Titolo completo

Europe’s Strategic-imagination Deficit

Strategic imagination is a product of the geopolitical contexts in which political elites operate. During the Cold War and, to a lesser extent, the early post-Cold War era, European states helped shape the Euro-Atlantic order and consequently generated original strategic initiatives that complemented or occasionally diverged from American preferences. As the post-Cold War transatlantic bargain deepened Europe’s dependence on US security guarantees and strategic leadership, European capacity to conceive alternative courses of action eroded. Donald Trump’s return to power and the weakening of the Euro-Atlantic order have exposed the costs of this dependence while creating new incentives for strategic innovation. Yet Europeans remain torn between adaptation to American retrenchment and the construction of a more autonomous security order. Greater European agency will depend on the ability to imagine and organise security as a genuinely collective European endeavour rather than as a derivative of transatlantic relations.