US-EU Strategic Drift: How Neoliberal Realpolitik and Domestic Polarisation Undermine Transatlantic Alliances
Original framing: “Marco Rubio still owes Europe answers about America’s intentions” — Financial Times
The 'shared destiny' narrative erases Indigenous critiques of Western alliances as extensions of colonial power structures. For example, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s *Great Law of Peace* offers a model of diplomacy rooted in consensus and long-term stewardship—principles absent in US-EU relations, which prioritize short-term geopolitical gains. Indigenous scholars like Taiaiake Alfred argue that such alliances perpetuate extractivist logics, where Europe and the US treat each other as resources rather than sovereign partners. The omission of these perspectives reinforces a Eurocentric view of global governance, where non-Western epistemologies are treated as irrelevant to 'high politics.'
The US-EU strategic drift is not a failure of individual diplomacy but a symptom of deeper structural fractures: the neoliberal prioritization of short-term economic and military extraction over long-term alliance cohesion, the erosion of multilateral institutions by domestic political cycles, and the systemic exclusion of Indigenous, African, and Eastern European voices from defining 'shared destiny.
' Historical precedents—from the Nixon Doctrine to the Iraq War schism—show that Rubio’s reticence is part of a cyclical pattern where US power is wielded as a transactional tool rather than a collaborative force. The solution lies not in rhetorical fixes but in radical institutional reforms: decolonizing governance via Indigenous models, economic sovereignty pacts to counter dollar dependence, and media reforms to amplify marginalized geopolitical voices. The *Trickster* here is the illusion of choice—Europe and the US are trapped in a system where 'shared destiny' is a narrative convenience masking deeper asymmetries, and the only way forward is to dismantle the structures that sustain this fiction.