I published an article yesterday in Real Clear Defense. The title is  “The Road to Securing European Cooperation on China Runs Through Ukraine”, but I suppose I could have called this piece, “How to Screw Up on Multiple Fronts at the Same Time.” That might have been harder to get past an editor.  

I spent a fair amount of time this past fall talking to people working in the EU institutions about China.  The short version is that they are concerned about the PRC’s actions to the point that most of the people you talk to candidly at the European External Action Service (EEAS) or elsewhere in the bureaucracy sound a lot like the people who wrote the first Trump administration’s National Security Strategy.  But the one thing that makes them see the PRC more as a threat is the PRC’s support of Russia since its invasion of Ukraine.  

Maybe the Trump administration thinks it can pull off a “reverse Nixon” and peel off Russia from its strategic partnership with the PRC with the gift of Ukraine.  But if the cost of doing so is abandoning Europe as a strategic backwater to concentrate on the Indo-Pacific, it may shoot itself in the foot.  There is an opportunity to build a transatlantic partnership on dealing with the PRC that would advance American interests.  

Yes, Trump’s credible threats to abandon the American role in European defense have sparked an effort in Europe to dig in the sofa cushions and find enough to pay for their own defense.  The Whitehouse would likely point to this as a success as the US has asked, cajoled, and threatened its European allies to shoulder more of the defense burden for decades.  Now European states are doing precisely that because they take President Trump’s threats seriously.  But this misses the point that they are doing so because they fear abandonment by the US rather than a desire to deepen an existing alliance.   It is not about burden sharing in NATO, which is in the American interest, but rather strategic separation, which is not.