Europe, America, and the End of Illusions

Europe, America, and the End of Illusions

A Reflection on Power, History, and the New Transatlantic Divide

✍️ Author’s Note
For more than two decades I have argued — often to polite disbelief — that the foundations of the transatlantic relationship were shifting. Europe’s expectations of the United States rested on memories of a world that no longer exists. Recent events and the new U.S. National Security Strategy only confirm what has been unfolding since the start of this millennium.

1. Gratitude, History, and the Shadow of Old Empires

Europe owes the United States a debt for 1944–45, but gratitude is not permanence, and memory is not strategy.
Americans often forget how much Europe contributed to their rise — from French arms to Dutch finance — but the deeper truth is more uncomfortable:

Europe followed the U.S. partly because it allowed Europe to remain at the table of global power.

After centuries of imperial primacy, Europe’s influence had collapsed.
By aligning with the American hegemon, Europe could:

• preserve a shadow of its former role,
• sit in rooms where decisions were made,
• and bask in the reflected light of a superpower whose ideas were largely European in origin.

Europe adapted to American leadership because it postponed the reckoning with its own diminished position.

This is rarely admitted, yet it is central to understanding Europe’s present disorientation.

2. Admiration Fades — And Perspective Returns

When I grew up there was widespread admiration for the United States.
My father — shaped by war, occupation, and strategic realism — warned me that U.S. motives were never altruistic, and that Roosevelt’s decisions were guided by interests, not sentiment.

Age has confirmed his wisdom.
Books like One Christmas in Washington and Paul Kennedy’s Rise and Fall of the Great Powers reveal the calculations behind the Grand Alliance. Pearl Harbor, not Churchill’s pleading, brought America in.

Admiration eventually gave way to perspective.

3. Vietnam to Gingrich to Trump — The Long Road to Nativism

American nativism did not begin with Donald Trump.
Pat Buchanan’s 1991 “culture war” speech merely dragged into daylight what had simmered for decades: resentment, tribal identity, and political absolutism.

Since Vietnam, American society has become: more divided, more unequal. more influenced by money, and more distrustful of institutions.

Newt Gingrich and the Tea Party added the ideological accelerants.
Trump was not an aberration. He was the confirmation.

4. The Caribbean Killings — A Symptom, Not an Exception

The recent extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean — people shot in international waters, clinging to wreckage — reveal a disturbing truth:

This is not a deviation. It is part of a long pattern.

The Geneva Conventions are clear. Maritime law is clear.
The justifications collapse under scrutiny.
This was murder — nothing more, nothing less.

But we have seen this before:

• CIA black sites,
• drone killings under Obama,
• Iraq,
• torture at Abu Ghraib,
• assassinations,
• regime change campaigns since the 1950s.

There is professionalism in the U.S. armed forces, but the policy framework has normalized violations. George W. Bush’s “war on terror” ensured that the moral authority of the postwar West would not return.

5. The New U.S. National Security Strategy — A Hard Break

The latest national security paper simply states openly what has been practiced quietly for years:

• U.S. primacy is non-negotiable.
• Allies are useful, not equal.
• Multilateralism is conditional.
• Europe is a secondary theatre.
• The “rules-based order” is invoked only when convenient.

The age of shared purpose is over.
The façade has fallen.

6. Maastricht, Enlargement, and Europe’s Strategic Decline

The great turning point was not only Iraq or Trump — it was Maastricht and the expansion of the EU eastward.

A more integrated Europe frightened Washington.
A larger, more fragmented Europe pleased it.

Bush Jr. understood this perfectly:

• “Old Europe” was a challenge.
• “New Europe” was compliant.
• Enlargement diluted European cohesion.

The U.S. encouraged Ukraine’s NATO path knowing it would provoke Russia, calculating that Europe — not America — would absorb the consequences.

Europe accepted humiliation after humiliation because it still believed in a postwar political script that no longer applied.

Obama’s pivot to Asia should have been the wake-up call, but Europe returned to sleep.

7. Trump and Vance — Disciplining Europe, Not Leading It

Trump’s worldview resembles a crude, weaponized Monroe Doctrine:

• America controls its hemisphere,
• tolerates no interference,
• and views global problems as burdens, not shared responsibilities.

But this is not 1823.
The world is interconnected in ways Trump cannot comprehend.

Meanwhile his strategists speak of “correcting Europe’s civilizational decline.”
This is not partnership.
It is ideological intervention.

Eastern Europe will again be used as leverage to steer the EU toward a more nationalist, compliant orientation.

8. American Power — Strength Abroad, Fragility at Home

Today the United States is a greet power, but a great power in decline, as military dominance cannot compensate for:

• fractured politics,
• social polarization,
• unsustainable debt,
• decaying infrastructure,
• and the erosion of institutional legitimacy.

The comparison to the Roman Republic is not dramatic.
It is historically fitting.

Trump’s approach — transactional, chaotic, hostile to allies — accelerates the decline by alienating partners and removing the support system that sustained American influence for 75 years.

9. Europe’s Dilemma — A Union Unfinished

The tragedy is not only American change.
It is also European incompletion.

Europe never built:

• its own defence,
• its own strategic autonomy,
• its own energy independence,
• its own technological sovereignty.

By remaining structurally dependent, Europe made itself vulnerable to abandonment.

The dream of the West concealed a deeper weakness.

Epilogue: Removing the Eyeshades

For more than two decades, I have argued that Europe’s adherence to the United States was rooted not only in gratitude but also in history, habit, and an inability to confront its own diminished power.

America has changed — fundamentally, perhaps irreversibly.
The world has changed alongside it.

The West of 1945–1991 no longer exists.

The new U.S. national security doctrine, the killings in the Caribbean, the resurgence of nativism, and the structural decline of American institutions all point in the same direction: Europe stands alone, whether it wishes to or not.

And yet Europe continues to behave as if Washington will eventually return to what it once was.

It will not.

Europe must finally take its eyeshades off.
The old light is gone. A new world has begun.

William J J Houtzager, Aka WJJH, December 2025

📌Blog Excerpt

Europe owes the U.S. gratitude for the past, but the America of Eisenhower and Kennedy has long vanished. Recent extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean and the latest U.S. National Security Strategy reveal a deeper truth: American interests have diverged sharply from Europe’s. From Vietnam to Bush to Trump, the trajectory has been clear. NATO is braindead, and the West as we knew it is over. Europe must stop dreaming of a bygone era and confront a world shaped by America First.