A Bargain Waiting on NATO’s Eastern Edge: Romania

As the United States pulls back from Europe, it is leaving NATO countries like Romania, on the Alliance’s eastern periphery, vulnerable to Russian aggression. Turning to Brussels, unfortunately would offer Romania little help: Europe is a decade away from being able to help itself.

Romania has been without a government for over two months, with a squabble over foreign policy amplifying the internal divide: should Romania throw up its hands and abandon a quest for stronger ties with Washington and turn to its own continent? Or should it double down on efforts to get and keep American attention and perhaps help achieve this by riding the AI boom?

The answer is simple. Until or unless, Europe is ready to fend/defend for itself, keeping the United States engaged is Romania’s overriding security requirement.

And the surest way to do that is economic entanglement — binding Washington to Bucharest through business. In this ever-more transactional world, it’s the only path forward and should be the next government’s organizing strategy. And it builds directly on President Nicușor Dan’s agenda.

Dan’s stance, read by some as a MAGA tilt, is better understood as a clear-eyed view of his nation’s place and circumstances. Trump, he emphasized, has shifted the world “from a moral way of doing things to a very pragmatic and economical way.”

Last October, the United States cut its rotational forces in Romania from roughly 2,000 to 1,000 troops. The American drawdown in Europe is not over: and this is about more than soldiers, Washington has announced it will not bring in a long-range fires battery to Germany as planned. Foreign Minister Oana Toiu assured Romanians that allies would fill the void, promising “a stronger NATO presence” by early this year. No additional alliance troops have arrived.

In testimony before the U.S. Senate this March, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General Alexus Grynkewich, was asked how long it would take Europe to lead the continent’s conventional defense. Europe “won’t be all the way there” by 2030, he said, “but certainly by 2035 they will be” — but only if its warfighting capacity and defense-industrial base keep growing.

A years to decade long window of vulnerability has opened for the countries that sit beside war-torn Ukraine.

The conclusion is uncomfortable but clarifying: for the next decade, the United States remains the indispensable ally that can help Romania deter Russia in the Black Sea. Romania’s leverage with this White House is vested interest, not sentiment. Bucharest should therefore bind itself to Washington through contracts and supply chains — a relationship far harder for a president to draw down than one measured in troop rotations.

Skeptics will object that this courts the very dependency Romania should fear. But there is a difference between purchasing favor and building shared interest. Under tariff pressure, Japan and South Korea pledged roughly $900 billion into the United States, in projects the president personally directs. Bucharest’s model is the reverse: to draw investment into Romania that the United States would never want to walk away from. Romania offers a ready source of energy — nuclear power — a willingness to build the datacenters that American AI companies so desperately need, as well as a large STEM workforce at a fraction of Western European cost.

Through this economic and energy entanglement, Romania gets its much-needed security blanket, while the United States gets some of what it so desperately wants: compute.

Mark Montgomery is a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He was formerly a policy director at the Senate Armed Services Committee. Antonia-Laura Pup is a PhD researcher at the European University Institute and previously worked as an advisor in the Romanian Parliament.