Max Bergmann
About
Director of the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at CSIS and transatlantic relations analyst
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Claims by Max Bergmann (20 of 35)
Europe shifted from appeasement to confrontation
European leaders have transitioned from a 'bend the knee' appeasement strategy toward Trump to recognizing that bending the knee achieved nothing, and that the only thing Trump respects is strength, so they must stand up to him as one would to a bully.
US lost strategic understanding of Europe after 9/11
Since 9/11 the United States stopped focusing on European security and lost its understanding of how Europe evolved over 25 years, reducing the relationship to defense spending and economic disputes, so senior US officials know Iraqi and Afghan details but cannot distinguish the European Commission from the European Council.
Bipartisan foreign policy consensus has broken
The historic strength of the transatlantic relationship was its bipartisanship—Democrats and Republicans agreed on about 95% of foreign policy fundamentals like NATO—and that consensus has now broken, leaving the two parties in fundamentally different places on Europe.
Greenland military operation was plausible
The Trump administration was likely serious about a military move on Greenland, which would have been a low-logistics operation of landing troops and planting a flag, and Denmark had concerns that the US was in a window of actually considering action.
MAGA hostility to Europe is ideological projection
MAGA hostility to Europe stems from Silicon Valley viewing Europe as a failure for lacking big tech, and a cultural fear that a successful 'socialist, woke' Europe would be a counter-model to MAGA's nativist nationalist project, producing a 'negging' dynamic of constant disparagement.
MAGA isolationism born from war disillusionment
MAGA's rage against the international system comes from a generation of patriotic new-right politicians who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, concluded the liberal-democracy rationale was 'bs', and combined neoconservative belief in unconstrained American might (stripped of the democracy element) with a nativist impulse to produce neo-isolationism.
Europe needs a standing rapid reaction force
Europe's number-one task is to replace the US as its rapid reaction force by leveraging its size and scale—for instance pooling the underused 200,000-plus Spanish and Italian armies into a permanent common force that other non-frontline countries can dock into, ceding some sovereignty to create coherence.
Procurement must be simplified and stockpiled
Europe must streamline procurement to reduce the logistics and maintenance burden of fielding many incompatible equipment types, and build vast stockpiles for deterrence, since the chaos Ukraine faced with eight-plus vehicle types illustrates how an attrition war is fundamentally a logistical nightmare.
Freak out is happening and producing real reform
Contrary to the worry that nothing will change, the European 'freak out' is already producing concrete action—a €150 billion EU loan package for common procurement over US objections, the creation of an EU defense commissioner promoting mass reform and a European Defense Union, and frontline Baltic officials now embracing strategic autonomy.
European defense failure is bureaucratic not political
Europe's core obstacle to common defense is bureaucratic rather than political: citizens want the EU to handle defense and see the Russia threat as real, but defense ministries have engaged only with NATO not the EU for 80 years, and national defense industries resist the efficiencies of Europeanization that threaten jobs and firms.
Goal is deterring Russia not replacing US military
Europe should not try to replicate the full US military's global power-projection capabilities like night operations in Venezuela, but focus narrowly on deterring Russia—positioning forces so that Kaliningrad, St. Petersburg, and Moscow are under threat—which clarifies and constrains what must actually be built.
US hollows out presence to obscure withdrawal
Rather than a clean break that would trigger a European 'freak out' and action, the US is hollowing out its presence in Europe while maintaining enough appearance that working-level NATO officials see no problem, masking the reality that what matters is whether the US would actually act in a 2029-2030 contingency under a Vance presidency.
War drives federalization like the US Civil War
Defense and foreign policy are the final frontier of European integration, and just as war drove American federalization—the US army was Serbia's size in 1914 and dismissed as a 'big common market' before reconfiguring into a world power within three years—the current security threat is similarly driving Europe toward deeper federalization.
Defense integration forces intelligence and foreign policy integration
Integrating to defend itself forces Europe to build adjacent capacities—an integrated intelligence capability (since relying on a US run by Tulsi Gabbard no longer works) and a coherent foreign-policy structure like a European security council—just as WWII forced the US to invent the precursor to the CIA.
Big political stakes have migrated to EU level
Europe is in a bizarre democratic-attention deficit where huge stakes now play out at the EU level while all politics remains national—Dutch elections fixate on soil nitrogen levels rather than the major EU-level decisions—so a new generation of lifelong EU citizens wants stronger EU action that politicians, scarred by the 2005 constitution defeat, have failed to offer.
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