When Ulrike Franke, senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, says that the new US National Security Strategy (NSS) “officially buries the old transatlantic relationship and the postwar West,” Europe should indeed take notice.

Franke’s reading is straightforward and provocative: the new NSS document is quite explicit about prioritization. The days of the United States behaving like “Atlas”, propping up the world, are over, according to the document. The US now will concern itself with other countries “only” when their actions directly threaten American interests. It foregrounds the Western Hemisphere, insists nations should prioritize their own interests, and bluntly admits that Washington will no longer attempt to manage every regional crisis.

On Europe, Franke emphasizes what she finds most striking: the “activist” tone. The White House does not limit itself to defense matters; it ventures into Europe’s internal affairs by scolding elites, warning about restrictions on speech, and lamenting demographic and cultural decline. Pages 25–27 of the US document, under the section titled “Promoting European Greatness,” should be read “in their entirety,” she argues, because they read less like alliance management and more like ideological intervention.

About Europe the NSS essentially says: Europe is weakening economically, losing global share, and flirting with what Washington calls “civilizational erosion.” The document laments regulatory overreach, alleged constraints on political liberty, collapsing birthrates, and the loss of self-confidence. It asserts that Europe supposedly enjoys conventional military advantages over Russia, nuclear weapons aside, and therefore should carry more of its own security weight. Now, this is debatable, at best: according to a French Institute of International Relations report, Moscow has a “decisive advantage” over Europe in firepower, size, and capacity of land arms. In any case, the NSS also identifies a US interest in brokering a ceasefire in Ukraine to stabilize Europe, prevent escalation, and reestablish strategic stability across Eurasia, while enabling Ukraine’s reconstruction as a viable state.

Thus, Washington insists it wants Europe “to remain European,” yet simultaneously reserves the right to intervene rhetorically and politically to nudge the continent toward a preferred course.

This tone will not surprise anyone who has been paying attention for the last decade. One may recall that under both Democratic and Republican administrations, the US has already been retreating from peripheral theaters while insisting allies do more. Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria: the pattern here is “less America,” but not “no America.” As such, the NSS is less a tombstone for the West than a certificate of further recalibration, so to speak, for an alliance that has always been asymmetrical.

This asymmetry has been colonial enough, as I have argued. Europe’s economic and energy subordination did not start with Trump’s NSS, of course. For one thing, The Inflation Reduction Act, under Joe Biden, began the “subsidy war” years ago, explicitly tilting the industrial playing field in favor of US firms while draining investment from Europe. So much for partnership.

The US sold energy at premium prices to a Europe cut off from cheap supplies, thereby accelerating deindustrialization. And as if economic warfare were not enough, Europe also absorbed the geopolitical shock of the sabotage of Nord Stream, which Pulitzer Prize Winner Seymour Hersh and many others attribute to Washington; an episode that remains shamefully underreported and never properly investigated in European capitals.

Considering all that, in February 2025, I even wrote about Europe and the US having become enemies in all but name. The point I made then was not that hostility would necessarily erupt, but that a veiled enmity had become all too visible. The pendulum, as I call it, was swinging. Washington was acknowledging other great powers, pivoting to the Pacific, and embracing a neo-Monroeist approach for the Americas. Be as it may, the American goal with such a pivot was never multipolar harmony but rather managed retrenchment without losing face.

Does that “bury” the transatlantic relationship, as Franke argues? Not necessarily so. The NSS is not a breakup letter; one may describe it as a bill presented at the end of a long dinner. To put it bluntly, Europe is being told to pay more, decide more, and complain less. Meanwhile, Washington remains embedded in NATO command structures, intelligence sharing, and industrial ecosystems that are not easily unwound; and so does Europe. Dependence does not vanish because a document says so;. It fades when alternatives exist at scale (and dependence often cuts both ways). Europe still lacks unified procurement, credible strategic autonomy, and energy resilience.

There is also a paradox in the alleged funeral of the West. The NSS scolds European elites for suppressing dissent and eroding freedom, yet it simultaneously seeks to influence domestic politics. This very meddling is itself proof that Washington cannot simply walk away.

Thus far, the document reads like an empire learning to live within limits, not an empire packing up and leaving. It is, again, about shifting burdens, not ending bonds altogether. Moreover, policies also change; we have seen that, under Trump’s radical pragmatism, strategy is not scripture. If anything, the NSS admits a truth that the European elites have preferred to ignore: the US will continue to dominate when it can, disengage when it must, and moralize when it suits. This does sound familiar enough, in terms of American attitude towards partners.

All of this does not mean Ulrike Franke’s analysis is simply wrong. The “postwar West” as an unquestioned cultural-political bloc is indeed gone. But alliances die slowly; they often erode long before they collapse. And there has always been a colonial component to such “alliance”. What we are witnessing is perhaps not an obituary but rather a metamorphosis.

The transatlantic relationship is becoming even more transactional, more conditional, more “naked”. For Europe, the choice now is really between dependency and sovereignty (or “strategic autonomy” as the French and the German sometimes like to call it). The American “withdrawal” from Europe (be it lamented or celebrated) is not a given, though.

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Uriel Araujo, researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts.