\n<\/p>\n
For decades a core objective of the Soviet Union was to \u201cdecouple\u201d the United States from Europe. Decoupling, as it was called, would break the Western alliance that kept Soviet tanks from rolling across the Prussian plains.<\/p>\n
Now, in weeks, President Trump has handed Moscow the gift that eluded it during the Cold War and since.<\/p>\n
Europe, jilted, is in shock. The United States, a nation whose core idea is liberty and whose core calling has been the defense of democracy against tyranny, has turned on its ally and instead embraced a brutal autocrat, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Gripped by a sense of abandonment, alarmed at the colossal rearmament task before it, astonished by the upending of American ideology, Europe finds itself adrift.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe United States was the pillar around which peace was managed, but it has changed alliance,\u201d said Val\u00e9rie Hayer, the president of the centrist Renew Europe group in the European Parliament. \u201cTrump mouths the propaganda of Putin. We have entered a new epoch.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The emotional impact on Europe is profound. On the long journey from the ruins of 1945 to a prosperous continent whole and free, America was central. President John F. Kennedy\u2019s \u201cIch bin ein Berliner\u201d speech in 1963 framed the fortitude of West Berlin as an inspiration to freedom seekers everywhere. President Ronald Reagan issued his challenge \u2014 \u201cMr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!\u201d \u2014 at the Brandenburg Gate in 1987. European history has also been America\u2019s history as a European power.<\/p>\n
But the meaning of \u201cthe West\u201d in this dawning era is already unclear. For many years, despite sometimes acute Euro-American tensions, it denoted a single strategic actor united in its commitment to the values of liberal democracy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Now there is Europe, there is Russia, there is China and there is the United States. The West as an idea has been hollowed out. How that vacuum will be filled is unclear, but one obvious candidate is violence as great powers duke it out.<\/p>\n
Of course, as the almost daily whiplash on new tariffs has made clear, Mr. Trump is impulsive, even if his nationalist and autocratic tendencies are a constant. He is transactional; he could change course. In 2017, on a visit to Poland during his first term, he said, \u201cI declare today for the world to hear that the West will never, ever be broken. Our values will prevail.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The president has since stripped himself of the shackles of such traditional thinking and of the establishment Republican entourage that buttressed it. He appears to be a leader unbound.<\/p>\n
The challenge for Europe is to judge what constitutes maneuvering on Mr. Trump\u2019s part and what is a definitive authoritarian American reorientation.<\/p>\n
A week after the ugly Oval Office blowup with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, accused of failing to say \u201cthank you\u201d for American military assistance that has since been \u201cpaused,\u201d Mr. Trump has agreed to a meeting next week of senior Ukrainian and American officials. He has also threatened to impose further sanctions on Russia if it does not enter peace talks. This may allay some of the damage, although little if any basis for ending the Russian-instigated war seems to exist.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhatever Trump\u2019s adjustments, the biggest danger would be to deny his abandonment of liberal democracies,\u201d said Nicole Bacharan, a political scientist at Sciences Po University in Paris. \u201cTrump knows where he is going. The only realist position for Europe is to ask: What do we have as a military force and how do we integrate and grow that power with urgency?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
President Emmanuel Macron of France declared this week that the continent faced \u201cirreversible changes\u201d from America. He urged \u201cmassive shared financing\u201d for rapid European military reinforcement, announced a meeting next week of European chiefs of staff and said \u201cpeace cannot be the capitulation of Ukraine.\u201d He also offered to extend France\u2019s nuclear umbrella to allies in Europe.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
These were indications of big strategic shifts. But nowhere in Europe has the impact of American realignment been more destabilizing than in Germany, whose postwar republic was largely an American creation and whose collective memory holds sacred the generosity of American soldiers offering the first succor to a devastated nation.<\/p>\n
Christoph Heusgen, the German chairman of the Munich Security Conference, teared up last month as he contemplated the end of his three years in the job. It was easy, he said, to destroy a rules-based order and a commitment to human rights, but hard to rebuild them. He spoke after Vice President JD Vance accused Europe of denying democracy by trying to block the advance of far-right parties, including a German party that has used Nazi language.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a terrible sight, the whipping boy and the weeping boy,\u201d said Jacques Rupnik, a French political scientist who has written extensively on Central Europe. \u201cEurope must step up now to fight for democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n
For many Germans, the idea that America, whose forces did so much to defeat Hitler, should opt to cosset a party, the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, that includes members openly supportive of the Nazis feels like an unpardonable betrayal. The AfD is now Germany\u2019s second largest party.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
In the words of the British historian Simon Schama, interviewed this week by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, this combined with the cutting-off of American military and intelligence aid to Ukraine, at least for now, constituted \u201chorrible infamy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Germany\u2019s incoming conservative chancellor, Friedrich Merz, reacted with words that felt like the death knell of the old order. \u201cMy absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the United States,\u201d he said. The Trump Administration, he suggested, was \u201clargely indifferent to the fate of Europe.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
In moments, a triple German taboo fell. Mr. Merz\u2019s Germany would exit American tutelage, examine the extension to Berlin of French nuclear deterrence and permit growing debt to finance a rapid defense industry buildup.<\/p>\n
Even at a time of economic difficulty, Germany is a bellwether for Europe. If French-German military cooperation does grow fast, and is complemented by British military involvement, as seems likely under Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Europe may shed its reputation as an economic giant and strategic pygmy. But it will not happen overnight.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Europe\u2019s major powers, it seems, have concluded that Mr. Trump is no outlier. He has plenty of support among Europe\u2019s growing far right who are anti-immigrant nationalists. He is the American embodiment of an age of rising autocrats for whom postwar institutions and alliances are obstacles to a new world order built around great-power zones of influence.<\/p>\n
If Mr. Trump wants to grab Greenland from a European Union member, Denmark, what other European conclusion is credible? The outlier of the past decade now looks like President Biden with his passionate defense of democracy and a rules-based order.<\/p>\n