NATO's Comfortable Fiction Is Running Out of Road
Secretary of State Marco Rubio described US force posture decisions as technical rather than political. European allies are not buying it — and that is the real story of Helsingborg.
The comfortable fiction of the transatlantic relationship — that alliance meant something fixed, that commitments traveled in both directions on predictable terms — is dissolving in real time. Ruben's insistence that force posture decisions are technical is the kind of statement that soothes internal audiences and confuses external ones. It does not answer the question the Helsingborg table was asking: what does the United States actually intend, and on what timeline?
Europe is learning to ask those questions without expecting clean answers. That is, reluctantly, a form of progress.