Thirty years ago this week, on Aug. 31, 1994, the last Russian soldiers departed Estonia and Latvia — a long overdue end to Moscow’s military domination of the Baltics, which had begun ignominiously in 1940 per the sordid terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Stalin and Hitler. That same day, a ceremony was held at Treptow Park in Berlin to commemorate Russia’s exit from East Germany after nearly 50 years of occupation.
The events of 1994 were more symbolic than pivotal in the sense that Moscow had already lost political control over Central and Eastern Europe years earlier. The Berlin Wall had fallen in 1989, Germany reunified in 1990, and the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991. But symbolism counts for a lot in international relations: The sight of Russian forces withdrawing from the Baltics was a powerful illustration that Moscow’s hegemonic ambitions in Europe were over.
In Washington, officials cheered on Russia’s military exit from Eastern Europe, but they brooked no suggestion that the U.S. should match Russia’s withdrawals with pullbacks of its own. From their point of view, the Cold War had ended in a total victory, not a draw. Having won outright, U.S. leaders laid plans to fill the post-communist space with a U.S.-led security architecture for the whole of Europe.
To be sure, there were major cuts to the number of U.S. troops in Europe following the Soviet collapse. But the NATO alliance grew massively in terms of its territorial reach. The U.S. has more than doubled its number of European allies in the last 25 years. And today, the U.S. security umbrella is larger than it has ever been.
The conventional wisdom is that America’s refusal to retrench from Europe was a prudent decision — that the extension of security guarantees to Poland, the Baltics and other East European states was a farsighted hedge against future Russian aggression. Absent the U.S. military presence in Europe, the argument goes, Moscow’s imperial ambitions would be even larger than they are today.
But what if this view is wrong? What if the U.S. footprint in Europe is a net drag on continental security? There is a strong case to be made that this is exactly right — that the transatlantic community’s lingering attachment to Cold War-era institutions has resulted in a security architecture maladapted to present and future threats.
The root problem is growing uncertainty about America’s willingness to fight and die on behalf of its nominal allies. To be clear, Washington still has a strong interest in preserving the political and economic independence of its major allies in Europe — Britain, France, Germany, Italy and so forth. But as Joshua Shifrinson pointed out several years ago, these states are no longer in real jeopardy of external domination. Only those in the east are at risk of suffering an armed attack.
Would the U.S. mobilize to fight a hot war against Russia in Eastern Europe? For this to be even barely feasible, it would first have to be established that America has a core national interest in that region’s security. Reasonable people can disagree on whether this is true, but consider a hypothetical: If U.S. policymakers and the voting public were asked to design their nation’s foreign and security policies from scratch, what is the likelihood that they would insist upon a military alliance with the likes of Lithuania or Romania?
Fair-minded analysts will likely put the odds at close to zero. At the very least, it is hard to deny that the United States today cares less about the territorial integrity, political independence, and economic openness of Eastern European nations than it did about the security of Western Europe during the Cold War. This is an obvious point, perhaps, but one that has far-reaching implications: It means that, quite inescapably, the chances of America’s leaders choosing to fight in a general European war is much lower now than they were in the past.
There is already dispositive evidence that America will not fight in defense of non-NATO members in Eastern Europe. This was revealed in 2008, when Russia attacked Georgia, and in 2014 and 2022 when Russia annexed Crimea and then launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The U.S. can be counted on to supply critical military and economic aid — for a time, at least — but it has announced in no uncertain terms that Americans will not be placed in harm’s way in defense of non-allies in Europe.
In reality, there is also reason to doubt whether the U.S. would risk nuclear war with Russia in defense of some NATO members, such as Poland or the Baltics. This is impolite to say aloud, of course, but manners would hardly matter in the event of a severe crisis involving Russia and an eastern-flank NATO ally. Motivated to avoid a cataclysmic disaster, sitting U.S. leaders would work hard to de-escalate any future conflict with Russia, even if it meant abandoning nominal allies in a time of need.
Two points warrant emphasis.
First, the Iron Curtain has moved. It now runs from Kaliningrad to Crimea rather than Szczecin to Trieste. The central issue facing the transatlantic alliance has shifted along with it, from whether Americans would mobilize to fight Russia over the fate of core West European economies (as during the Cold War) to whether U.S. leaders would risk World War III in defense of countries on the far eastern periphery of the continent. The answer to this latter question is highly uncertain at best.
Second, America’s expansive security commitments should not be taken as evidence that, if push ever came to shove, the U.S. would fight a major defensive war in Europe. There is a hard limit to what can be inferred about future U.S. intentions from an analysis of the U.S. military footprint today. Legacy forward deployments from the Cold War are just that: holdovers from a bygone era, not a distribution of power assets that U.S. leaders would necessarily choose again.
The U.S. is the only superpower in Europe, that much is true. But it is a beached superpower. Its forces were sent across the Atlantic in the 1940s to defeat fascism and then in the 1950s to deter a communist takeover of Western Europe. They have stayed in Europe not because Americans have a sacrosanct interest in the security of nations that border Russia (they do not), but because decisionmakers in Washington are allergic to major strategic adjustments.
For Europe to be secure, America should retrench. It is Europeans who have the most to lose from Russian revanchism, and so it is Europeans who should shoulder the burden of defense and deterrence. The focus should be on convincing Moscow that any future instance of armed aggression would be met by ample, unified, autonomous and impregnable European defenses — a future that is well within grasp.
There is no good reason to continue basing European deterrence upon the dubious assumption that the U.S. would respond to a Russian attack by surging conventional forces into the region and joining a war that might turn nuclear. The risk is too high that Moscow will correctly come to view America’s security guarantees as lacking credibility, perhaps becoming emboldened to force yet another devastating war upon the continent.
This is the freedom that Europeans won for themselves when they evicted Russian troops from their sovereign soil all those years ago: The freedom not just to choose their domestic political systems and international allegiances, but to choose the best available option for preserving regional security. In the past, that meant relying on the United States. Today, it means pursuing an independent path. For the sake of all Europe, a rebalancing of the transatlantic alliance cannot come soon enough.
Peter Harris is an associate professor of political science at Colorado State University.
