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The message of America’s new National Security Strategy is brutally simple: the geopolitical dispensation of 1945 is over.

For the first time, Washington states openly what has been implicit for years: Europe is no longer a strategically privileged ward of the United States. The… pic.twitter.com/vYbHUjZcpT

— Henrik Dahl (@SociologenHD) December 8, 2025

The message of America’s new National Security Strategy is brutally simple: the geopolitical dispensation of 1945 is over.

For the first time, Washington states openly what has been implicit for years: Europe is no longer a strategically privileged ward of the United States. The institutions and assumptions of the post-war order have decayed—and the bill for Europe’s illusions has arrived.

Critics call the strategy a “right-wing narrative”. But remove the rhetoric and the core diagnoses remain deeply familiar to European analysts:

– A continent fractured by internal security failures and political denial.

– A demographic trajectory that erodes both economic vitality and defence capacity.

– A steady, self-inflicted narrowing of free speech, born of the inability to name the forces that actually constrain it.

– And above all: an elite that preferred soothing theories about Russian and Chinese convergence to a hard look at reality.

What the U.S. now articulates—more bluntly than Europeans like—is simply this: the era of strategic dependency is over. A nation re-arming for great-power rivalry in the Indo-Pacific will not subsidise Europe’s security in perpetuity.

This is not a break in the transatlantic bond. It is an overdue maturation. Europe must take responsibility for its own security—military, institutional, cultural.

Polarisation, antisemitism, and democratic fatigue are no longer “domestic issues”. They are security concerns.

World War II has finally ceased to be the organising frame of Europe’s security order.

A new chapter begins—one that will test whether Europe can confront reality without illusion.