The Trump administration has said that it is now policy to not send meaningful reinforcements to Europe in case of a military conflict. Most notably, super carriers, carrier aviation, extra fighter jets, aerial refueling, airlift capacity, air defense, and precision munitions.
It guarantees a divergence in training, doctrine, and the ability of the various countries of the alliance to function as a unit. For all intents and purposes, NATO is now gone.
Hey all, Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. Today we’re talking about NATO, specifically. The US Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, just changed the mechanics of what the United States might send to might send to NATO in case of a military emergency. You know, a war and the short version is very, very little. No carriers, no carrier aircraft, no precision munitions, no logistical supply, limited satellite support.
In essence, Hegseth says that the United States wants to operate as if a war with China would happen at any time and any assets that we might need to fight. China can never be deployed anywhere else. That’s the official statement. The unofficial statement is after the Iran war, the United States has lost the capability to even pretend to fight more than one war at a time, and the one war that it would fight.
If you’ve chosen to preposition everything for China and China only means that you really can’t intervene anywhere else. We had talked earlier about how the way the Trump administration fought the Iran war would basically excise its power from the Eastern hemisphere. We are seeing that in real time now. And politically, the Trump administration has made the decision that Europe is on its own.
So where does this take us? Well, number one, it means that the US alliance, the NATO alliance might still exist on paper. But if the United States is already saying before conflict even begins it, very little and certainly none of the assets that the Europeans don’t have are coming. That’s that’s pretty much the end of things. The plan for NATO going back to 1949 has been that the United States will develop certain broad area competencies, and then the Europeans won’t.
And we did that in order to make sure that the Europeans were always dependent upon us. And in the case of a fight, we would command all of their militaries. That has now ended. So the United States just lost force projection in Europe. And as the Europeans now retool to do what they can, we’re going to lose interoperability.
You see, the issue is that the United States weapons systems are designed for very, very long range and then durability upon arrival. But that’s not the sort of fight that the Europeans would ever find themselves in. So the Europeans have purchased American weapon systems in order to maintain interoperability with the country that will ultimately be commanding their troops in a hot fight.
If those forces if the American forces are not coming, there’s no point in maintaining interoperability. And if you play that forward into a world where drones are up and rising, the Europeans don’t have the 1015 years it would be necessary to build an American style force with American style weapons that can’t be built that fast. So they’re going to be doing Ukrainian style weapons that can be built in weeks to months, probably backstopped by a multi-state nuclear deterrent.
How that is managed? TBD, which means that in as little as a year from now, the European and the American militaries are not going to be interoperable anymore. And if they do decide, for whatever reason, to operate side by side, they’ll be doing so with different command structures and different doctrine, which means that now, in addition to the political decision in Washington to end the alliance, the Europeans are going to be forced to make procurement decisions that would functionally end the alliance anyway.
So NATO had a great run. We are now entering the great unknown of strategic breakdown and realignment, and the Trump administration has made sure that Europe and the United States are in opposite sides of that.
