Which is the real Europe? The mostly peaceful, democratic, and united continent of the past few decades? Or the fragmented, volatile, and conflict-ridden Europe that existed for centuries before that? If Donald Trump wins the U.S. presidential election in November, we may soon find out.
Trump flirted with pulling the United States out of NATO during his first term as president. Some of his former aides believe he might really do it if he gets a second. And it’s not just Trump talking this way: As U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance, one of the leading America First acolytes, has argued, “[The] time has come for Europe to stand on its own feet.” Even among those who don’t explicitly subscribe to the America First ethos, the pull of competing priorities—particularly in Asia—is growing stronger. A post-American Europe is becoming ever more thinkable. It’s worth asking what kind of place that might be.
Optimists hope that Europe can keep on thriving—even if it loses the U.S. security umbrella that NATO leaders will celebrate at the alliance’s 75th anniversary summit in Washington in July. The United States might go home, in this view, but a Europe that has grown wealthy, stable, and reliably democratic over the past 80 years is ready to act as a constructive, independent force in a multipolar world.
More likely, however, a post-American Europe would struggle to meet the threats it faces—and might even revert, eventually, to the darker, more anarchic, more illiberal patterns of its past. “Our Europe today is mortal. It can die,” French President Emmanuel Macron warned in late April. In an America First world, it just might.
EUROPE HAS CHANGED SO DRAMATICALLY since World War II that many people—Americans especially—have forgotten how hopeless the continent once seemed. Old Europe produced some of history’s greatest aggressors and most ambitious tyrants; its imperial ambitions and internal rivalries touched off conflicts that pulled in countries around the world. Europe was the land of “eternal wars” and endless troubles, the aviator and prominent isolationist Charles Lindbergh said in 1941—better for the United States to keep clear of that cursed continent.
The fundamental issue was a geography that cramped too many powerful contenders into a single space. The
