Has NATO Become a Liability for Europe?

The American electorate and foreign policy elite’s dissatisfaction with NATO, the decades-long debates about the balance of benefits and costs attending American retrenchment from overseas engagements, the narrowing of power differentials between the United States and China, and a growing animus towards Europe on issues ranging from gender-mainstreaming to trade to defence suggest that it is time for Europeans to reconsider their fidelity to NATO, participation in the American-dominated and -instrumentalized NATO integrated military command (IMC), the continued basing of US armed forces in Europe, and the unrestricted American use of European air and maritime spaces for conducting global military operations. In other words, it is well past time to ask: Is the hedged American security guarantee sufficiently robust to justify continued American leadership? Would Europeans be better off – or at least no worse off – if they were to leave the IMC and initiate a Europe-dictated American departure? If the major European powers decided to send Americans home, would it contribute to the European Union (EU) goal of strategic autonomy, lend Europeans greater leverage in shaping US foreign policies within the European neighbourhood, and make Europeans less susceptible to American ultimata? This article addresses those questions.