While Helmut Schmidt has often been depicted as a ‘reluctant European’ who only came to embrace European integration because of US policy under Carter, this article shows that Schmidt's conceptions of Europe have remained largely consistent since the late 1940s. Using rare materials from his private archive, it analyses how Schmidt utilised the EC in dealing with the multiple crises of the 1970s, regarding European and transatlantic cooperation not as antagonistic but as complementary processes. With the reheating of the Cold War from the late 1970s onwards, however, the international and domestic preconditions of Schmidt's two-pillar foreign policy gradually began to erode.