Second, the United States is preponderant in most dimensions of power—the world’s most complete power. For allies and adversaries alike, the facts of its power are not questioned—only how it is employed and why. However, for Europe to be a capable counterpart with enough capacity to act, even as a counterweight, its Union needs to be extended in the political arena lest it proves to be no better than a counterfeit. NATO cannot be turned into a universal social worker any more than the EU can become a global security provider. With each institution relying on the other in the areas it does least or less well, institutional complementarity is about power and weaknesses, as America and Europe thus complete each other on behalf of shared interests and common goals. 

Third, complementarity of European membership in NATO and the EU also remains desirable. The six countries that signed the Rome Treaties were all NATO members; thirty-five years later, at the end of the Cold War, the European membership of NATO (then fifteen) and the EU (then twelve) was nearly identical. Enlargement since then has affected both institutions almost evenly, with only two of the thirteen new NATO members and five of the sixteen new EU members not becoming members of the other institution. Post-Brexit but also with reference to Turkey, this convergence now looks beyond reach. To avoid more separation, consultation between the total thirty-five members of EU (now twenty-eight) and NATO (now twenty-nine, including twenty-one European countries) should be reinforced to ease Euro-Atlantic consultation before decisions are made by or for either institution, thus making them all partners of choice for joint or complementary action by either institution to which they do not or cannot belong. 

Fourth, the rise of China as a superpower is nearly certain, whatever its place in a region with little settled history and five nuclear powers—including two of them that are highly unstable and potential first users. Unlike the Soviet Union, which could not match, let alone surpass, America’s superiority, China can, although the road is getting bumpier and the risks of a hard landing real—with falling growth, growing regional challenges, and little adaptability. As was shown by Reagan after three decades of global rivalry with the Soviet Union, strategic restraint has its limits and hegemonic expansion faces diminishing returns. Seven decades after the West allegedly “lost” China, it is now China which is “losing” the West, as a broad consensus posits that a less strong and even less united China may be a better fit after all. 

Fifth, the Cold War is won and gone, but Russia is neither done nor defeated. For the Russky Mir—the Russian world that comprises parts of Kazakhstan and sizeable populations in the Baltic States—there is no modest vision of a natural sphere of influence over its neighbors. Now, only a short quarter of a century after its most recent defeat, Russia acts like it won the Cold War, as it calls for NATO to be disbanded and the EU to be neutered while blatantly intervening in their members’ national elections and spreading new instabilities in areas of vital interest to them. Yet, faced with bad geopolitical conditions all around, economically vulnerable, and with few capable friends, Russia is a demandeur state whose future is with but not in the West, including the United States and Europe, and neither in nor with Asia, including China.

Sixth, the Greater Middle East is more fragmented, hostile, dangerous, and unpredictable than ever before. The territorial arrangements made at the expense of the Ottoman Empire one hundred years ago are void and opened to the highest bidders. Gone, too, are the few days of interstate wars between Israel and its Arab neighbors to which the region grew accustomed—the kind of wars Israel could win on the cheap, America end on the quick, and Europe watch from a distance while non-Western states were kept away. What is left are the kinds of endless wars we lose or just cannot win—with a potential for bigger and worse wars than any in the past. During the Cold War, the statistic that best described the deepening U.S. involvement in the Middle East was zero—zero military casualties up to 1983 (in Beirut, Lebanon) and zero regime change intervention after 1953 (in Iran), but also zero effectiveness in ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and zero results in enhancing human rights. Now, even Yogi Berra’s arithmetic cannot measure the current moral and strategic confusion. With the region broken into a multitude of territorial and sectarian pieces, and absent a local will to fix it or even agree over what needs fixing first, there is little the United States and Europe can fix alone and on the quick, if anything.

Seventh, the entire Greater Middle East stands where Europe was during the past century: there can be no order in the world without some order in the region. Turkey, which “lost” the region to an imperial West in 1916, and the imperious rise of Iran, which hopes to regain the region on behalf of its own brand of Islam, are special challenges which neither the United States nor Europe can escape. For the former, the West is losing its appeal, and even while Turkey remains fit for NATO because of its military capabilities, NATO itself is not because of the alliance handicaps it brings. And even if the EU suits Turkey because of the economic advantages it offers, Turkey does not because of its democratic deficits. Don’t make of Turkey an orphan, though: NATO must give it the strategic respect it deserves for its contributions and the EU the economic partner it needs for its secular democracy to endure.

Eight, with regard to Iran, the post-1979 tensions are just about to run out of time. As an increasingly defiant regime shows a predilection for war with the United States over the “maximum” economic pressures imposed since Trump withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal; and as Israel—and possibly the United States too—confirms its own preference for a war with Iran over a nuclear Iran, this is the most immediate threat in the region, with a potential for a serious military clash matched nowhere else. Make no mistake: however and whenever a war starts with Iran, unless it is ended quickly, the horrific risk is to have it end into a catastrophic nuclear escalation.

Ninth, wild cards and small events, by definition unknown and unpredictable, demonstrate best the need for transatlantic strategic interdependence. There are numerous pressing concerns: terrorism, economic instability, populist uprisings, rapidly developing technological changes, and more. With all these issues moving at variable speeds and in opposite directions, no power alone, however peerless, can stay on top for long without capable allies. And no single dimension of power, however superior, can suffice to resolve any one issue, however significant.

Tenth, in a moment infused with a certain air of destiny, divisions between the United States and Europe, as well as among the states of Europe, are serious because many of these issues are existential. These divisions are placing the transatlantic partnership in jeopardy at a time when unity is essential—not because, absent their alliance, the United States and Europe would be denied a future, but because that future would be less promising, more dangerous, and less comfortable. Post-Trump and post-Brexit, then, let’s be sure to undo the damage done to the EU and NATO. As Winston Churchill reflected in 1919, many futures ago, “The true nature of nations is what they do when they are tired.” Our Western democracies have rarely been as tired as they are now. But whatever their reasons, this is no time for them to walk away from the achievements of the past seventy years, including a Western alliance that defeated history in Europe and kept the West firmly in place elsewhere. It won’t require thaumaturgy to revive it, but practical accomplishments.

Simon Serfaty is Professor of U.S. Foreign Policy at Old Dominion University (ODU), in Norfolk, VA. He also holds the Zbigniew Brzezinski Chair (emeritus) in Global Security and Geostrategy with the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), in Washington, DC.

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