By Cody Fenimore, Fall 2025 Marcellus Policy Fellow

Over the past seven decades since the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) formation, the United States has provided the overwhelming majority of Europe’s defense. Born from a sense of duty to help European countries stabilize and to prevent the spread of communism after the Second World War, this unequal burden sharing arrangement has bred dependency among America’s European allies. Despite years of prosperity among individual countries and as a bloc, European defense capabilities have atrophied, and their repeated commitments to meet NATO’s defense spending benchmarks have lagged given the security blanket of the continued U.S. presence. With the fall of the Soviet Union decreasing the chance for conflict on the continent, and as American strategic interest shifts to other regions like the Indo-Pacific, maintaining an expansive European footprint dilutes the United States’ strategic focus, consumes scarce defense resources, and allows our European allies to perpetuate an unsustainable security architecture.

This paper argues that an immediate, deliberate retrenchment of U.S. military forces from Europe is both strategically feasible and long overdue. It finds that Europe now possesses overwhelming economic, demographic, and military advantages over its regional threat, Russia, whose conventional weakness has been exposed by its failed invasion of Ukraine, while continued U.S. overcommitment risks provoking escalation and constraining Washington’s ability to respond to higher-priority threats elsewhere. To address these challenges, the paper proposes a phased but decisive posture shift: the immediate withdrawal of rotational and surge ground forces; substantial reductions in U.S. air and naval assets that do not align with core U.S. interests; the retention of stabilizing nuclear deterrence and flexible offshore capabilities; and the transfer of nonessential defense functions and NATO leadership responsibilities to European allies. Framed not as abandonment but as strategic realignment, this approach would restore NATO’s defensive purpose, compel long-delayed European burden-sharing, and allow the United States to preserve deterrence while regaining the strategic flexibility required in an era of intensifying global competition.