Written on May 24, 2026. Published on limesonline.com.

A word more useful than a continent

Europe does not exist, at least not as a unified geopolitical entity. France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, Poland, the Baltics, Scandinavia, the Balkans, the Iberian Peninsula, the Mediterranean, the Arctic, the North Sea, the Russo-German fault line, and the Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and post-Ottoman peripheries do exist. States and territories with distinct memories, industries, fears, and enemies. Yet the United States was speaking of Europe long before Brussels claimed to embody it.

For Washington, Europe has always been less a political reality than a function: an origin to separate from, a civilization to inherit, a hotbed of wars to neutralize, a market to penetrate, a front to man, a protectorate to stabilize, an ally to discipline, a regulatory competitor to contain. The United States did not discover Europe. It translated it and reduced it to an operational category for its own ascent.

First, anti-America; then, the theater of world wars; then, the prized half of the West; and finally, a rich, dependent space less willing to obey without argument. The word survives, the substance thins. Washington will keep referring to Europe because the name is useful. But it will increasingly act against Europe as a unit because the unit is no longer useful, or useful only if subordinated.

The current crisis is not a quarrel among ill-mannered allies. It is the rupture of Western communion. The rite remains: NATO summits, final communiques, family photographs, formulas about democracy. But the sacrament has cracked. America no longer guarantees Europe as it once did; Europe no longer believes in America as it once did; both continue to use the language of the West because they do not yet have another. The decisive fracture concerns the loss of one assumption: that American command and European security coincide.

For eighty years, Europeans called “alliance” what was above all an imperial administration. Americans called “community” what was above all a containment device. As long as the Soviet enemy existed, the ambiguity worked. After 1989, it continued to work through inertia, convenience, and habit. Now the ambiguity is dissolving. The Europe of the Americans does not disappear: it is disassembled, priced, selected, and renegotiated. It does not die in a day. It gradually loses its form.

The Old World as mother and disease

The United States was born European and anti-European. It cannot think without the Old World, yet it must narrate itself as its correction. The English language, common law, the Protestant Bible, the Scottish Enlightenment, classical republicanism, banking, commerce, universities, and diplomacy came from across the Atlantic. So did fear: monarchy, aristocracy, standing armies, taxes, dynastic wars, court corruption, political Catholicism, the balance of power, secret diplomacy.

Washington’s formula against entangling alliances was not provincialism. It was political geography. The new republic knew it was weak; it needed time, space, and oceans. It had to grow without being drawn into the European machinery of alliances. Jefferson could speak of peace, commerce, and friendship with all nations, but the premise remained the same: to prevent the American republic from becoming a pawn in someone else’s game.[1]

The educated American of the founding age knew Europe, studied it, imitated it, and feared it. The popular American remembered it as the place from which one fled: famines, conscriptions, masters, oppressive churches, closed castes. America presented itself as an exit from European history. Here the first Europe of the Americans was born: not an ally, not a partner, but the photographic negative of the national experiment.

Monroe: separating the hemispheres, inheriting the empire

In the nineteenth century, the United States was not yet hegemonic. It nevertheless grew into a continental power: it devoured space, pushed the frontier, compressed Native peoples, absorbed territories, and bought, conquered, and colonized without calling its acquisitions colonies. Europe remained the dominant system, but America imposed a rule: Europeans could remain in the Old World and not return politically to the New.

The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 did not proclaim equality between the hemispheres. It announced a still-immature hierarchical separation. The United States lacked the power to impose it on its own; the British Royal Navy made it plausible. But the principle was set: America for the Americans, that is, progressively, for the United States. Europe was repelled not because it was irrelevant, but because it was too dangerous: it could restore monarchies, support rivals, and block US growth.[2]

At the same time, Europe entered the American body. Germans, Irish, Italians, Scandinavians, Poles, Eastern European Jews, Slavs, and Greeks crossed the Atlantic, transforming America into something more complex than the Anglo-Protestant republic the Founders imagined.[3] In nineteenth-century America, Europe had three faces: cultural capital for the elites, a human reservoir for industry and the frontier, and a political risk for a republic afraid of importing subversive ideas and unassimilable loyalties.

Coming to Europe to prevent Europe from becoming one

The two world wars changed the scale of the relationship, not its deeper logic. The United States crossed the Atlantic not out of love for Europe but because no power could be allowed to organize the continent against America. In 1917, Wilson cloaked intervention in moral language. Beneath the rhetoric of democracy lay calculation: a hegemonic Germany, projected across the Atlantic and into the markets, would be incompatible with the security of the United States.[4]

In 1941-45, the posture was even clearer. Hitler could not be allowed to control Europe because a continent unified by Berlin, integrated with industrial resources, technology, an Atlantic coast, and Eurasian depth, would become a platform against the rising hegemon. Washington intervened to prevent the fusion of European continental power and oceanic projection. It defeated Germany, then stayed. Not out of generosity. To prevent another empire, the Soviet one, from collecting the inheritance of the defeated.

The American rule stabilized: Europe could be integrated only if integration remained within the US order. Unity produced by Berlin was a threat; unity produced by Washington was stabilization. The difference was not the degree of unity but command. That is why a united Europe was encouraged when it neutralized nationalisms, organized the market, contained communism, and lightened the American managerial burden; it became suspect when it claimed to become a geopolitical subject.

The West: the noble name of the protectorate

After 1945, the West was born, not as an eternal civilization but as a strategic construction. Before then, rival Christianities, European empires, republics, monarchies, colonialisms, and civil wars were exported around the world. After 1945, Washington ordered the field: the free world against the enslaved world, democracy against totalitarianism, capitalism against communism, the Atlantic against Soviet Eurasia.[5]

The Cold War produced a semantic miracle. The United States, born in opposition to Europe, became a European power. West Germany, newly defeated, became an ally. Fascist Italy became the Mediterranean frontier of the free world. Imperial France became a companion, albeit an unstable one. The United Kingdom ceded its empire and secured a special role. Small Western Europe, devastated and terrified, received protection; in exchange, it accepted hierarchy.

The Marshall Plan was not charity. It was architecture: it stabilized economies, integrated markets, shaped ruling classes, and kept hunger, inflation, and social conflict from opening the door to the communists. NATO completed the construction. The dollar, bases, intelligence, cinema, consumer culture, universities, foundations, technologies, industrial standards, military training, and nuclear cooperation made Western Europe a region of the American empire without formal colonies.[6]

The formula attributed to Lord Ismay – keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down – remains unsurpassed because it brings NATO back to its operational truth: not a club of equals, but a device to prevent the USSR from advancing, Germany from becoming fully strategic again, and Europeans from becoming European.[7] The myth of the West dressed a command structure as a community of destiny.

1989: the victory that dissolves the cement

The fall of the Wall and the Soviet collapse did not only liberate Europe. They also liberated ambiguity. If NATO had served to contain the USSR, what remained after the Soviet Union disappeared? If the West had been born in opposition to communism, what would it become without that opposition? If the United States had been indispensable because the enemy was existential, how could the permanence of empire be justified when the enemy imploded?

The American answer was not withdrawal. It was expansion. Washington decided that victory confirmed its right to set the world’s grammar. In the 1990s, Europe ceased to be merely a front and became a laboratory for the liberal order: NATO enlargement, European Union enlargement, the Balkans, international tribunals, human rights, open markets, privatizations, and democratic transitions.[8]

For Washington, Central and Eastern Europe served as both strategic prize and moral proof. Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined NATO in 1999; in 2004, the Baltics, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Slovenia followed; then Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Finland, and Sweden after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Each enlargement was framed as consolidating freedom. Each enlargement also moved the perimeter of the American guarantee eastward.[9]

The contradiction did not explode immediately because the 1990s were a decade of euphoria. Russia was weak, China was not yet central, Western Europe prospered, the euro promised stability, and the Balkans seemed to confirm the need for American arbitration. For American liberal elites, Europe became a normative partner; for deep America, however, it came to embody taxes, bureaucracy, military weakness, secularization, and socialism.

Iraq: the Atlantic family discovers it does not speak the same language

September 11 seemed to recompact the Atlantic. For the first time, NATO invoked Article 5. Afghanistan became an Atlantic mission. The alliance left Europe to demonstrate that it still had a function.[10]

Then came Iraq. The fracture went beyond the war. It concerned the right to define the threat. Washington wanted to overthrow Saddam Hussein; London followed; Warsaw, Rome, Madrid, and others aligned; Paris and Berlin opposed. Donald Rumsfeld offered the brutal formula: old Europe versus new Europe. The distinction endured because it captured a fact. Europe is not one. The East, recently freed from Soviet domination, saw the United States as the ultimate guarantor against Moscow. The richer, safer West, more accustomed to the American rent, could afford dissent, moralism, and caution.[11]

In the eyes of many Americans, Iraq reactivated an old caricature: verbose, spineless, hypocritical Europe, ready to judge others’ use of force after having delegated its own security to them. In the eyes of many Europeans, America again became an impulsive imperial power. After Iraq, Washington continued to speak of Europe but acted on national nerves: the British for intelligence and special operations; the Poles and Balts for pressure to the east; the Italians for the Mediterranean and bases; the Germans for industry and logistics; the French for Africa, nuclear matters, and an autonomy that is irritating but sometimes useful.

Obama: Europe as a respectable past

Obama did not break with Europe. He relativized Europe. Culturally, he was the American president most intelligible to European elites in the early twenty-first century: cosmopolitan, legalistic, multilateral, prudent, and inclined toward the language of rights, climate, and governance. But his mental geography was already post-Atlantic. The pivot to Asia signaled that the decisive theater was no longer Europe. The future of American power would be played out in the Pacific, in technology, in value chains, and in competition with China, not in the liturgies of Brussels.[12]

For liberal America, Obama’s Europe remained a desirable mirror: public health care, livable cities, welfare, climate, secularism, railways, and financial regulation. For the American right, that same Europe became a warning: low birth rates, unassimilated immigration, debt, taxes, weak armies, arrogant bureaucracies, and evaporated sovereignty. The financial crisis and the euro crisis then showed that Europe was too integrated to be merely a market and too divided to be a power.

Obama treated Europe as a mature ally from which to ask for greater responsibility. Trump would treat it as an insolvent debtor.

Beijing before an Atlantic that is emptying out

The Western fracture is easier to understand from the outside. From Beijing, the Atlantic is not a quarrelsome family: it is the old center of the world losing cohesion. For China, the crisis between the United States and Europe is not merely a dispute over NATO or tariffs. It is proof that the West can no longer translate its material superiority into common political discipline.

Beijing approaches Europe with a patience different from America’s. It does not need to protect it. It must penetrate, divide, seduce, and work around it. Ports, logistics, railways, batteries, electric vehicles, telecommunications, rare earths, universities, debt, commerce: the Sino-European relationship does not pass through strategic communion but through segmented convenience. China does not need Europe to become Chinese. It is enough that it is not compactly American.

For Washington, this is the central contradiction. America would like to shift resources toward the Indo-Pacific, but it cannot afford an unstable Europe, a Russia free to press westward, an out-of-control Mediterranean, an inflamed Middle East, and a Germany tempted by economic accommodations. To contain China, it must discipline Europe; disciplining Europe, however, drains energy from the Chinese theater. If Europe no longer aligns with America, Beijing gains ground without firing a shot.

Trumpism as method: the alliance turned into an accounting audit

Trump’s arrival in Europe was not a personal accident. He accelerated fatigue already accumulated across the apparatuses, Congress, the defense industries, and the electorate. For years, Washington had been asking Europeans to spend more, buy more, and risk more. Trump changed the register: he stopped asking as the benevolent head of the West and began demanding as a creditor. Previously, protection was a common destiny; with him, it became an invoice.

Trump’s Europe is defined by three accusations. The first is military: Europeans consume American security without paying its cost. The second is commercial: Germany, the European Union, and the major continental exporters sell too much in the United States, buy too little, and use rules and tariffs to protect their own markets. The third is cultural: Europe is allegedly a laboratory of liberal post-sovereignty, defined by immigration, bureaucracy, digital censorship, punitive environmentalism, judges, and technocracies. The novelty lies not in each accusation, but in their fusion: defense, trade, and culture wars become one dossier.

That is why exchanges between Trump and Europeans should not be read as diplomacy alone. They are imperial pedagogy. The president wants concessions and, above all, a scene: to show his own public that America no longer lets itself be cheated by rich, elegant, ungrateful allies. Prolonged handshakes, abrasive press conferences, tweets, tariff letters, threats about troops and bases, praise for docile governments, contempt for Brussels: Trump does not abolish the American empire. He strips it bare. He removes its universalist velvet and makes it proprietary, accounting-driven, at times obscene.

2017: Brussels, Taormina, Berlin. The first public crack

The first visible fracture appeared in May 2017. In Brussels, at NATO’s new headquarters, Trump spoke before the Article 5 memorial and the Berlin Wall. The location was chosen to reassure, but the speech had the opposite effect. The president focused his message on defense spending: twenty-three of the twenty-eight members, he said, were not paying what they should; if the allies had met the 2 percent of GDP target, the alliance would have had $119 billion more.[13]

The absence of a solemn reaffirmation of the collective guarantee carried more weight than many later formulas. Europeans learned that Washington wanted more spending and that the American president was willing to sow doubt about protection within the alliance’s temple. A few days later, Merkel declared in Bavaria that the era when Europeans could rely completely on others was ending; Europe had to take its fate into its own hands.[14]

The United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement fits the same sequence. Macron responded with the planetary counter-slogan; France, Germany, and Italy declared that the agreement could not be renegotiated. The climate dispute was not lateral. For Trump, Paris symbolized global constraints on American workers, energy, and industrial sovereignty. For Europeans, it was proof of their normative superiority. The Atlantic was not discussing only emissions, but who had the right to define the legitimate future.[15]

2018: tariffs, NATO, Iran. The bill enters the temple

In 2018, the fracture shifted from symbolism to coercion. In March, Washington imposed 25 percent tariffs on steel and 10 percent on aluminum on national-security grounds. Targeting China is one thing. Targeting the European Union, Canada, Japan, and other allies with a measure designed for security threats means crossing categories. The ally becomes a potential industrial risk.[16]

In April, Macron flew to Washington to persuade Trump not to withdraw from the nuclear agreement with Iran. The visit had an almost monarchical staging: embraces, a state dinner, personal complicity. But the diplomacy of seduction did not hold. In May, Trump withdrew from the JCPOA. France, Germany, and the United Kingdom expressed regret and sought to preserve the agreement. Washington imposed secondary sanctions. Europe discovered that its diplomatic sovereignty ends where American financial jurisdiction begins.[17]

In July, at the NATO summit in Brussels, Trump raised the price. He denounced German behavior and linked defense, trade, and Russian gas. Nord Stream 2 loomed in the background: for Washington, Berlin asked for protection against Moscow while buying energy from Moscow. Merkel became the face of the Europe that trades with the enemy, exports cars, spends little on defense, and demands moral respect.[18]

Juncker’s visit to the White House temporarily froze the commercial escalation: more industrial goods, energy cooperation, and European purchases of soybeans and liquefied natural gas. In reality, it was a tactical truce. Trump secured the photograph of Brussels forced to negotiate; Juncker avoided a war over automobiles.[19] The G7 in Charlevoix closed the visual circle: Merkel standing, Trump seated with folded arms; then the president withdrew his support for the final communique.[20]

Europe disassembled: London, Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, Rome

America’s great skill lies in speaking about Europe and dealing with Europeans. Trump pushes this tradition to the extreme. Post-Brexit United Kingdom is the partner to be recovered within the Anglosphere: intelligence, nuclear power, finance, language, maritime warfare, and access to Europe without going through Brussels. The special relationship becomes less sentimental, not less useful.

France is the most theatrical and irritating interlocutor. Macron understands that Trump must also be treated as a performative sovereign: he invites him to the July 14 parade, offers him symbols, and tries to build familiarity. But Paris cannot accept being merely an executor. On climate, Iran, digital taxation, NATO, Africa, and strategic autonomy, it preserves the Gaullist temptation to distinguish itself.

Germany is the structural target. Berlin concentrates everything that annoys Washington: a trade surplus, an automotive industry, low military spending, energy dependence on Russia, European regulatory power, and strategic reluctance. In Germany, Trump sees the perfect parasite of the American order: too economically strong to be innocent, too militarily weak to be autonomous, and too moralistic to be grateful.

Poland and the Balts embody the Europe America prefers: anti-Russian, Atlanticist, willing to buy American weapons, less in love with Brussels, and more interested in the bilateral guarantee than in European sovereignty. Italy remains the flexible case: less decisive than Germany and less assertive than France, yet geographically valuable. The central Mediterranean, the Balkans, North Africa, the Middle East, bases, ports, telecommunications, and energy: Rome does not lead Europe, but Europe passes through it.

The German question after the American guardian

Germany is not only a target of Trump. It is the European problem that America had frozen. After 1945, Washington made the German revival acceptable by enclosing it within three mechanisms: occupation, NATO, and European integration. Germany could become rich, industrial, export-oriented, and central again on the condition that it not become fully strategic again. It had to produce power without naming it. It had to command the European economy without appearing hegemonic.

This formula enters crisis when America stops sustaining, at no cost, the stability it created. If Washington punishes Berlin for military spending, trade, energy, and dissent over Iran, it forces Germany to ask whether a central industrial power can remain politically immature on an insecure continent. Rearmament frightens Germans and Europeans first of all; when leadership tries to recover the language of power, the continent listens with a long memory.

The war in Ukraine accelerates the Zeitenwende but does not bring it about. Berlin promises more spending, industry, and responsibility, yet remains suspended between strategic pacifism, dependence on America, fear of Russia, European constraints, and global interests. If America asks for more and guarantees less, the Federal Republic must decide what it wants to be. A Germany that is too weak leaves Europe without an engine; a Germany that is too strong awakens ghosts; an adult Germany would require a Europe that does not exist.

2019-2020: Greenland, London, Berlin. The ally as available space

In 2019, the Greenland affair revealed the crudest side of Trump’s approach to geography. Copenhagen dismissed the idea of buying the island from Denmark as absurd. Trump canceled the scheduled visit. Many observers treated the episode as real-estate eccentricity. They were wrong. Greenland is the Arctic, polar routes, critical minerals, radar, China, Russia, and access to the North Atlantic. The brutality of the language revealed a deep conviction: if a territory is essential to American security, an ally’s sovereignty becomes a negotiating variable.[21]

That same year, Macron declared NATO brain-dead. It was not only a French provocation. It was a diagnosis of a chain of unconsulted American decisions, from Syria to the relationship with Turkey, from Russia to the global posture. An alliance that no longer discusses common strategy but only contributions and obedience keeps the infrastructure but loses the political brain.[22]

The NATO summit in London added an anthropological detail: Macron, Trudeau, Johnson, and others were recorded joking about Trump’s timing and behavior. The episode was not gossip; it revealed a distance that had become personal, stylistic, and symbolic. In 2020, tensions reached the troops. Washington announced the withdrawal of roughly 12,000 personnel from Germany and its exit from the Open Skies Treaty. The logistical heart of the American empire in Europe became a lever against the main continental ally.[23]

Biden: short restoration, long dependence

Biden attempted restoration. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the West seemed to return: flags, sanctions, weapons, conferences, G7, NATO, democracy versus autocracy. But the war revealed dependence more than unity. The United States provided intelligence, weapons systems, coordination, financial depth, and diplomatic pressure. Europeans discovered they lacked stockpiles, sufficient industry, common command, adequate air defense, full energy autonomy, and a shared strategic culture.

Ukraine did not rebuild the West. It revealed its asymmetry. Europe still depends on the United States to confront a war on its own territory. The United States discovered it could use the crisis to discipline allies, relaunch its military industry, sell energy, and contain Russia, but also that it did not want to remain indefinitely trapped by European fear. Biden offered familiar language. He did not resolve the decline in the alignment of American and European interests.

The restoration had a structural limit: it promised to put the West back together without refounding the pact. Europeans wanted America’s return to normality, but normality also meant delegating security, postponing the industrial problem, invoking strategic autonomy while asking Washington for weapons and guarantees. Trump would return to say brutally what Biden covered with the grammar of alliance.

2025: Brussels and Munich. Hegseth and Vance rewrite the alliance

The second Trump does not start from scratch. He enters an already corroded relationship and pushes it to an even more decomposed state. On February 12, 2025, in Brussels, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spoke at the Ukraine Defense Contact Group: a return to the pre-2014 borders was unrealistic; NATO membership was not feasible; any guarantees would be supported by European and non-European troops, outside a NATO mission and without Article 5; no US troops in Ukraine; the predominant share of future aid from Europe.[24]

Washington was not only telling Europeans to spend more. It was also telling them to take the political risk of accepting a guarantee that the United States did not want to turn into its own war. Hegseth separated three things Europeans had tried to hold together: support for Ukraine, NATO, and the American guarantee. Europe can support Kyiv, but not by assuming that the American empire will automatically absorb every step.

Two days later, in Munich, Vance shifted the attack from the military plane to the moral one. Rather than focusing on Russia or China, he identified the threat from within as Europe’s main problem: censorship, annulment of elections, exclusion of populist parties, immigration management, and voter fear. The vice president did not reassure the allies; he contested the pedagogical legitimacy of liberal Europe.[25]

The Hegseth-Vance sequence is a double decomposition. Hegseth removes from Europe the certainty of an automatic military guarantee. Vance removes its moral superiority. The first says: European security is first and foremost your problem. The second adds: you can no longer invoke common values while you censor, filter, disqualify, and correct your citizens’ votes.

The Oval Office against Kyiv: Europe witnesses its own absence

On February 28, 2025, the Oval Office meeting among Trump, Vance, and Zelensky turned the transatlantic crisis into a global event. Zelensky sought guarantees, recalled Russia’s 2014 aggression, and expressed skepticism about diplomacy with Putin. Vance accused him of ingratitude; Trump rebuked him for risking World War III; the meeting collapsed; the agreement on mineral resources remained suspended. America showed that the protected party can be publicly humiliated.[26]

For Europeans, the blow was double. Zelensky is the symbol of the resistance Europe supported but could not guarantee on its own. His exposure revealed the irrelevance of the continental capitals at the decisive moment. The war is in Europe; the blood is Ukrainian; sanctions weigh on Europeans too; the strategic consequences fall on the continent. Yet the emotional negotiation takes place in Washington, before American cameras.

The European response was immediate but defensive. Leaders rallied around Kyiv. Von der Leyen relaunched the European rearmament plan, promising to mobilize up to 800 billion euros. London and Paris sought to shape a coalition of the willing; Starmer and Macron sought the American backstop because a European force without a US umbrella risks being politically conspicuous and militarily fragile.[27]

Europeans respond to American brutality by calling for more Europe, yet they continue to seek an American seal. They want autonomy, but they want Washington to validate it. They want to support Ukraine, but they fear doing so without the United States. This ambivalence is the substance of the post-Atlantic crisis.

Trade, industry, technology: the Union as geoeconomic adversary

In the second term, the commercial front is not incidental. It is the arena where Trump can directly target the European Union. NATO disassembles Europeans; trade reassembles them because trade competence lies with the Union. Steel, aluminum, automobiles, pharmaceuticals, digital, green subsidies, procurement, data, and platform taxation: here, Brussels becomes an obligatory interlocutor. The Union has no army, but it has regulations, a market, sanctions, competition, antitrust, privacy, and technological standards. It is not a full power. It is a normative power.

The return of tariffs in 2025, with the elimination of exemptions and the increase to 25 percent on aluminum, signaled continuity with the first term. The argument remained national security: steel and aluminum are not ordinary goods but strategic assets. The effect is evident. The military alliance does not protect against US economic coercion; military dependence reduces freedom of commercial response.[28]

In 2026, the threat to the European automotive sector reopened the most sensitive wound, especially for Germany. Reports indicated plans to raise tariffs on cars and trucks from the Union to 25 percent, citing European delays in implementing the previous trade agreement. For Trump, the European car is the perfect target: a symbolic industry, German manufacturing, American employment, the trade deficit, and pressure on investment in the United States.[29]

Technology adds another layer. The American right reads European rules on data, platforms, content, digital competition, and artificial intelligence as an attempt to discipline US companies and censor political speech. Vance places digital censorship among the nodes of Western security; Musk intervenes in the German debate in favor of the AfD. The fracture no longer runs only between governments but also among states, the Commission, American platforms, populist parties, courts, and public opinion.[30]

2026: Berlin, Iran, troops. Punishment becomes physical again

The new phase becomes harder when tensions over Iran compound tensions over Ukraine. The crises of 2026 show that America can demand support even in theaters Europe considers destabilizing and punish dissent within Europe itself. The clash with Berlin, following Friedrich Merz’s criticism of America’s handling of Iran, leads to the decision to withdraw roughly 5,000 troops from Germany over the next six to twelve months. A limited reduction, but enormous as a signal: the troop withdrawal becomes a message again.[31]

Iran is the theater where America asks Europe to obey outside Europe. Supporting Kyiv, increasing military spending, or buying gas or weapons is not enough. It must also grant rear areas, bases, airspace, political legitimacy, and public silence. The Middle Eastern war does not stay in the Middle East because it passes through European infrastructure: Ramstein, Sigonella, Aviano, Naples, Rota, Moron, Lakenheath, Incirlik. If America fights elsewhere using Europe as a platform, the continent discovers that protection can turn into exposure.

The most recent recrimination over Greenland belongs to the same phase. In the first term, buying the island could still seem like real-estate eccentricity applied to the Arctic. In 2026, the register shifts: Trump presents control of Greenland as a national-security necessity, implicitly contests the adequacy of Danish sovereignty, and leaves the use of force on the table. It is no longer a rejected purchase proposal; it is strategic pressure exerted on an ally.[32]

The consequence is more serious than the provocation. Greenland is territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, a member of NATO and the European Union. An American military intervention against the island would amount to an internal war within the alliance: the supreme guarantor of Article 5 would become the possible aggressor of an ally. The European problem would no longer be only the retreat of the United States, but also the possibility that the guarantor power becomes a direct source of intimidation.[33]

The bases: sovereignty in use

The bases are the material grammar of American Europe. As long as strategic consensus holds, they appear as technical infrastructure: runways, radars, depots, commands, antennas, ports, warehouses, military housing, and training ranges. When consensus cracks, they reveal their political nature. They are not simple places. They are portions of conditioned sovereignty. The national flag remains, but the strategic function can suffer the consequences of decisions made elsewhere.

Sigonella encapsulates the Italian problem. It is an Italian base used by the United States under bilateral agreements, within a relationship that does not formally cancel national sovereignty. But when America wants to use the Mediterranean platform for operations Italy has not chosen, who really decides? The memory of Sigonella in 1985 endures because it made visible the difference between alliance and obedience.[34]

Spain offers another option. Rota and Moron are strategic nodes for the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Middle East. If Madrid limits support for an American operation, Washington can seek alternatives, increase Morocco’s weight, valorize other access points, and use Maghrebi geography as indirect pressure on the Iberian Peninsula.[35]

In Italy, the question is acute. Sigonella, Aviano, Naples, Vicenza, Pisa-Livorno, Gaeta, Niscemi, and the other installations are not Cold War relics: they connect Europe, the Mediterranean, Africa, the Levant, the Gulf, and the Red Sea. If America fights or threatens to fight in the Middle East, Italy becomes a rear area, even when it would prefer to remain a spectator. Protection turns into exposure.[36]

The second Trumpism: downgrading without withdrawal

The second term reframes this tension as doctrine. Europe is not abandoned. It is downgraded. Washington does not intend to hand the continent to Russia or allow a hostile power to control the Atlantic, the Arctic, or the Mediterranean. But it wants to remain on different terms: less automatic guarantee, more price; less community of destiny, more deal; less West, more hub-and-spokes relationship, with individual states selected for usefulness.

The real message is harsher than the propaganda. The United States does not want a sovereign Europe. It wants Europeans more armed, more willing to spend, more aligned with American strategy, but not too autonomous. It asks for operational maturity without full geopolitical emancipation. A European defense that buys from America, thinks within NATO, obeys US priorities, and relieves Washington of secondary costs is desirable; a defense capable of choosing neutrality, accommodation with Moscow, or anti-American protectionism is intolerable.

A new political geography of the continent follows. Washington no longer treats Europe as a sum of values but as a portfolio of functions: London for intelligence and the sea; Warsaw for pressure to the east; Berlin for industry, logistics, and the discipline of the center; Rome for the Mediterranean and bases; Oslo and Copenhagen for the Arctic and the North Atlantic; Ankara for the straits and the Black Sea; Brussels for rules and tariffs; Paris for nuclear power and Africa. Each capital has a different price. Each price measures usefulness.

The difference between withdrawal and hollowing out is decisive. Withdrawal would be an exit. Hollowing out is permanence without communion. America remains, but not as before. NATO remains, but it no longer means what it once did. The bases remain, but their function can become more negotiable, more exposed, and more vulnerable to blackmail. Europeans remain allies, but increasingly as contractors for a security service whose cost rises as the guarantee diminishes.

Europe as an internal cultural enemy

The new American right adds a deeper layer. Europe is not only an ally that does not pay but also a destiny to avoid. In radicalized conservative discourse, Brussels becomes the name of a disease that can infect America: government without people, rights without nation, markets without borders, judges without mandate, censorship disguised as security, environmentalism as social discipline, immigration as dissolution, digital regulation as political control, welfare as dependency.[37]

The word Europe changes function. It no longer denotes only an external continent. It becomes a domestic metaphor. Attacking Europe means attacking the part of America perceived as European: elitist, university-based, liberal, technocratic, secularized, cosmopolitan, regulatory, postnational. Silicon Valley when it censors, Harvard when it selects, Washington when it administers, Brussels when it regulates, Davos when it preaches: in the political imagination of the new right, they all end up in the same symbolic circuit.

This imaginary Europe serves to fight an internal war. The America that feels dispossessed sees in the Old Continent its own worst future: fewer children, more immigrants, less industry, more bureaucracy, less military virility, more rights language, less border, more courts, less nation. Real Europe matters less than the Europe useful to America’s culture war. For some, it remains a vacation destination, genealogy, Normandy, Paris, Ireland, Catholic Poland, and familial Italy. For others, it is socialism, ingratitude, and decadence. Trumpism does not need to prove that Europe is an enemy; it is enough to suggest that it takes advantage of America and embodies a model hostile to deep America.

Rome against Trump’s religious America

The cultural fracture does not pass only through Brussels. It also passes through Rome. At the moment when Trumpian America tends to transform its politics into a civil religion, Roman Catholicism becomes an uncomfortable interlocutor. Not because Europe is more Christian than the United States; it is often more secularized. But Rome preserves a universal claim that does not coincide with American sovereignty. It speaks to nations, migrants, the poor, wars, borders, life, peace, the market, technology, and dignity: a language that exceeds the state.

For religious Trumpism, this excess is suspect. America First does not easily tolerate a Church that is not America’s chaplaincy. When Rome recalls Catholic universality, it relativizes every nation, including the American one; when it speaks of migrants, it limits the border’s political monopoly; when it speaks of peace, it undermines the sacralization of force; when it speaks of the poor, it disturbs the theology of wealth as a sign of election.

The conflict between an American president who sees himself as a defender of civilization and an American pope who rejects aligning with America is more than a confessional detail. It is a dispute over who has the right to define the West. Trumpian America wants a proprietary, identitarian, armed, national, selective West. Rome tends to recall that Christian universalism precedes and exceeds the geopolitical West.[38]

The Europe Washington will continue to want

Despite its contempt, the United States cannot simply leave Europe. Geography prevents it. The Atlantic remains a strategic depth. The United Kingdom remains an island platform. Norway, Iceland, Denmark, and Greenland matter for control of the North. The Baltic is a hinge between Russia and Germany. Poland is a useful territorial mass. Germany remains the industrial heart. Italy is a Mediterranean aircraft carrier, a rear area of the Levant, and a node linking Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Turkey remains the key to the straits, the Black Sea, the Caucasus, and the Middle East.

Washington, therefore, will not exit Europe by closing useless bases. It will disassemble it: energy, routes, technology, semiconductors, ports, shipbuilding, space, undersea cables, artificial intelligence, air defense, ammunition, nuclear power, the Mediterranean, the Arctic, Ukraine, the Balkans, and North Africa. Political Europe may continue to issue communiques; strategic America will speak with capitals, defense ministries, industries, services, ports, and bases.

The old West promised a community; the new Atlantic offers contracts. For eighty years, Europeans could believe that American protection was destiny, civilization, gratitude, a shared memory of the war, and a bulwark against totalitarianism. Now they must discover that it was above all a historical form of American interest. When interest changes, form changes.

NATO after NATO

NATO does not necessarily have to die to stop being what it was. It can survive as infrastructure after losing its promise. It can remain a warehouse of interoperability, a chain of command, a network of bases, a technological standard, a school for officers, a market for armaments, a consultation procedure, and a device of pressure. The political death of an alliance does not coincide with the dissolution of its offices.

Classical NATO rested on three coincidences. The main threat to the United States and Europeans was the same. American protection was credible because Washington considered Europe indispensable to its own security. Europeans accepted subordination because they considered it less costly than a return to their history. Today, all three are uncertain. The United States looks to China and the Indo-Pacific; Europeans to Russia, migration, energy, the Mediterranean, terrorism, and internal disintegration. America wants to use Europe, but not be its prisoner.

This produces a NATO that is harsher and less sacred. More transactional, less liturgical. More military, less Western. More useful as a technical device, less credible as a strategic family. The collective-defense clause remains. But every future crisis will ask what once seemed implicit: does America really want to take the risk for this ally, in this theater, against this enemy, with this president, before this electorate?

In Europe, the diagnosis is merciless. Remaining in NATO is no longer enough to feel safe. Leaving it is not realistic. Building European autonomy requires a subjectivity Europe lacks. Increasing military spending without deciding who commands produces larger arsenals, not strategy. NATO after NATO is this interregnum: the umbrella remains over European heads, but no one knows with certainty whether it will open in the decisive storm.

The end of American Europe

The United States will continue to pronounce the word “Europe”. But it will use it like an old map: useful for orientation, not for believing the territory still matches the drawing. The Europe of the Americans has been a mother to surpass, a disease to avoid, a theater to balance, a frontier to conquer, a West to invent, a market to open, a protectorate to stabilize, an ally to reprimand, a cultural enemy to brandish, a client to invoice.

The relationship will not end in a solemn divorce. It will end through downgrading and hollowing out. Fewer declarations of love, more conditions. Less NATO as church, more NATO as warehouse. Less Brussels, more Warsaw, London, Rome, Berlin, Oslo, Ankara, and Paris when needed. Fewer common values, greater technical compatibility. Less destiny, more price.

For Washington, Europe has never really been a subject. It has been a space to prevent, then save, then organize, then enlarge, and now renegotiate. The final irony is cruel. Europeans believed America had helped them become Europe. The United States had helped them above all not to become European again. Now that Washington is tiring of its own invention, the Old Continent must decide whether it truly exists or whether it is only the polite name for the most successful protectorate in modern history.

What matters is not whether America will remain in Europe: it will remain because it suits America. What matters is which Europe it will find before it: frightened clients, competing regional powers, a regulatory bureaucracy without a sword, or a subject capable of defining its own interests. The answer will not come from Washington, but from Europe’s capacity to transform the loss of the Atlantic illusion into political form. Without this transformation, the Europe of the Americans will not be replaced by the Europe of the Europeans. It will be replaced by no Europe.

Notes

[1] F. Gilbert, To the Farewell Address, Princeton UP, 1961.

[2] J. Sexton, The Monroe Doctrine, Hill and Wang, 2011.

[3] R. Daniels, Coming to America, Harper Perennial, 2002.

[4] A. Tooze, The Deluge, Viking, 2014.

[5] M.P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, Stanford UP, 1992.

[6] M.J. Hogan, The Marshall Plan, Cambridge UP, 1987.

[7] T.A. Sayle, Enduring Alliance, Cornell UP, 2019.

[8] G.J. Ikenberry, After Victory, Princeton UP, 2001.

[9] NATO, “Member Countries,” chronology of enlargement.

[10] NATO, “Statement by the North Atlantic Council,” September 12, 2001.

[11] P.H. Gordon, J. Shapiro, Allies at War, McGraw-Hill, 2004.

[12] H.R. Clinton, “America’s Pacific Century,” Foreign Policy, November 2011.

[13] D.J. Trump, “Remarks at NATO Headquarters,” Brussels, May 25, 2017.

[14] Reuters, “After summits with Trump, Merkel says Europe must take fate into own hands,” May 29, 2017.

[15] White House, “Statement on the Paris Climate Accord,” June 1, 2017.

[16] D.J. Trump, Proclamations 9704-9705, March 8, 2018.

[17] White House, “Remarks on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,” May 8, 2018.

[18] White House, “Remarks with NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg,” Brussels, July 11, 2018.

[19] White House-European Commission, Joint U.S.-EU Statement, July 25, 2018.

[20] Reuters, “Trump says does not endorse G7 communique,” June 9, 2018.

[21] Reuters, “Trump cancels Denmark visit after rebuff over Greenland,” August 21, 2019.

[22] E. Macron, interview with The Economist, November 7, 2019.

[23] U.S. Department of Defense, “European Command Force Posture Review,” July 29, 2020.

[24] P. Hegseth, “Opening Remarks at Ukraine Defense Contact Group,” February 12, 2025.

[25] J.D. Vance, “Remarks at the Munich Security Conference,” February 14, 2025.

[26] White House, “Remarks Prior to a Meeting With President Volodymyr Zelenskyy,” February 28, 2025.

[27] European Commission, “Press statement by President von der Leyen on the defence package,” March 4, 2025.

[28] D.J. Trump, Proclamations 10895-10896, February 10, 2025.

[29] Reuters, “Trump says he will raise tariff on autos from European Union to 25%,” May 1, 2026.

[30] J.D. Vance, “Remarks at the Munich Security Conference,” February 14, 2025; Reuters, “Elon Musk backs AfD,” December 28, 2024.

[31] Reuters, “US withdrawing 5,000 troops from Germany,” May 1, 2026.

[32] House of Commons Library, President Trump and Greenland, Research Briefing CBP-10472, January 23, 2026.

[33] North Atlantic Treaty, April 4, 1949, arts. 5-6.

[34] US Army – The Army Lawyer, “The 1985 Sigonella Episode and the Limits of the United States-Italian Relationship,” 2021.

[35] Kingdom of Spain-United States, Agreement on Defense Cooperation, December 1, 1988.

[36] Camera dei deputati, “La disciplina delle basi militari NATO ed USA in territorio nazionale,” XVI legislatura, Dossier ES0720, 2011.

[37] J.D. Vance, “Remarks at the Munich Security Conference,” February 14, 2025.

[38] Pope Leo XIV, “Address to Members of the Diplomatic Corps Accredited to the Holy See,” January 9, 2026.