The Storm That Won't Pass
The comforting European belief that the American disengagement will pass with the Trump administration mistakes a fifteen-year structural reorientation for a passing squall — and the strategy documents of four administrations prove it
The comforting illusion
A reassuring conviction is circulating in Europe’s chancelleries, and more openly still in the commentary that flatters them: that the real problem is the Trump administration, and that once the storm has passed things may return to what they were. The United States will again shoulder the bulk of European defence; the Europeans will again buy a share of American weapons as the price of that protection; and in the meantime national budgets can go on directing to welfare and pensions the resources that would otherwise go to armies. It is the belief that one need only wait — cross the tempest with one’s head down, avoid irreparable gestures, keep the transatlantic bond intact until a more reliable tenant returns to Washington. It is a comfortable thesis, because it asks nothing; and for that reason it is the most dangerous of illusions. For the American disengagement from Europe is not the whim of one president. It is a long, structural, bipartisan trend, codified in the foundational strategy documents of four consecutive administrations — Obama, the first Trump, Biden, and the second Trump — and resting on a historical failure that no change of administration can repair. Whoever waits for Trump to pass is waiting for the return of a world that no longer exists.