For 70 years, the transatlantic relationship rested on a fiction that flattered both sides. America was the guarantor of a rules-based order, and Europe was its co-architect. The fiction was useful, and for a long stretch it was even partly true. But it hid a harder fact, and that fact is now impossible to ignore. Europe was never the coauthor of that order. It was its protected interior. The arrangement had a name we were too polite to use: a protectorate.
That protectorate is over—not because America betrayed it, but because America has stopped pretending. The shock now running through European capitals is not really about any single decision out of Washington. It is something slower and harder: the recognition that the role we thought we were playing was never the role we actually held. I have argued in these pages that what looks like American retreat is in truth a reform of American power. This essay asks the next question, and it is the uncomfortable one. What does that reform leave of Europe? And does Europe still have anything to offer that America cannot supply for itself?
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