In June 2025, Celeste Wallander — former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, the official who oversaw American military assistance to Ukraine under Biden — published an essay in Foreign Affairs titled “Beware the Europe You Wish For.” Her argument was counterintuitive and, as it has turned out, prophetic. America spent decades demanding that Europe spend more on its own defense. Europe finally did. And now America may not like what it got.
The core of Wallander’s argument is worth understanding on its own terms before drawing the implications for Trump. For eighty years, American hegemony within NATO was built on European dependency. European nations, outspent and outgunned by the Americans who guaranteed their security, had strong incentives to defer to Washington’s priorities even when they disagreed with them. They bought American weapons. They permitted American bases on their soil to be used for operations far beyond Europe’s borders — against the Houthis in Yemen, against Iran, in Afghanistan, in the Azores during the Yom Kippur War. They subordinated their foreign policy preferences to the requirements of maintaining American goodwill. The price of American protection was American deference, paid quietly and consistently for three generations.
That arrangement is ending. By 2024, twenty-three of NATO’s thirty-two members were meeting the alliance’s two percent of GDP defense spending target — up from six in 2021. Germany rewrote its constitution to allow deficit spending for military purposes. The EU created a –163.5 billion defense procurement loan pool, with the requirement that the money be spent on European companies. Poland is spending 4.12 percent of GDP on defense, more than the United States. Europe, in Wallander’s precise framing, “is no longer dependent on the United States’ surveillance aircraft.” The dependency that made European deference automatic is dissolving. And with it goes the infrastructure of American hegemonic advantage that most Americans have never thought about and have therefore not noticed losing.
The consequences are already visible. Europe will not lift sanctions on Russia until Ukraine is ready to settle — a constraint on American diplomatic maneuvering that would have been unthinkable a decade ago, when the threat of losing U.S. support would have produced acquiescence. Europe holds two-thirds of the –330 billion in frozen Russian assets; without European cooperation, Washington cannot dangle that carrot before Putin. SWIFT, the international payments system whose exclusion of Russian banks has been one of the most powerful tools of economic pressure, is headquartered in Europe. The American officials who want to ease sanctions to facilitate negotiations cannot do so unilaterally. They need European permission, and European permission is no longer automatic.
The Iran conflict added another dimension that Wallander anticipated but that has now become concrete. American operations against Iranian nuclear and military facilities in February 2026 depended on bases in Europe — in Greece, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Those bases were used because European allies permitted it. Wallander’s essay had warned that a more autonomous Europe might refuse such permission for future operations, forcing the United States to strike from bases far from the theater or from Middle Eastern partners that are easier for adversaries to target. That warning is now an operational planning reality, not a hypothetical.
Against this backdrop, the question of Trump’s legacy with American allies is more than a question about style or tone. It is a structural question about whether the United States recognizes, in time, that the world it is operating in has changed in ways that require a changed American approach. Wallander, in a May 2026 follow-up piece for Foreign Affairs, asked what Trump could learn from Reagan. The answer she offered was instructive: Reagan understood that alliance management was not charity. It was investment. The military relationships, the basing agreements, the interoperability of weapons systems, the diplomatic trust built through sustained engagement — these produced returns that pure national accounts could not capture but that American power absolutely depended upon.
What would it take for Trump to build an enduring legacy with American allies rather than a legacy of managed estrangement? The steps are specific and they are not, in principle, inconsistent with Trump’s stated priorities. First, stop treating European defense spending increases as a concession extracted by American pressure and start treating them as the foundation for a renegotiated partnership. Europe is now a military peer in ways it was not in 2016. Peers do not defer. They negotiate. The administration that figures out how to negotiate with a more capable Europe, rather than continuing to demand the deference of a dependent one, will have achieved something genuinely durable.
Second, address the basing agreements proactively rather than reactively. The legal instruments that govern American access to bases in Europe — the access, basing, and overflight agreements that Wallander describes — are bilateral and renegotiable. An administration that lets these agreements deteriorate through neglect or hostility, and then discovers during a crisis that European governments have legal grounds to deny access, will have handed a strategic advantage to adversaries at the worst possible moment. The time to shore up those agreements is before they are needed, not during a conflict when the leverage has already shifted.
Third, accept that European concerns about China are real but different from American concerns. Europe trades with China, depends on Chinese supply chains, and does not share America’s Pacific strategic exposure. The demand that Europe fully align with Washington’s China policy is the demand that Europe ignore its own economic geography. It will not work. What might work is the approach that has governed American relationships with Middle Eastern partners who maintain ties with China out of economic necessity — a relationship that accommodates strategic hedging while preserving core security cooperation. Europe is entitled to at least the same consideration.
Fourth, take the nuclear question seriously. European governments are discussing, for the first time since the early Cold War, whether the continent needs its own credible nuclear deterrent. France and the United Kingdom have nuclear capabilities, but neither has the scale or strategic depth of the American arsenal. If American commitment to Article 5 — the NATO mutual defense guarantee — is perceived as conditional, the pressure to acquire independent deterrence will accelerate. An administration that makes Article 5 credible and unconditional, rather than a subject of episodic doubt, removes one of the most corrosive forces currently at work in the alliance.
Wallander’s essay ends with a choice laid before American policymakers as plainly as it can be laid: spurn Europe and face a more dangerous world alone and depleted, or forge a new and more accommodating transatlantic relationship that respects the changed balance of power. Neither Beijing nor Moscow has an alliance of comparable economic weight, diplomatic reach, and military capability. China and Russia cannot build what the transatlantic relationship represents. The question is whether the United States will maintain what it has already built, or whether it will discover the value of that inheritance only after it has been spent.
The window is not closed. Europe has not made an irreversible choice. A significant majority of Europeans still prefer a United States that is engaged over a United States that is absent. The diplomatic capital required to repair what has frayed is available to an administration that chooses to spend it. What is required is not a return to the comfortable arrangements of the past, which are genuinely gone, but a serious engagement with the new terms on which the alliance can function. That engagement, sustained and credible, is what a durable legacy looks like. Whether this administration will pursue it is, as Wallander correctly identifies, the question of the moment.
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