The current crisis between Europe and the United States marks the end of an era—regardless of who follows Donald Trump. The trans-Atlantic bond rested on specific features at the global level as well as within the United States and Europe. All are now gone.
The international context in which the bond bloomed—first in the postwar period and then in the era after the fall of the Berlin Wall—was one in which the United States was a liberal leviathan. It had fought and won two global wars—World War II and the Cold War—standing for liberal values. Those victories enabled it to spread those norms, first across Western Europe and parts of Asia and then throughout the world. The order that rested on U.S. power, including international organizations and laws, was imbued with a liberal ethos.
The current crisis between Europe and the United States marks the end of an era—regardless of who follows Donald Trump. The trans-Atlantic bond rested on specific features at the global level as well as within the United States and Europe. All are now gone.
The international context in which the bond bloomed—first in the postwar period and then in the era after the fall of the Berlin Wall—was one in which the United States was a liberal leviathan. It had fought and won two global wars—World War II and the Cold War—standing for liberal values. Those victories enabled it to spread those norms, first across Western Europe and parts of Asia and then throughout the world. The order that rested on U.S. power, including international organizations and laws, was imbued with a liberal ethos.
Trans-Atlanticism was embedded in this global context; it represented its inner core. This was true both of the international institutions that the United States was pivotal in establishing and leading—including the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and NATO—and of those it supported from the outside, foremost among them the European Union, whose deepening and expansion it backed over the years. It was an order in which laws and norms were often violated, including, and at times especially, by the United States as well as Europe. Yet they were recognized and shared on both shores of the Atlantic. It was also a time in which the United States and Europe frequently disagreed over policy, sometimes profoundly. But those divergences never fundamentally shook a deep sense of mutual belonging or a shared belief in the values of freedom, democracy, and international cooperation.
That liberal order is now gone. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney broke the spell at the World Economic Forum in January. Over successive crises—beginning with 9/11, through the global financial crisis, the crisis of liberal democracy, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the wars that have ravaged Europe and the Middle East—the international liberal order has been fraying for a quarter century. But while, for years, its most ardent believers continued to pay lip service to it, now even they are publicly acknowledging it is over.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 20.Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images
The international liberal order has ended because, in the multipolar system we live in, a plurality of values sits uncomfortably with liberalism’s universalistic aspirations. Above all, it is gone because its primary architect—the United States—has turned against that very order, using its privileged position within it to strike at its core.
The United States is no longer a leviathan or a liberal one. By acting as a predatory power and exploiting what remains of its privileged position, it is simply accelerating its own relative decline, especially with respect to an illiberal China. This is crystal clear in areas such as trade, energy, and even diplomacy. Beijing’s ascendancy is only being propelled by Washington’s self-inflicted wounds: tariffs, a stubborn reluctance to embrace the energy transition, and a catastrophic war in Iran.
The end of the international liberal order erases the global context in which trans-Atlanticism was born and thrived. Without it, trans-Atlanticism would have struggled in any case. But it is the profound changes in both the United States and Europe that seal the end of trans-Atlanticism as we have known it.
In the United States, illiberalism and authoritarianism are on the rise. There are still strong forces pushing in the opposite direction, and one has good reason to believe—and to hope—that they will eventually prevail. But even if this were to happen, there is little to suggest that Washington will simply revert to the past. This is not only because it will take immense time and effort to undo the damage the Trump administration has inflicted on domestic norms and institutions. As countries such as Poland and, as we are about to witness, Hungary demonstrate, there is no easy or rapid path back to liberal democracy once illiberalism and authoritarianism have been allowed to creep into and poison the system.
It is also because the United States has been changing profoundly as an economy, a polity, and a society and will continue to do so. The sense of belonging it felt toward Europe had particular roots, grounded in history and in the heritage of large parts of society—and especially of the elites who governed the country for many decades. That is changing as the societal and generational makeup of the country shifts.
U.S. President John F. Kennedy delivers a speech at NATO headquarters in Rocquencourt, France, on June 2, 1961.AFP via Getty Images
Deep down, Europeans knew that Joe Biden would be the last trans-Atlanticist president of the United States. And this holds true regardless of whether a Democrat wins the next presidential election and Trumpism is definitively defeated. There will be no future U.S. president who triumphantly returns to Europe and announces, “America is back,” as Biden did at the 2021 Munich Security Conference. Whoever leads the United States in the years ahead is highly unlikely to feel the same emotional attachment and sense of belonging that former U.S. presidents showed toward Europe.
In Europe, the change is rooted less in sociology and more in psychology. Trans-Atlanticism was never free of policy disagreements. Precisely because the economic, societal, political, and defense bonds were so deep, there were plenty of occasions for profound divergences—as often happens within families. There were also moments when disagreements led to a temporary distancing between the two shores, as with the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
And there were moments when Europeans were told that Washington had to attend to other priorities, most notably its competition with China. This became a common refrain during Barack Obama’s presidency and grew louder and starker during Trump’s first term. But this was not necessarily a bad thing. It simply meant redesigning the social contract between the two sides of the Atlantic. A Europe highly dependent on the United States for its defense—one that knew Washington had its back—was counterbalanced by the U.S. defense industry’s open access to the lucrative European market as well as by the use of joint military bases on European soil. As each war in the Middle East has shown, particularly the bases in southern Europe are crucial to U.S. power projection southward. Europeans generally followed the United States, even when they disagreed with the choices it made, as in Iraq.
What has unfolded over the past year and a half is qualitatively different. It is not a redefinition of the trans-Atlantic social contract for reasons that are both inevitable and perhaps even desirable. It is a fundamental breach of trust that cannot be undone. This is manifested not only in the profound disdain that Trump and members of his administration display toward Europe and in the tariffs the United States has piled onto European goods, threatening more at every unrelated disagreement that arises. Nor is it merely the sway that Russian President Vladimir Putin—Europe’s archenemy—holds over Trump. It is above all the U.S. threats to annex Greenland, an integral part of Denmark and therefore of Europe, that have proved most damaging. Never before has the United States so brazenly threatened the independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of a European country.
Whatever happens next, that breach of trust has occurred, and what is broken will not be restored to its earlier condition. European dependence on the United States will be slow to diminish, and there will remain many issues on which Europeans and Americans share mutual interests and will work together. But just as Latin American countries have ingrained in their political DNA the understanding that the United States cannot be fully trusted and may turn against them, that same awareness has now been implanted in Europe. No matter the closeness and cooperation that may be rebuilt in future, the recent past will remain inscribed in European political consciousness in ways that simply did not exist before. It will be a gene that, in good trans-Atlantic times, may lie dormant—but will spring back to life when the trans-Atlantic relationship comes under strain once again. Europe’s immune system, psychologically as well as materially, is changing.
Does the end of trans-Atlanticism mean all is lost? Does it necessarily imply that Europe and the United States cannot be close again? No, it does not. The world has changed, and so have the United States and Europe. But mutual interests and a common foundation will continue to make the trans-Atlantic relationship important in future. Trans-Atlanticism as a liberal ideology inscribed in a specific historical period is over. But the trans-Atlantic relationship is not. And just as a couple, having gone through a painful separation or even divorce, can with time and effort become good friends again—so, too, can Europe and the United States.
