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 view from the center of the American empire was very different from our own; that the U.S. felt burdened and overburdened; and that it carried an ever greater load than its European periphery. Americans were fighting costly wars in the interests of the entire empire, while we were perfecting our welfare states.
The Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis, years of deindustrialization, and the arrogance of the American elite toward working class and rural voters created the perfect conditions for a demagogue to come to power, which is exactly what happened when Donald Trump took over the Republican Party and won the 2016 presidential election. His success was so shocking that even he himself didn’t fully realize what had happened. But that was no longer the case when he was elected again a year ago. Since his second inauguration in January, the transatlantic world has changed dramatically.
There are many things that can be said about Trump, but one thing is that he can never be called an ideologue. Trump’s ideology is Trump and nothing more. But the same cannot be said of his vice president, J.D. Vance, his inner circle in the White House, or the broad MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) movement that supports him.
One of the main ideologues of this movement, Stephen Bannon, sees the world as a battlefield between the Judeo-Christian tradition and its enemies, among them representatives of Western liberalism. He believes that allies are needed to win this global culture war, and he thinks he has found them in the right-wing populist parties of Europe. Now that MAGA is in power in the US, Bannon sees opportunities to expand the movement by pressuring the “decaying” Europeans.
This seems to be what Vance had in mind when he delivered his infamous speech at the Munich Security Conference in February. Censuring the European officials in the room, he portrayed the far-right Alternative for Germany party as a victim of censorship while the Trump administration sued the media and penalized universities at home.
Bannon and his associates reject everything the EU stands for. The goal of the EU, based on liberal values, is to overcome nationalism through ever deeper integration. But MAGA is a non-apologetic nationalist, and he seeks to find common ground with those who share his chauvinistic views on policy. Thus, under Trump, transatlanticism is being turned upside down. It is no longer an internationalist but a nationalist project.
The irony should be obvious. In case we haven’t forgotten, transatlanticism arose out of the struggle against extreme German nationalism and the genocidal racism of the Nazis in World War II, and was maintained during the Cold War with the Soviet Union.
But even if we recognize that Europe has lived comfortably as an American protectorate for several decades, we should not succumb to the pressures of the current U.S. administration. As much as we owe America, we also have obligations to ourselves – to the values and principles we have long lived by. 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 a disaster for Europe – and especially Germany – to accept such a transformation of itself. We must never forget the warning that former French President François Mitterrand issued in his last speech before the European Parliament: ‘Nationalism is war’. In just a few words, he captured the essence of Europe’s disastrous experience with this form of politics. For us, we are not talking about some abstract ideology, but about Europe’s legacy as the most violent place on Earth before 1945.
If the American radical right were to actually try to destroy the post-nationalist project of Europe – a edifice that has been built with great effort over generations – only one person could rejoice: Vladimir Putin. It would be an utterly tragic and absurd outcome – a kind of dialectic of irrationality.
Joschka Fischer,
German foreign minister and vice-chancellor from 1998 to 2005,
was the leader of the German Green Party for almost 20 years.
© Project Syndicate, 2025.
www.project-syndicate.org
