America's New Security Doctrine and the Reordering of Global Energy Geopolitics

Cloud cuckoo land Europe is being left behind

Washington’s newly released National Security Strategy (NSS) has struck Europe with the force of a long-suppressed truth bluntly delivered. For the first time since the end of the Second World War, the United States has published an official doctrine that no longer idealises the post-war transatlantic compact. Instead, it describes an uncomfortable divergence: the United States, still attached to the rough-and-tumble of its First Amendment, democratic accountability and national interest, now sees a Europe that has lost confidence in its own civilisation, abandoning its classical liberal inheritance of free speech and intellectual inquiry. Instead, it chose to pursue utopian projects such as Net Zero, mass immigration and an ever-expanding regulatory state that corrodes its own industrial base.

Atlas No More

The shock in Brussels, Berlin, Paris and London is palpable. European policymakers, long accustomed to assuming their own centrality, now confront an America that openly doubts whether Europe retains the cultural coherence or economic resilience necessary to serve as co-custodian of ‘the West’. The transatlantic relationship was always more than a security pact: it was meant to be a civilisational partnership grounded in a shared understanding of liberty, national sovereignty and free exchange. Washington’s new document coolly observes that these shared assumptions no longer exist. Yet amid the outrage from European elites, who decry this as an abandonment of shared values, lies a deeper rupture with implications far beyond a cultural critique of Western Europe by a conservative US administration.