The American Primacy viewpoint holds that the United States should maintain its position as the dominant power within NATO, that the alliance exists primarily to serve American strategic interests, and that Washington's leadership role is not merely a historical artifact but a necessary condition for Western security. Holders of this view argue that American primacy within NATO is the load-bearing wall of the liberal international order - remove it, and the structure collapses. This position is associated with foreign policy hawks, realist internationalists, and neoconservatives, and finds institutional expression in think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Hudson Institute, as well as among significant factions within both major American political parties.
Proponents argue that stable international orders require a hegemon - a single dominant power willing and able to provide public goods such as freedom of navigation, deterrence of revisionist powers, and enforcement of alliance commitments. They contend that the United States has fulfilled this role since 1945, and that no European power or combination of European powers is capable of replacing it. Without American primacy, advocates argue, NATO becomes a loose coalition of states with divergent interests and inadequate defense budgets, incapable of credible deterrence against Russia or, in the longer term, a rising China. Mearsheimer's framework of hegemonic stability is frequently invoked by primacy advocates, though Mearsheimer himself is a primacy skeptic.1)2)
American primacy advocates hold that decades of American security guarantees have allowed European NATO members to systematically underinvest in their own defense. They point to the NATO commitment - formalized at the 2006 Riga Summit and reaffirmed at the 2014 Wales Summit - that member states spend at least two percent of GDP on defense, a target most members failed to meet for most of the alliance's history.3) Advocates argue this is not merely a financial grievance but a strategic liability: allies who cannot field capable forces cannot share the burden of deterrence, leaving the United States to bear disproportionate risk and cost. From this perspective, American primacy is not a choice but a structural consequence of European states choosing welfare spending over defense - a consequence the United States should correct by demanding performance, not simply accept.
Holders of this view argue that American primacy is inseparable from the nuclear umbrella the United States extends over NATO allies. No European state possesses the nuclear arsenal or delivery systems necessary to deter a full-scale Russian nuclear threat. Britain and France maintain independent deterrents, advocates acknowledge, but regard these as insufficient for extended deterrence of the scale NATO requires. The credibility of Article 5 - the collective defense guarantee - depends, they argue, on the certainty that the United States would respond to an attack on any member with the full weight of American military power.4)
Advocates contend that the United States has invested decades of institutional capital - basing agreements, command structures, interoperability standards, intelligence sharing, and diplomatic relationships - into the NATO framework. This architecture, they argue, cannot be replicated quickly or cheaply by European alternatives. Dismantling or diminishing American primacy within this structure would mean discarding irreplaceable infrastructure at precisely the moment when great power competition with Russia and China demands its preservation.
Some primacy advocates go beyond pure strategic calculation, arguing that the United States and its NATO allies share a common civilizational inheritance - liberal democracy, rule of law, market economics, and individual rights - that makes the alliance more than a transactional security arrangement. From this perspective, American leadership is not imperialism but stewardship of a zone of freedom that benefits all its members. They hold that the United States, as the most powerful liberal democracy, has both the capacity and the obligation to defend this order against authoritarian challengers.5)
The American primacy viewpoint within NATO has roots in the original design of the alliance. When the North Atlantic Treaty was signed in 1949, the United States was the only NATO member possessing nuclear weapons and the only economy capable of rearming Western Europe. The asymmetry was structural from the beginning. The Eisenhower administration's “New Look” policy formalized American nuclear primacy as the basis of NATO deterrence, substituting nuclear weapons for the conventional forces a war-exhausted Europe could not sustain.
The Cold War institutionalized American primacy through the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) position, which by convention has always been held by an American officer - an arrangement NATO allies accepted as the price of the American security guarantee. Advocates of primacy cite this history as evidence that the arrangement has always been understood, by all parties, as the structural foundation of the alliance.
The end of the Cold War produced what primacy advocates regard as a fateful drift. European defense spending declined sharply through the 1990s and 2000s, and the Clinton and Bush administrations allowed the burden-sharing imbalance to widen in the interest of alliance harmony. The Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008 and the annexation of Crimea in 2014 reinforced primacy advocates' argument that the post-Cold War “peace dividend” had been a strategic error.
The Trump administration's aggressive burden-sharing demands, though rhetorically disruptive, are seen by many primacy advocates as a necessary correction - an overdue insistence that European allies treat the two-percent commitment as a floor rather than an aspiration. The Biden administration's return to a more conventional alliance management style is assessed by primacy advocates as a retreat from necessary pressure, trading short-term alliance comfort for long-term strategic weakness.6)
Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is interpreted by primacy advocates as a vindication of their longstanding warnings about European underinvestment and the consequences of treating Russia as a status quo power. They argue the invasion demonstrated that NATO deterrence below the nuclear threshold remained credible only because of American conventional and logistical capabilities.
Robert Kagan - Senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of Of Paradise and Power (2003) and The World America Made (2012). Kagan is among the most systematic advocates of the view that American power is the precondition of the liberal international order, and that European complacency is enabled by American security guarantees.
Elbridge Colby - Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and architect of the 2018 National Defense Strategy. Colby argues for a disciplined form of primacy focused on denying regional hegemony to China and Russia, and has been influential in translating primacy arguments into defense policy.7)
Hal Brands - Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and prolific commentator on American grand strategy. Brands argues that American primacy, while costly, remains the least bad available option for preserving an international order compatible with American interests and values.8)
John Bolton - Former National Security Advisor and longstanding advocate of American primacy. Bolton holds that the United States should maintain dominant military power but is categorically skeptical of multilateral institutions constraining its exercise - a position that distinguishes him from multilateral primacists such as Kagan and Brands.
The Heritage Foundation - Institutional advocate for robust American military spending, NATO burden-sharing demands, and American leadership of the alliance. Heritage analysts have been consistent critics of European free-riding and advocates for conditioning American commitments on allied performance.9)
A significant fault line runs between primacy advocates who regard NATO itself as valuable - as a force multiplier, legitimizing structure, and intelligence-sharing framework - and those who regard alliance management costs as excessive. The former, associated with figures like Kagan and Brands, argue that American primacy is best exercised through and within multilateral institutions. The latter, more closely associated with Bolton and some elements of the America First right, hold that the United States should maintain dominant military power but reduce its institutional entanglements.
Even primacy advocates who agree that European free-riding is a problem disagree about how hard to push for correction. Some argue that public pressure and conditional commitments are necessary to force European governments to make difficult budgetary choices. Others contend that aggressive burden-sharing demands damage alliance cohesion and provide Russia and China with evidence of Western disunity, and that the correct approach is firm private diplomacy rather than public confrontation.
A newer internal debate concerns whether NATO primacy should remain Eurocentric or extend to Indo-Pacific competition with China. Some primacy advocates, including Colby, argue that NATO commitments risk overextending the United States at a moment when resources should be concentrated on deterring China in the Pacific. Others argue that Russia and China present a unified revisionist challenge that must be met simultaneously, and that Indo-Pacific primacy and NATO primacy are inseparable.10)
Some primacy advocates argue that American commitments should be explicitly conditioned on allied burden-sharing performance - that states failing to meet defense spending commitments should receive reduced or delayed Article 5 guarantees. Others argue that conditional commitments undermine deterrence by introducing uncertainty about American resolve, and that the correct approach is to demand better performance without signaling that commitments are negotiable.
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