Europe's security landscape has changed dramatically in the past decade amid Russia's resurgence, mounting doubts about the long-term reliability of the U.S. security commitment, and Europe's growing aspiration for strategic autonomy. This changed security landscape raises an important counterfactual question: Could Europeans develop an autonomous defense capacity if the United States withdrew completely from Europe? The answer to this question has major implications for a range of policy issues and for the ongoing U.S. grand strategy debate in light of the prominent argument by U.S. “restraint” scholars that Europe can easily defend itself. Addressing this question requires an examination of the historical evolution as well as the current and likely future state of European interests and defense capacity. It shows that any European effort to achieve strategic autonomy would be fundamentally hampered by two mutually reinforcing constraints: “strategic cacophony,” namely profound, continent-wide divergences across all domains of national defense policies—most notably, threat perceptions; and severe military capacity shortfalls that would be very costly and time-consuming to close. As a result, Europeans are highly unlikely to develop an autonomous defense capacity anytime soon, even if the United States were to fully withdraw from the continent.

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Since the end of the Cold War, the study of European defence has been dominated by a 'CSDP-centric' approach, while largely neglecting the comparative analysis of national defence policies. This article makes the case for turning the dominant research prism of European defence studies upside down by returning the analytical precedence to the national level. This approach privileges the comparative analysis of national defence policies and armed forces, before focusing on the trans-/supra-national level. The case for this conceptual turn is made in three steps. First, it addresses the different historical stages in European defence integration and the transformation of national armed forces in Europe. Second, it questions the predominance of CSDP in the scholarly literature on European defence. Finally, it seeks to demonstrate the fruitfulness of such a demarche by empirically substantiating common patterns and intra-European divergences in the evolution of national defence policies and armed forces since the end of the Cold War. In conclusion, the article suggests avenues for research focused on European national defence policies and armed forces.

Throughout history, Great Powers have devised balancing strategies aimed at checking the ambitions of rival Great Powers. To do that, they have sought to enter and mobilize alliances and security partnerships with secondary states. Yet, the influence of secondary states on the balancing strategies of Great Powers remains largely underestimated in the International Relations literature. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we posit that secondary state preferences play a key enabling or constraining role in shaping the balancing choices of Great Powers. We focus specifically on how the adoption of hedging strategies on the part of secondary states affects the balancing strategies of established Great Powers. We argue that when secondary states adopt a hedging strategy established Great Powers are incentivized to engage in what we call ‘covert balancing’. Covert balancing occurs when an established Great Power conceals its security cooperation with a secondary state beneath a cover that is seemingly unrelated to balancing a rising Great Power, thus working around the secondary state's hedging strategy while at the same time helping generate a latent capacity to balance. We probe our argument by examining US balancing strategy against China in the Asia–Pacific.

This Special Issue aims to explain the transition from the Cold War US-led system of exclusive bilateral alliances in East Asia (or "hub-and-spokes" system) into a "networked security architecture", i.e. a network of interwoven bilateral, minilateral and multilateral defence arrangements between the US and its regional allies and partners, and that also partly includes China.Drawing from the English School of International Relations, it challenges dominant Structural Realist explanations which interpret such development as a form of external balancing against a revisionist China. By contrast, this Special Issue submits that China's selective contestation of the US-led hegemonic order in East Asia has sparked a renegotiation of such order among regional powers, which has resulted in the restructuring of the underlying alliances and defence partnerships into a networked security architecture. Specifically, regional powers have sought to broaden the composition of the US-led hegemonic order in East Asia-by diversifying the range of defence ties between US allies and partners, but also by seeking to include the PRC in it. Thereby, rather than merely balancing the People's Republic of China, they have sought to channel the trajectory of China's rise within this hegemonic order through a mixture of resistance and