By skyforbes 
The transatlantic relationship isn’t at a crossroads, it’s past one. America’s new National Security Strategy confirms what Europeans have feared since Vice President JD Vance’s speech in Munich last February: Washington now sees a strong, unified European Union as a problem to be solved, not an ally to be supported.
The Trump administration’s NSS mentions Europe twice as often as China, America’s principal strategic competitor. Sit with that for a second: a president who campaigned on “peace through strength” has decided Brussels is a bigger problem than Beijing. Another measure of how problematic this document is: the Kremlin endorsed it. If you’re getting kudos from Dmitry Medvedev, you should probably ask yourself whether you’re the baddies.
NATO is the most successful military alliance in the history of the world. The US bases, supply chains, and forward deployments across Europe aren’t a favor to the Europeans, they’re how America projects power from the Middle East to the Arctic at a fraction of what it’d cost to do it from home. The transatlantic relationship has been central to both American strategy and the stability of the post-war order. And if you’ll remember, the only time NATO’s Article 5 has ever been invoked was by the United States, after September 11, 2001. Every European ally came to America’s defense despite different approaches to free speech, regulation, and countless other policy disagreements. They showed up, fought, and died alongside Americans in Afghanistan. Many joined Iraq, too.
But President Donald Trump believes that a strong and well-coordinated Europe is bad for America's interests. He doesn’t like the European Union, in large part because the EU is big and self-confident enough (at least on some issues like European security and digital regulation) to tell the president and his allies things they don’t want to hear. Together, the Europeans match American heft in trade and regulatory power. Its consumer market is larger than America’s. That’s a lot of leverage, and Trump doesn’t like being on the receiving end of it.
What’s most striking to me about this document isn’t any specific policies, but what it reveals about values. Increasingly, the United States and Europe don’t share them. This reflects a change in America far more than a change in Europe. Trump sees a G-Zero world ruled by the law of the jungle, where might makes right and everything can be bought. For all its flaws, institutional quirks, and bureaucratic sclerosis, the European Union stands for something else: rule of law, liberal democracy, human rights, multilateralism. You can roll your eyes at that list all you want, but it’s the foundation of the entire European project. Heck, it’s why America built the transatlantic alliance in the first place. (The alternative, two world wars, didn’t work out too well for anyone.) And it’s now in direct tension with what Washington is selling.