There is no doubt that Europe owes much to the United States. No one should ever forget America's decades-long defense of freedom in Western Europe and West Berlin, its successful financing of post-World War II reconstruction, its victory in the Cold War, and the unification of Europe under the security umbrella of NATO.
For Europe, these were successful, happy and, it must be said, comfortable decades. But they also lulled Europeans into complacency. We failed to notice that the perspective from the center of the American empire was quite different from ours; that the United States felt burdened and overstretched; and that it increasingly bore a heavier burden than that which fell on the shoulders of its European periphery. The Americans fought expensive wars in the interests of the entire empire, while we perfected our welfare states.
The Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis, years of deindustrialization, and the arrogance of American elites toward working-class and rural voters created the perfect conditions for a demagogue to rise to power. And that’s exactly what happened when Donald Trump took the Republican Party leadership and won the 2016 presidential election. His success was so shocking that even he himself didn’t fully understand what had happened at first. But a year ago, when he was re-elected, the situation changed. Since his second inauguration in January, the transatlantic world has undergone fundamental changes.
There are many things that can be said about Trump, but one thing he can never be called an ideologue. Trump's ideology is Trump himself - and nothing more. The same cannot be said, however, for his Vice President J. D. Vance, nor for his inner circle in the White House, nor for the broader MAGA ("Make America Great Again") movement that supports him.
One of the movement's leading ideologues, Stephen Bannon, sees the world as a battleground between the Judeo-Christian tradition and its enemies - including the very advocates of Western liberalism itself. He believes he needs allies to win this global culture war, and he believes he has found them in Europe's right-wing populist parties. Now that MAGA is in power in the US, Bannon sees an opportunity to expand the movement by putting pressure on "decadent" Europeans.
That appears to have been Vance's intention when he delivered his controversial speech at the Munich Security Conference in February. After criticizing European officials in the room, he portrayed the far-right Alternative for Germany party as a victim of censorship, even as the Trump administration at home was simultaneously suing media outlets and pressuring universities.
Bannon and his allies reject everything the European Union stands for. Founded on liberal values, the European Union aims to overcome nationalism through ever-deeper integration. But MAGA is openly nationalist and seeks to ally itself with those who share its chauvinistic political views. Thus, under Trump, transatlanticism is turned on its head. It is no longer an internationalist project, but a nationalist one.
The irony should be obvious. Lest we forget, transatlanticism emerged from the struggle against Nazi extreme German nationalism and genocidal racism in World War II and survived throughout the Cold War against the Soviet Union.
But even if we acknowledge that Europe has lived comfortably as an American protectorate for several decades, we must not succumb to the pressure of the current American administration. As much as we owe America, we also owe ourselves - to the values and principles that have long guided us. America may have abandoned liberal values and embraced populist nationalism, but that does not mean we should do the same.
In fact, it would be disastrous for Europe - and especially for Germany - to accept such a self-transformation. We must never forget the warning that former French President François Mitterrand gave in his last speech to the European Parliament: "Nationalism is war." In just a few words, he summed up the essence of Europe's disastrous experience with this kind of politics. For us, this is not a question of some abstract ideology; it is about Europe's legacy as the most violent part of the world until 1945.
If the American radical right were to actually try to tear down the European post-national project - a edifice that many generations have painstakingly built - only one person would be happy about it: Vladimir Putin. That would be a completely tragic and absurd outcome - a kind of dialectic of irrationality.
The author was the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Vice Chancellor of Germany from 1998 to 2005; he led the German Green Party for almost 20 years
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2025. (translation: NR)
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