There are bad marriages, there are loveless marriages and then there are those long diplomatic arrangements that continue out of habit, paperwork and fear of the neighbors. NATO increasingly resembles the last category. The chemistry is gone. The old passion, the sweeping moral confidence of the postwar Atlantic alliance has cooled into the sort of brittle coexistence where both parties still share a house but eat dinner in separate rooms.
For decades, the arrangement worked because it rested on a simple emotional bargain. America provided muscle, money, and strategic clarity. Europe provided legitimacy, markets, and the comforting illusion that the West still represented a coherent civilization rather than a collection of competing anxieties wrapped in procedural language. During the Cold War, the relationship had urgency. The Soviet Union was a looming presence that forced coherence upon people who otherwise might have spent their time arguing over tariffs and wine regulations.
But history has a cruel sense of humor. NATO won the Cold War and slowly lost the plot. The alliance today often feels less like a military pact than an exhausted corporate retreat where nobody remembers the original mission statement. Washington complains that Europe free-rides on American defense spending while simultaneously resenting any attempt by Europe to pursue strategic independence. Europe complains about American recklessness while depending almost entirely on American logistics, intelligence, and military infrastructure whenever a genuine crisis appears. Each side accuses the other of immaturity. Both are correct.
The deeper problem is psychological. America no longer sees Europe as the center of the world. Asia dominates strategic thinking now. China absorbs the imagination once reserved for Moscow. Europe, meanwhile, has become trapped between dependency and denial. Its political class speaks constantly about “strategic autonomy” in the same tone people discuss finally learning Italian or committing to yoga, always beginning next year.
And then there is the issue nobody wants to state plainly: the emotional mythology underpinning the alliance has collapsed. The old Atlantic narrative depended on shared confidence in liberal democracy, economic growth and Western inevitability. That confidence is evaporating simultaneously on both continents. America looks increasingly inward, polarized and suspicious of its own institutions. Europe looks fragmented, aging, and uncertain whether it still believes in borders, industry, or power itself.
The result is not an imminent collapse but something potentially worse: a hollow continuation. Alliances rarely die dramatically. They decay administratively. Meetings continue. Statements are issued. Summits produce carefully staged family photographs beneath enormous flags. Yet underneath the choreography sits a growing recognition that the interests of Washington, Berlin, Paris, Warsaw, and Ankara are diverging faster than diplomats can invent new language to conceal it.
A bad divorce may still be avoidable. But the relationship now survives less through affection than inertia. NATO once embodied strategic romance: a grand union forged in existential danger. Today it increasingly resembles two exhausted partners staying together because separating would be expensive, frightening, and geopolitically inconvenient.
History suggests that is rarely enough.
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