SAMUEL P Huntington predicted in 2004 that because the US corporate elite had become global cosmopolitan citizens instead of American nationalists, their indifference would lead to a populist backlash in the American polity.
Six years later, in 2011, during an audience in Brussels, Robert Gates, the former US Defence Secretary with firsthand experience of Post-WW2 and Cold War Periods, had forewarned Europeans about the coming formative change in American politics and urged them to increase their defence budgets.
Both Robert Gates and Samuel Huntington were remarkably clairvoyant in their prognosis.
Two decades later, the 2025 Munich Security Conference yielded two important syntheses: first, the lack of sufficient creative foresight in understanding the role of impersonal, imperial forces of geography, history and human psychology in shaping contemporary policy positions. Second, the striking difference in the impact of the 20th-century strategic hangover—the two great wars and the Cold War—on the political mindset operating in the USA and Europe, the two sides of what Henry Adams once called the Atlantic Combine. The syntheses demand an imaginative competence that Greeks used to have in their tragic theatres. They had a dedicated god for intuition, wine, and ecstasy—Dionysus— helping them comprehend beyond the prejudice of position, to rationalize the power of irrationality, to embrace the other side of the story before making critical decisions.
Europe’s security mindset is shaped by a prolonged history of hosting the most devastating battlefields of human history, situated next to their homes, schools and gardens, leaving their bridges, hospitals and highways in rubble. Their inability to sustain the momentum of the European Enlightenment wave east of the Carpathian Mountains has posed a perennial ideological challenge to their liberal order – namely, how to integrate Russia into their value system – an enigma more complex than previous ones posed by Imperial Germany, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. The bloodiest battlefronts in European history, from Tannenberg to Stalingrad, were fought on the eastern fronts against Russia, igniting a conflagration of violence that has left an indelible mark on the European psyche, reawakened by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. As Europeans struggled to reconcile ideological and geographical paradoxes throughout the last century, they came to realize that adhering to centre-left, left, or far-left ideologies served as an ideological bulwark to safeguard their hard-won liberties and democratic institutions.
However, their failure to comprehend during NATO’s expansion eastwards that how to tread on the fine line between historical insecurities of their own and that of Russia, is one important reason that led to the Ukraine War. Due to economic strain and cultural anxiety, coupled with Europe’s proximity to an autocratic Russia, an unpredictable Africa with its burgeoning youth populations eager to migrate to Europe and the turbulent Middle East, Europe is increasingly vulnerable, crowded and apprehensive, with sensitively calibrated choices. They depend on China’s huge renewable workshop and Russian energy on one hand yet have concerns about their cultures and politics on the other. European polities are shifting rightward or far rightward, as evidenced by the recent EU elections and reinforced by the latest German elections. Although this shift may be frustrating, painful and disruptive, it is ultimately a balancing evolution and not a permanent divorce.
On the other hand, for the United States—a temperate, resource-rich new settlement, geographically protected by two oceans—the 20th century was primarily about maintaining a hegemonic balance among the various powers of the eastern hemisphere, having consolidated its position in the western one, particularly after the construction of the Panama Canal and gaining control over Caribbean international sea line communications. A key factor in the US successfully achieving this strategic goal during the last century was the progressive tax reforms implemented after the Great Depression, which enabled a thriving middle class that funded the largest maritime war machine in human history. This machine is capable of securing critical sea junctions from Panama, through the Mediterranean, Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean and Straits of Malacca, all the way to the South China Sea. However, 21st-century America struggles with wealth inequality and a diminishing middle class among US taxpayers, which is the real financial backbone fuelling the US cross-continental aircraft carrier strike groups. Meanwhile, the Han’s China, after alleviating its territorial insecurities with Uyghurs in the West, Tibetans in the South and Mongolians in the North, through its Belt and Road Initiative, is now pushing for more maritime space in the Western Pacific, Indian Ocean and Red Sea by investing heavily in developing ports and naval research and development.
French economist Thomas Piketty argued in 2018 that rising wealth inequality has undermined the progressive electoral colleges on both sides of the Atlantic, namely the Democrats in the US and social democrats in Europe. This alliance had fortified the trans-Atlantic strategic system over the last four decades but is now unable to represent the interests of low-income and less-educated classes, having become parties dominated by educational elites. In this context, Donald Trump’s demand for access to Ukraine’s Rare Earths and his transactional approach towards the EU, Gaza and Taiwan—as if an insurance company demanding premiums to provide security in return—is unsurprising. He embodies a flustered response to American pragmatism after decades of sluggish political correctness, disparity, migrations and military extravaganzas in the Middle East. Donald Trump is writing the playbook for the new phase of globalization, which is more about trade protection, political realism and real-time diplomacy. He started it by rewriting terms with his own transatlantic allies.
Beijing and Moscow are cautiously monitoring his moves and their response would decide the success of this future framework. Regardless of whether Donald Trump succeeds or fails, he has already started pulling the Europeans out of the 20th-century strategic hangover. The pull had already gone surgical when he had an unprecedented, heated argument with Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. A day before, Keir Starmer, just before his crucial meeting with Donald Trump on the future of Ukraine, announced the biggest sustained increase in defence spending since the end of the Cold War. He was endorsed by almost all the European heads from the Baltic to the Mediterranean during the Ukraine Summit in London.
At this stage, the disagreement between Europe and the USA is more transactional than strategic, as both sides know that the world has become too interconnected to disengage, particularly within the NATO Alliance. However, the only alarming prospect is if both sides of the Atlantic continue to fail in understanding their positions in the larger and pragmatic sense of human history where progress is not always linear.
The Author is a columnist and member of UNFCCC and ICAN. He taught Public Policy in the National Defence University of Pakistan.
