Carnegie commentary Strategic Europe A Letter From the Editor: The Transatlantic Alliance’s Existential Challenge - by Rym Momtaz Published on January 7, 2025

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Strategic Europe

A Letter From the Editor: The Transatlantic Alliance’s Existential Challenge

Europe and the United States face many external threats, yet the biggest one may lie within. Strategic Europe’s editor in chief reflects on the lessons of 2024 and examines how transatlantic partners can secure their future.

by Rym Momtaz

Published on January 7, 2025

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Dear readers,

Before getting into the long list of challenges 2025 will present, I wanted to take a moment to put 2024 into perspective. Europe is certainly experiencing one of the most fraught and challenging strategic contexts in generations, but all is not doomed. Europeans can rise to the moment, provided they go beyond saying the right things, level with their populations about the necessary sacrifices, and actually do what is needed.

Europe and the United States are facing a trifecta of domestic and foreign threats that endanger the very system that gave them unrivaled geopolitical dominance, peace and prosperity. And perhaps for the first time since the end of World War II, the threats from within are the more existential ones.

The first threat comes from within Western societies. A growing part of the populations is rejecting the fundamentals of liberal democracy. This is happening amid a technological revolution marked by the rise of AI­—which, if completely unregulated, threatens to upend the ability of millions to make a living.

And the second threat is from within the transatlantic alliance. With Europe’s prosperity and China’s rise, there is bipartisan consensus in the United States over changing the security and economic terms of the alliance. Either the alliance finds a way to renegotiate these or it is programming its own obsolescence.

Finally, China and Russia are in the full swing of mounting the most credible threat to the Western-dominated rules-based international order since its inception.

But despite the challenges ahead and the hardships of the past year, 2024 produced a few European geopolitical breakthroughs that should be recognized and be built on.

Sweden and Finland joined NATO, a strategic sea change that, despite decades of Russian assertions to the contrary, did not lead to World War III. This, coupled with Russia’s abandonment of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, should counterbalance the instinct to over-self-deter that has dominated European and American policymaking toward Moscow in recent years. Instead, it should encourage Europeans and Americans to push back more forcefully against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bluffs, especially as they gear up for negotiations over Ukraine.

The West’s economic statecraft experienced two watershed moments: The G7 crossed a psychological Rubicon in agreeing to use the revenues of Russian frozen assets to fund Ukraine’s fight against Russia’s invasion, and the EU took a first step in applying tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles. While neither was the strongest policy possible they do indicate a growing awareness of the need to use these tools differently and push back on Moscow’s and Beijing’s efforts to subvert international rules.

Last year Maia Sandu’s improbable win in Moldova’s presidential election despite Russia’s best efforts as well as the resilience of protesters in Georgia showed that “the West” and the EU are still powerful ideals that inspire people outside of it to resist autocracy and subversion. This is a reminder European and American leaders would be well-advised to heed and to draw upon as they seek to overcome the crisis of confidence and power they are experiencing.

And perhaps most crucially, 2024 saw the arrival of more collaborative EU-NATO leadership, as well as the emergence of a new geopolitical and defense European nucleus between Poland, France, and the Nordic and Baltic states. These two elements will be essential in enabling the EU to meet the moment of truth 2025 will represent.

The first big test will be Ukraine—as it has been since Russia invaded the country in 2022. How the Europeans empower themselves to be at the table of the coming U.S.-Russian negotiations will determine the basis of their security for decades to come. There is only one price of entry for them: delivering hard security guarantees for Kyiv, including by breaking their self-imposed taboo of deploying troops to Ukraine. It also entails an overhaul of the European defense industry of New Deal proportions.

More counterintuitively, the very real Russian security threat and China’s growing efforts to undermine the Western-led international order will not be the West’s biggest challenges in 2025.

The preservation of the fundamentals that have underpinned Western liberal democracy, the system that has enabled Western dominance, is now both crucial and problematic. There is no longer a consensus among Western leaders over the rule of law, the separation of powers, and the principle of equality, the values that have underpinned liberal democracy so far. This also has an economic component. The EU’s leadership is increasingly leaning toward regulating the tech space, in part for financial reasons but also to preserve the political space, which puts it on a collision course with the new U.S. administration. President-Elect Donald Trump fought the EU’s tech regulation in his first term and is more likely to do so now given his close bonds with much of Silicone Valley’s leadership.

There will be no more determinant negotiations than the upcoming ones between the United States and EU member states and institutions over defense, trade, and tech. Keeping these tracks separate as well as maintaining cohesion among Europeans will prove increasingly more difficult.

But these fraught negotiations will be existential for the continued prosperity and security of both the United States and Europe. America’s vastly wealthier and more robust economy needs a flourishing European economy. That cannot happen if Russia’s imperial ambitions in Europe are not rebuffed, if Europeans fail to produce enough weapons to stand on their own two feet and defend themselves, and if their economy is destroyed by U.S. tariffs and subsidies.