Philip Stephens / May 2026
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The Nato alliance is beyond repair. The future of Atlanticism is transactional.
Associations between friendly nations generally fall into two categories. The strongest are enduring alliances, grounded in shared norms and values as well as an alignment of geopolitical interests. Then come looser, instrumental arrangements - pacts, ententes and such like - framed around specific threats or common goals.
Nato has often been called history’s most successful alliance. With some justice. The alliance’s guarantee of the territorial integrity of its member states (initially 12, now 32) was underpinned by its founding commitments to freedom, democracy and the rule of law. Its military strength was buttressed by its normative power.
That era has now passed. Some of the transatlantic bridges demolished by Donald Trump’s ruinous presidency can doubtless be patched up after his departure. But the bond of trust on which the alliance rested has been irrevocably broken. America and Europe, it turns out, are not as alike as many had assumed (and more recently pretended).
Europe is dismissed in Washington as a feeble freeloader, its civilisation under threat from immigrants. Europeans have taken a look as the less civilised dimensions of American society and decided they prefer Canadians.. The best to be hoped for of future transatlantic cooperation is a set of transactional, transient arrangements.
At the height of empire the statesman Lord Palmerston famously declared that great powers such as Britain quite naturally elevated permanent national interests above any quest for eternal allies. This was a fair description of the policy that saw Britain subsequently drawn into two world wars. Trump, though he would not recognise the historical parallel, is playing Palmerston.
The assumed collision between international commitments and selfish interests, however, was confounded after the second world war by a recognition among western leaders of a unique alignment of sovereign and collective goals. For the US and Europe, doing the right thing together would also serve their individual interests. It was this belief that gave birth to Nato and its role of the guarantor of the much wider panoply of international rules and institutions that became the western liberal order.
The shared geopolitical interest, of course, was to counter the advance of Soviet communism. For the US this meant establishing global leadership. Washington’s economic strength depended on access for its vast industries to international markets, particularly those of Europe. European nations, left devastated and politically fractured by the war and often menaced at home by rising communist parties, looked for a system that would at once underwrite their political stability and leave behind might-is-right territorial conflicts. The US alone could provide that security.
The outcome was the grand bargain that was Nato - and its Article 5 commitment to view any attack on one member state as an aggression against all. America assumed leadership of this new western order on the understanding it would write the rules of that order. Europe accepted US leadership as the price of its own security.
It suited both sides to set the new alliance within a grand framework of values. Western might would be situated on the side of right. America’s role as the shining city on the hill sited its selfish ambitions on the moral high ground. Europe hoped that a law-based international system rooted in liberal democratic values would pull down the curtain on the horrors of wars between states. Democracies do not fight each other, was a favourite phrase.
Power would still confer privilege, Washington’s allegiance to rules, it was tacitly understood, would not entirely exclude America’s interest-based exceptionalism. When the mask slipped as the CIA sponsored proxy wars in Latin America, Asia and Africa, Europe looked the other way. As Canada’s Mark Carney has observed this involved a certain hypocrisy in the pursuit of self serving interest. But Nato worked. Large wars between states were replaced by smaller wars within them.
Now, the bargain that gave us the west has been undone.
It will take decades for the shift to play out. So, as they watch Trump ranting and rambling about his vainglorious war against Iran, threatening to invade a Nato ally or playing the apologist for Vladimir Putin’s revanchism, Europeans can be forgiven for clinging on to the hope that this is a nightmare from which one day they will wake up. It is impossible, they tell each other, to imagine another president as dangerously capricious. In any event, belligerent unilateralism has proved blind to America’s fundamental interests.
America First, as Trump might have learned from the absence of support from allies during the witless attack on Iran, has become America Alone. Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, spoke for the rest of Nato when he remarked that the principal effect of the failed attempt to bomb Tehran into submission has been to humiliate the US and underline its growing estrangement from erstwhile allies.
When Trump threatens to retaliate by pulling out some of the US troops stationed in Germany, he characteristically misses the point. The truth about Nato long unspoken in Washington has been that a disproportionate military contribution to the alliance was an inexpensive underpinning for global military primacy. The troops stationed in Europe and East Asia were put there to project American power.
The president’s ignorance, however, is only one part of the present story of shifting geopolitical plates. To hope that life might yet return to a semblance of normality is to ignore other fundamental shifts in the distribution of global power. Unhinged and dangerous as he is, the grain of truth in Trump’s embrace of crude nationalism is that the terms of the Atlantic bargain were already under strain.
The US was comfortable with a liberal world order because it made the rules. That began to change two or three decades ago with the shift in relative power from north to south. And now, in a world that no longer belongs to the west, Chinese rather than American industry is the biggest beneficiary of open trade. Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine openly defies the Pax Americana in Europe. Defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan have stripped the US of the aura of invincibility in the Middle East.
The conclusion drawn by many in the US - and they reach beyond Trump’s MAGA movement - is that if they cannot mark out the playing field the national interest is no longer served by global leadership. Better to concentrate on the western hemisphere and focus on the technological and military competition with China.
There are all sorts of analytical flaws in this strategy, not least that the US has somehow to defend its global interests. But that’s not the way it looks to Middle America, where the historical lessons of the opening decades of the 20th century struggle to get much of a hearing.
None of this is to predict a complete rupture in transatlantic relations. As even Trump has discovered the infrastructure of decades of collaboration and interdependency - whether economic, military, technological or intelligence - cannot be dismantled overnight. And Europe and the US will continue to share common interests, whether economic or security, so many of the elements to the old relationship will doubtless survive in future co-operative arrangements. But they will be transactional. The essentials of the post war alliance - trust on the European side and confidence on the American - have gone.
Europeans have begun to focus, albeit too slowly, on building their own defences. There is a long way to go. Beyond that, they should be thinking about how to build stronger alliances well beyond the continent’s borders. Many other like-minded nations - Canada, Australia, Japan and South Korea among them - have been cut loose by America’s retreat. It’s time to imagine how to build a west without America.
The author’s substack can be accessed here.
