For decades a core objective of the Soviet Union was to “decouple” 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.
Now, in weeks, President Trump has handed Moscow the gift that eluded it during the Cold War and since.
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.
“The United States was the pillar around which peace was managed, but it has changed alliance,” said Valérie Hayer, the president of the centrist Renew Europe group in the European Parliament. “Trump mouths the propaganda of Putin. We have entered a new epoch.”
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’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in 1963 framed the fortitude of West Berlin as an inspiration to freedom seekers everywhere. President Ronald Reagan issued his challenge — “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” — at the Brandenburg Gate in 1987. European history has also been America’s history as a European power.
But the meaning of “the West” 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.
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.
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, “I declare today for the world to hear that the West will never, ever be broken. Our values will prevail.”
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.
The challenge for Europe is to judge what constitutes maneuvering on Mr. Trump’s part and what is a definitive authoritarian American reorientation.
A week after the ugly Oval Office blowup with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, accused of failing to say “thank you” for American military assistance that has since been “paused,” 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.
“Whatever Trump’s adjustments, the biggest danger would be to deny his abandonment of liberal democracies,” said Nicole Bacharan, a political scientist at Sciences Po University in Paris. “Trump 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?”
President Emmanuel Macron of France declared this week that the continent faced “irreversible changes” from America. He urged “massive shared financing” for rapid European military reinforcement, announced a meeting next week of European chiefs of staff and said “peace cannot be the capitulation of Ukraine.” He also offered to extend France’s nuclear umbrella to allies in Europe.
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.
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.
“It was a terrible sight, the whipping boy and the weeping boy,” said Jacques Rupnik, a French political scientist who has written extensively on Central Europe. “Europe must step up now to fight for democracy.”
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’s second largest party.
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 “horrible infamy.”
Germany’s incoming conservative chancellor, Friedrich Merz, reacted with words that felt like the death knell of the old order. “My 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,” he said. The Trump Administration, he suggested, was “largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.”
In moments, a triple German taboo fell. Mr. Merz’s 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.
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.
Europe’s major powers, it seems, have concluded that Mr. Trump is no outlier. He has plenty of support among Europe’s 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.
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.
Of course, the ties between Europe and the United States are no small matter. They will not be easily unraveled; they are much more than a military alliance. According to the latest E.U. figures, trade in goods and services between the 27-nation European Union and the United States reached $1.7 trillion in 2023. Every day, some $4.8 billion worth of goods and services crosses the Atlantic Ocean.
Mr. Trump has claimed since taking office a second time that the European Union was “formed in order to screw the United States.” It was a statement typical of his a-historical, zero-sum view of the world. In fact, by any reasonable assessment of the past 80 years, the Euro-American bond has been a prosperity engine and a peace multiplier.
“The alliance is at a very painful stretching point, but I would not call it a breaking-point, at least not yet,” said Xenia Wickett, a London-based consultant who has worked for the U.S. National Security Council. She differentiated between Mr. Trump’s demand that Europe pay more for its defense, a not unreasonable request, and his embrace of Mr. Putin.
Where that embrace leads, if maintained, is unclear. But as Mr. Schama said, “When you do reward aggression, it guarantees another round of aggression.” Ukraine, for Mr. Putin, is part of a much broader campaign to undo NATO and the European Union. Along with China in a “no limits” partnership, he wants his Russian resurrection to put an end to what he sees as Western domination of the world.
As Pierre Lévy, a former French ambassador to Moscow, wrote last month in Le Monde, “It’s up to the American people to understand they are in Putin’s line of fire: de-Westernize the world, end American hegemony, end the dollar’s dominant place in the global economy, and act with the backing of Iran, North Korea and China.”
For now, and for unclear reasons, Mr. Trump does not seem to care. He is not about to waver from his zero-criticism susceptibility to Mr. Putin. Europe, it seems, will just have to overcome its stupefaction.
“We are all heartbroken when we wake up,” Ms. Bacharan said.
