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The U.S. Needs to Refocus on European Foreign Policy
There’s far more to NATO than just containing Russian aggression
When Russian president Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February of 2022, he brought the U.S.-European partnership into the foreign policy spotlight, and forced a reexamination of the relationship between the two regions. Within that partnership, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, stands at the forefront of their cooperation, and the invasion of a country close to many NATO members has tested the relationship. NATO was originally founded as a way for North America and Europe to work together to contain the Soviet Union and protect democracy, and now that those threats are returning in the form of Putin’s Russia, NATO and the U.S.-European partnership are once again important foreign policy arenas.
On the part of the U.S., its current interests in the region come down to countering the rise of Russia and preventing a direct war with another superpower. As a result, the current issues of the Ukrainian conflict and NATO’s reliance on the U.S. for security are particularly relevant, especially as the U.S. will need to rely on its alliance with Europe in the future in order to deal with issues of Arctic security and China’s rise — both of which will require the U.S. to weigh its own interests and the current geopolitical climate in European relations.
The current context of U.S.-Euro relations
Before examining the United States’ current priorities and what challenges it will soon need to deal with, it is important to consider the environment that those challenges are occurring in. The U.S.’s relationship with Europe has long been defined by their collective desire to prevent the rise of Russia, which resulted in the formation of NATO. While that mission went dormant for several years, in the last few it has once again risen to prominence, making NATO and the US-European alliance more important than it’s been for a very long time.
In 2020, before Russia’s full-on invasion of Ukraine two years later, former ambassador to NATO, Victoria Nuland, said that, “Ukraine is another battlefield for democracy that the United States must not cede to Putin. American and European support for the country…
