14. The US’s Strategic Dilemma: Saving Transatlantic Security or Rebalancing to Asia?

The global system is in a state of flux, and security challenges are being felt very differently by the United States and Europe. This is having a significant impact on what we might think of as the “Euro-Atlantic space” and on the interests and policies of its members. European nations are wrestling with an unprecedented refugee crisis and Brexit, while the United States is increasingly concerned about a growing power competition with China. There even seems to be a transatlantic split on the implications of Russian activities in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and of the war with Georgia in 2008. The risk is that the current Euro-Atlantic security architecture, designed for a different time and set of challenges, may be unravelling in the face of a new type of global security landscape, and especially a transition to Asia as the fulcrum of the twenty-first century.