By Nick Clegg
Thursday, August 21, 2025
In the summer of 1930, the U.S. secretaries of war and
the Navy developed War Plan Red, a 94-page document laying out detailed plans
to strangle the naval and trade capabilities of the United Kingdom in a
hypothetical future that involved the U.S. and U.K. at war with each other. The
centerpiece was a full-scale land invasion of Canada, a seaborne attack on
Halifax, a blockade of the Panama Canal, the capture of British possessions
throughout the Caribbean and the Bahamas and Bermuda, and a direct challenge of
the Royal Navy by U.S. naval forces in the Atlantic.
Far from the sepia-tinted account of transatlantic
relations that is so often evoked today, the union between the English-speaking
nations that emerged after the First World War was neither fulsome nor
uncritical. Rather, the experiences of the war provoked deep antipathy and
suspicion among American decision makers toward the British empire. And the
plans, though never approved by Congress or the president, were not merely
theoretical—the U.S. built air bases, camouflaged as civilian airfields, along
the Canadian border. Only after the threat of Nazism emerged in the mid-1930s
was War Plan Red quietly shelved. It was not declassified until the 1970s.
War Plan Red’s existence is a useful reminder that so
much of what people assume to be the granite-like permanence of the postwar
transatlantic community—forged by the horrors of the Second World War and the
exigencies of the Cold War—is in fact more recent and, as we are now
discovering, more fragile. The misty-eyed nostalgia for a yesteryear of
American and European unity has always been based on sentiment as much as
reality. From President Dwight Eisenhower’s threat to crash the British pound
during the Suez Crisis of 1956 to America’s opposition to French attempts to
maintain control in Vietnam and Algeria, the decline of European power while
the U.S. emerged as the undisputed hegemon was marked by naked rivalry as much
as it was by the amity of “the West.”
So Donald Trump is drawing, however unwittingly, on
historical precedent when he brandishes his own imperial designs on Canada,
Greenland, and the Panama Canal. When he expresses his suspicions about
Europe—the European Union, according to Trump, “was formed in order to screw
the United States”—he does so too. The NATO Summit earlier this summer—an
“orchestrated grovel at the feet of Donald Trump,” as the British journalist
Martin Kettle put it—demonstrated how unbalanced the relationship has become.
More recently, the Alaska summit at which Trump gave Russian President Vladimir
Putin the red-carpet treatment only underscored the point. They discussed
Putin’s invasion in the heart of Europe without a single European leader
present. European leaders got what looked instead like a school photo in the
White House alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—a row of school
pupils holding hands to confront an overbearing headmaster. Perhaps the past 80
years of American transatlantic leadership—which established one of the
greatest security alliances in history and built a democratic bulwark against
the threat of Soviet Communism—will turn out to be the exception, not the rule.
***
Anyone listening attentively to J. D. Vance’s broadsides
earlier this year at the Munich Security Conference and the AI Action Summit in
Paris will have noticed a new mix of menace and petulance from the U.S.
government. In addition to delivering a familiar critique of Europe’s sluggish
and overregulated economy, the speeches signaled a willingness to use American
power—and European dependency on that power—to interfere in Europe’s internal
democratic politics: “The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe
is not Russia; it’s not China; it’s not any other external actor,” Vance said
in Munich. “What I worry about is the threat from within.”
After Vance endorsed Germany’s far-right AfD party and
met its leader in the run-up to the German election, Chancellor Friedrich Merz
did not mince his words: “The interventions from Washington were no less
dramatic and drastic and ultimately outrageous than the interventions we have
seen from Moscow.”
At a rally in Poland days before the presidential
election there, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem seemed to suggest that
the U.S. would continue to support Poland only if Trump’s preferred
candidate—the conservative historian Karol Nawrocki—were to win: “He needs to
be the next president of Poland. Do you understand me?” Noem said, adding that
if Nawrocki was elected, Poland “will continue to have a U.S. presence here, a
military presence.” (Nawrocki did win, and was inaugurated earlier this month.)
All of this makes the Trump-Vance agenda very clear. Far
from espousing an isolationist “America First” doctrine, when it comes to
Europe, the Trump administration is seeking to enforce a doctrine of “America
Everywhere,” in which political parties that share the same nativist outlook
are actively supported by Washington, and those who do not are ceaselessly
criticized.
***
Like so many Europeans of my generation, I am a product
of transatlanticism. My father was one of the lucky few children to be moved to
safety in the United States during the height of the Nazi bombardment of
London; my Dutch mother was released from a Japanese-run prisoner-of-war camp
in Indonesia following the U.S. victory over Japan. I studied as a post
graduate at the University of Minnesota, and did a stint as a fact-checker at The
Nation magazine in the early 1990s. Later, as an EU trade negotiator and
member of the European Parliament, I was part of an effort, working with
successive U.S. administrations, to build a rules-based global trading system.
As Britain’s deputy prime minister from 2010 to 2015, I worked with the Obama
administration on an array of shared endeavors, including counterterrorist
operations and commercial agreements. And recently I spent seven years as a
senior executive at Meta, on the front line of the technological revolution—and
blazing controversies—emanating from Silicon Valley.
In short, a world in which Europe and America don’t walk
tall and in tandem with each other, even when they disagree, is hard for me to
contemplate. I fervently believe that the world is safer, stronger, and
wealthier because of this unique relationship. But now is the time to imagine
the previously unimaginable: a world in which deep-rooted transatlanticism
gives way to shallow transactionalism.
Part of what is pulling the relationship apart is,
ironically, the demonstrable nature of America’s supremacy over Europe, a
supremacy delivered in no small part by the statecraft of previous U.S.
administrations: an open trading system built on the undisputed role of the
dollar as a global reserve currency; the deployment of overwhelming defense and
security capabilities; the gravitational pull of a world-leading university
system (despite, for now at least, the current administration’s attack on American
academe); and economic prowess built on American domination of both
international finance and technology. The U.S. has, on all of these benchmarks,
comprehensively pulled ahead of Europe. When I served as deputy prime minister,
the GDPs of Europe and the U.S. were roughly the same; today, the U.S. GDP is
almost one and a half times larger.
No wonder some Silicon Valley investors now talk of
Europe as a “dead” place—an adjective I’ve heard in various conversations—as if
a continent of 500 million people and centuries of scientific and cultural
discovery can be dismissed as little more than a hemispheric museum. In many
ways, the tech elite is merely repeating the mockery directed at supposed
European decadence by generations of American commentators (H. L. Mencken’s
caustic assertion that “there are two kinds of Europeans: the smart ones, and those
who stayed behind” comes to mind). Of course, their scorn has been fully
matched by a long tradition of European snobbery toward supposedly uncouth
Americans.
Yet the divisions seem starker now. Rather than gentle
ribbing between Old World and new, or specific disagreements between otherwise
aligned allies, they are increasingly framed in zero-sum terms. A new class of
American nationalists frets about the end of Western civilization, advancing a
blood-and-soil ideology that elevates faith, family, and fealty to the nation
over democratic ideals. Rather than seeking cooperation between political
systems regardless of who is in power, they seek to elevate their ideological
bedfellows at the expense of everyone else. It is the subjugation of diplomacy
to virulent partisanship, egged on by outriders in business and politics who
smell opportunity and personal advancement in populism.
***
A persistent theme in the U.S.’s critique of Europe has
to do with America’s culture of free speech, derived from the First Amendment.
A standard trope among the MAGA faithful is that Europe is a continent cowed by
censorship. But this argument reeks of double standards: In Trump’s America,
saying the wrong thing can get you defunded—or deported. Everyday travelers to
America now nervously expunge anything from their social-media feeds that could
be interpreted as criticism of the Trump administration for fear of being arraigned
at the border. So much for free speech.
For all the flaws in Europe’s approach to free
expression, European universities do not typically advise American and other
foreign students to delete private messages for fear of attracting the
attention of the authorities. Yet Europeans would be well advised to recognize
that there is a significant kernel of truth in some of the critiques. Recent EU
laws governing online content are a sprawling mess, seem unlikely to fix the
internet’s problems, and risk creating structures that can be used to suppress
legitimate debate. Much as Americans too readily overlook the deep fear of
political extremism in a continent drenched in blood through two world wars and
disfigured by fascism and Soviet Communism in living memory, the shadows of
history should not be used to curtail basic freedoms today.
There are stark differences in attitude toward markets
and regulation too. Clearly America and Europe will never have the same
attitude toward risk; the sink-or-swim approach to poverty in the U.S. is
unimaginable to most Europeans, not least because it is historically associated
with the rise of extremism that inflicted so much damage on the continent in
the 20th century. Equally, the risk-averse (and in many cases self-sabotaging)
approach to regulation in the EU is inexplicable to most Americans, who have
seen how a swashbuckling culture of innovation has delivered unimaginable
wealth and ingenuity to the U.S.
These vastly different experiences naturally shape the
operating cultures of the two continents: the American, which instinctively
rejects restrictions on enterprise, no matter the broader ramifications for
society; the European, which reflexively recoils from rugged individualism,
even at the expense of sorely needed economic dynamism. The fact remains that
Europe’s businesses and innovators are held back by institutions that too often
seek to prevent every potential harm rather than deliver any potential benefit.
***
For all the desire to see “the West” as an expression of
mutual values derived from the same fundamental perspective, Europe and America
are more different than our shared culture—from Henry James to Hollywood—would
suggest. Our history and experiences are different; our attitudes and societies
are different; and our place in the world is different too. Nothing has
illustrated this more dramatically than the volte-face in U.S. government
attitudes toward the Kremlin. If the aftermath of the Second World War was the
foundation upon which transatlantic solidarity was established, a united stance
against the authoritarian ambitions of Russia provided the brickwork for that
solidarity throughout the Cold War period. Yet memories of the former have now
faded, and Trump has chosen to treat Putin with more political respect than
many leaders in Europe.
This abrupt change has shaken the tenets of Atlanticism
down to its core. While Europeans have belatedly recognized the need to bear
more of the costs for their own security, the realization that Europe and
America see the geostrategic threats of the world from fundamentally different
perspectives is taking root. America’s basic message to Europe of late has
been: You’re on your own. From now on, don’t expect too much help from us. The
fact that a bus load of European leaders had to surround Trump to extract the
hitherto wholly uncontroversial idea that the U.S. might play some role—with no
boots on the ground—to guarantee Ukraine’s future security is a sign of how far
things have changed. But this logic goes both ways. In the coming years, it
will become more difficult for Washington to insist that Europe follows its
lead in isolating and weakening China, especially if doing so harms European
prosperity. If the U.S. is ever more ambivalent to the Russian threat on
Europe’s doorstep—especially if any peace deal in Ukraine gives Putin a free
hand to destabilize or reinvade the country in the future—and continues to
interfere in European elections while hitting Europeans with tariffs, European
governments will have difficulty explaining to voters why they should go out of
their way to help Uncle Sam in its rivalry with Beijing.
In all of this, the inescapable facts of geography appear
to be reasserting themselves. Europe does not face Asia across the Pacific.
Russian tanks will never roll onto American soil. Of the two continents,
America is blessed with the most benign geographical inheritance: a young
continent-size nation, shielded by two vast oceans on either side, with mostly
pliant neighbors to the north and south and a national history free of external
invasion (though of course not without foreign attacks), one that has skillfully
ridden its natural advantage to a hegemonic position and now stands without
equal. Compare that with the cluttered old patchwork of middling and small
nations—with different ethnic, religious, and linguistic identities stretching
back millennia—living cheek by jowl in a crowded continent in a risky
neighborhood. To most Americans, conflicts in the Middle East are a distant
tragedy; to Europeans, they are next door. Russia is ever menacing; a land war
rages in the heart of the continent; and handling mass migration across the
Mediterranean from Africa continues to divide European governments. Europe is
simply more precariously located than many Americans appreciate.
Today’s shift in American politics marks a new chapter in
the diverging histories of our two continents. It is no passing mood, much
though Trump’s critics might wish otherwise. A significant portion of the
American voting public supports the newly assertive “America First” worldview.
This will not disappear overnight, nor will the growing distance between Europe
and America. And that is perhaps the most important lesson of all: Rather than
being mugged by the surprise discovery that we are very different, maybe a more
mature transatlantic relationship going forward will acknowledge and even
celebrate those differences. There is no reason why we cannot have a productive
relationship—geopolitically, economically, culturally—despite them.
The answer to the ineluctable distance between the lives
and perspectives of our citizens is not to throw up our hands in horror but to
look for the places where our interests ought to overlap—we are both continents
born of the Enlightenment, and rooted in democracy, after all—and find ways to
work together toward tangible goals without the emotional baggage that
accompanies a forced sense of kinship.
Finding a new equilibrium will require a measure of
humility on both sides of the pond. Trump, Vance, and their colleagues should
cease believing—unlikely though that currently seems—that “America First” must
be “America Everywhere,” as if Europe should be brought to heel by emulating
the one-eyed view of “freedom” espoused by the hard right in the U.S. And
Europeans should stop moping about the fact that the U.S. has chosen a very
different trajectory driven by a different worldview, and work instead to strengthen
their own continent. Perhaps, like a couple sustaining a marriage that has lost
all its early magic, we will both emerge stronger for the realization of a
fundamental truth: We’re different, and there’s nothing wrong in that.
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