Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a terrific, bracing speech yesterday to the Ukraine Defense Contact Group that deserves praise.<\/p>\n
For more than two years, European capitals have been encouraging maximalism regarding the Ukraine war<\/a>, and more generally encouraging the doddering US president\u2019s romantic ideas about the transatlantic relationship.<\/p>\n It all came crashing down today.<\/p>\n Hegseth made clear, inter alia, that,<\/p>\n For too long, US policy on Europe has been driven by airy romanticism, not by a cold, hard assessment of the strategic environment. As Joshua Shifrinson and I wrote in Foreign Affairs<\/em><\/a> last year,<\/p>\n With no candidate for European hegemony lurking, there is no longer any need for the United States to take the dominant role in the region\u2026 U.S. policy does not need to aim at formal withdrawal from or continued membership in NATO; it simply needs to make clear that Washington\u2019s tenure as Europe\u2019s pacifier is coming to an end, and if European defense planners feel that leaves a hole to fill, they must fill it themselves.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Hegseth\u2019s speech suggests the Trump administration agrees. The division of labor in the transatlantic relationship needs to change now.<\/p>\n Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Hegseth both have important speeches to come during the remainder of this trip. We should hope for similar themes to be raised \u2013 and for policy to follow.<\/p>\n\n