Critics may be misreading the recent NATO summit.
It looks to them as if the U.S. is unilaterally siding with Europe against Russia.
President Trump is smarter: he knows who has the winning hand, and his direct communications with his peers, Xi and Putin, are not always public.
President Trump's earliest critical instincts toward the EU and NATO still hold. While the U.S. is currently extending them some diplomatic courtesy and limited support, Europe is ultimately surrounded on all sides by powers that make it irrelevant in global influence terms. Europe has put itself into this predicament, due to its own domestic economic decline from bad policy choices. It is using war as a way to revive its fortunes. Its odds are long.
The EU is surrounded economically by the U.S. to the west; by Russia and China to the east, by a vast Arctic territory to the north that it cannot control, and by India and a rising Middle East power, Israel, to the south. Europe has no strategic maneuvering room. It has limited prospects to reemerge as a serious power, and NATO is long past relevancy, and solvency.
Since his first term, President Trump has been right about Russia, and NATO.
Being “right” means understanding Russia’s long-term economic and trade importance, and appreciating its military prowess. Along with China and the U.S., it makes up the superpower triad. Being right also means he understands that the days are numbered for the EU and NATO, and that the world has changed without them.
After the Anchorage meeting with President Trump, President Putin invited his counterpart to Moscow: Trump's guarded reply was a reminder that productive relations may be welcome by both leaders, but each is also operating in and surrounded by a complex defense and foreign affairs tradition that doesn’t trust the other side. Some have called this the “crucible of belief,” and past experience is hard to overcome. Change will happen slowly.
Europe is part of that shared Eurasian landmass, and its security, but “Europe” is not a unified, single country. Even within its own limited Western sphere, it has been a region constantly engaged in rivalry and war. There was a period after Napoleon — roughly a hundred years — where relative peace was enjoyed. But the 20th century has been just the opposite: a nearly unbroken chain of war — regional, revolutionary, world, and cold — and now, a new 21st century war is increasingly seen as inevitable.
There are many political, social, and institutional explanations, but economic decline is at the heart of why the EU is determined to provoke Russia (and why it is pleading before the U.S.).
If Germany, France and the U.K. were strongly led, however, with robust domestic industrial growth, controlled borders via immigration, and with less external energy dependence, if not facing domestic energy bankruptcy, such a conflict would not be necessary, or given any serious consideration.
In recent history, one only has to review Angela Merkel’s disastrous “green energy” policy, deindustrialization, open borders, and the idling of German nuclear power, as a strong explanation. She fell completely for naive progressive ideology which asserts that oil no longer matters.
But for President Trump, the U.S. was going down the same path.
France and the U.K. are just as bad in their string of weak leaders, uncontrolled borders, domestic violence from cultures foreign to their own, and deindustrialization and outsourcing. It is little wonder that Europe’s “leaders” are now economically trapped, and are turning to war as a desperate form of economic recovery.
NATO’s putative head, Mark Rutte, was recently in the White House, pitching for war and U.S. financial backing, with slides and charts that looked more like a failed business recovery plan. The old saying “be careful what you ask for” may be relevant, as NATO is functioning as a proxy for Western Europe, and looking to the U.S. as its pre-bankruptcy sponsor. President Trump has seen this before.
There are obviously many other interests and players driving this strategy, but German-French-British decline may be the largest factor. Scandinavia is somewhat immune, especially Norway with its natural resources and capital, but it is susceptible to European political and policy contamination.
Economic historian Walt Rostow, a White House national security advisor to U.S. presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, provided a powerful economic model that goes a long way to partly explain why Eurasia, and Europe, have always been unstable and in conflict. His “The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto,” maps how countries grow in relative stages of maturity.
But it also predicts how countries will turn to war when those stages are challenged, interrupted, or allowed through poor leadership, or state interference, to stagnate or backslide. Europe has slid backwards from an advanced industrial and colonial power, to an effective open border welfare state, led by a weak political class with no plans, ideas, commitment, or national loyalties.
Russia’s Kremlin has recently announced that its Special Military Operation in Ukraine has been converted to formal war. While predicting its development is problematic, Russia's power advantage is so overwhelming that NATO can only been seen as engaging in effective suicide. Given Europe’s cultural tendency to existentialist gloom, perhaps it is understandable.
When war finally stops, as it must, it usually results in new borders, relationships, alliances, and deals being formed. NATO and Europe seem to be counting on the chaos of war as a path out of their own weakness.
The U.S. may lend some technical military support to them as a simple matter of arms sales, but this may be their own self-inflicted, poisoned chalice.
And in the end, the U.S., Russia, and China will simply resume their global dominance and power alliance. The EU will likely collapse or shrink; NATO will finally be decommissioned, and the old Atlantic Alliance will bypass Europe and align economically with Eurasia’s east and south — because that is where the power is.
That is what the stages of growth predict.
The EU is also going to be further eclipsed commercially and militarily and by a rising Israel-dominated Middle East, because they know what they want, they have a plan, and they know how to fight. European bureaucrats like Rutte, Macron, Merz, and von der Leyen do not, and face an interesting fate when they finally realize that this battle is likely their last political stand.
The citizens of Europe may be relieved.
Matthew G. Andersson is a former aerospace CEO and law and policy author. He has worked in Russia and Europe on commercial joint ventures and regulatory policy, and has testified before the US Senate. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago and University of Texas at Austin where he worked with economist and White House national security advisor W.W. Rostow at the LBJ School of Public Affairs.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/07/nato-s-last-stand/
