There are years that the textbooks compress into a single date because everything that mattered happened at once. Nineteen forty-five, when the unconditional surrender of Germany was signed in a Berlin suburb and a bipolar order settled over the world for the next four decades. Nineteen ninety-one, when the Soviet Union dissolved and an interim, improvised order took its place. I have come to believe we are living through a third such date right now, in real time, without the comfort of hindsight. The transatlantic order assembled after the Second World War — built largely by the United States, with the United States at its center — is coming apart in front of us. This is not a crisis within the order. It is the dissolution of the order itself, a tectonic shift on the scale of the two that preceded it. And the most important thing to understand about it is that despair is the wrong response. What is ending was always going to end someday; what matters now is what we choose to build in its place.
The illusion that shattered
For decades, Europe lived inside a comfortable illusion. It assumed that the security guarantee underwriting its prosperity — the American umbrella, the unspoken promise that Washington would always be there — was a permanent feature of the landscape, like weather or geography. Under cover of that assumption, Europe quietly neglected its own defense. Why pay for armies and air defenses and an intelligence apparatus when a wealthier, stronger partner across the ocean had already paid for them? It was a rational bet, right up until the moment it wasn’t.
The current American presidency shattered the illusion. It did not merely strain the alliance; it exposed how much of the alliance was always a matter of faith rather than fact. When the world watched the spectacle in the Oval Office — a wartime president of a country under invasion lectured, mocked for his clothing, told he held no cards and should be grateful — it was watching the umbrella fold. The signals since have been unambiguous. Military aid suspended. Intelligence sharing throttled. A trade war launched not against adversaries but against allies, with the harshest blows reserved for Canada, a neighbor casually rebranded a future fifty-first state. A standing demand that the victim of aggression negotiate from his knees while the aggressor is offered the carrot and the partner is handed the stick.
I want to be precise about what this is and is not. The United States has not stopped being part of Western civilization in the deep sense. Its people remain; its culture remains; the books, the music, the universities, the whole dense web of the Euro-Atlantic world is still woven through with American thread. But politically, the country has become a severed limb. The body of the civilization is intact, yet one of its limbs no longer obeys the brain, no longer moves in concert with the rest. For some years — four, realistically, perhaps two if the domestic resistance is faster than I expect — there will simply be no transatlantic civilization of the kind we knew. That is not a forecast I make with pleasure. It is a fact I make with cold clarity, because clarity is the precondition for everything that follows.
What is happening to America is not only America’s problem
It would be a mistake to read this purely as a story about one erratic man. The deeper danger is that what we are witnessing in Washington is a particular kind of politics — call it a postmodern fascism, a fascism without a coherent doctrine, generating chaos instead of ideology — and that its central enemy is liberal democracy itself. The men driving it understand, even if they cannot articulate it, that their natural opponent is the open, rules-bound, empathetic society. That is why the assault travels. It does not stay home.
You can see the proof in how it works abroad. Inside Europe there are figures who function as the project’s Trojan horses, the most articulate of them insisting that the threat from the East is illusory because the aggressor is too weak — too weak even to finish the war it started, therefore no threat to anyone, therefore no reason for Europe to arm, to sanction, to resist. It sounds almost like an anti-tyranny argument. It is the opposite. It is a sedative, designed to keep Europe asleep while its agency is dismantled from within. The same voices oppose every increase in European independence, insist that only a grand bargain over Europe’s head can bring peace, and would roll out the honors for a man under an international arrest warrant. This is not pragmatism. For Europe, it is suicide dressed as prudence.
There is a further reason the West misread all of this for so long, and it is worth naming, because it bears on every decision now. After the Soviet collapse, the serious centers of expertise in Europe and America that had studied the East withered, defunded, because the threat seemed to have evaporated. Into that vacuum flowed influence of a different kind — clubs and channels and intermediaries serving the very regime that would later launch the war. The expert class degraded. Politicians, taking advice from people who no longer understood the terrain, lost the ability to see what was in front of them. That is how you end up with leaders treating a manufactured spectacle as strategy, or mistaking inherited celebrity for political authority. Misreading is not free. We are paying for it now, and we will keep paying until the analysis is rebuilt from the ground up.
The shape of the answer
Here is where despair must give way to construction. If the American limb is, for now, severed, then the task is simply to count the resources that remain — and the count is more encouraging than the gloom suggests.
Begin with the obvious thing that the defeatists keep denying. We are told there is no army left in Ukraine, no one left to hold the line. Then who is holding it? If the defending army had been destroyed, why has the invader, after years of effort, failed to take a single regional capital? Ukraine fields one of the strongest armies in the world today, and more than that, it has pioneered an entirely new dimension of warfare. Its drone force — domestically built, relentlessly innovated — has put it at or near the front of the world in a domain that did not meaningfully exist a few years ago. Skies that the aggressor once treated as a one-way street have become uneasy over its own cities, its own airports shut down, its own war factories struck. The arithmetic is straightforward: combine that battle-hardened army and that army of drones with Europe’s industrial base, its money, its defense capacity, and the sum is a formidable defensive alliance. The pieces exist. What has been missing is the will to assemble them.
That will is now forming, and it is being forced into existence by the very rupture that caused the alarm. A new European military pact — likely with something equivalent to a mutual-defense clause, an answer to the question “if one of us is attacked, are we all attacked?” — is becoming inevitable precisely because the old alliance was rejected from the other side of the ocean. I cannot tell you the exact legal form it will take, or whether its mutual-defense article will read word for word like the one before it. The institution does not yet exist, and it is hard to describe in detail a thing still being born. But the objective conditions for it exist as a simple fact, and the political will, the declarations, the intentions are there. First the desire, then the structure. The desire has arrived.
Consider Finland as the living model of what this Europe can be. A country with mass conscription, a serious modern air force, a defense built on the assumption that it might one day stand alone — and a historical memory of having resisted the same eastern empire when it was at its most formidable. Finland is the iron hedgehog: a creature that asks for nothing, threatens no one, and is simply too painful to swallow. Against a hedgehog, the predator’s strength is irrelevant; there is no soft place to bite. A Europe of iron hedgehogs is a Europe against which the regime in the East is, in the most practical sense, powerless. That is the posture worth building toward — not aggression, but invulnerability.
And the civilization need not stop at Europe’s old geographic edge. Because the rupture has severed America the polity from Europe, but America the continent includes more than one country. Canada is already inside the Western defensive alliance. It is a wealthy nation, extraordinarily well-educated, and rich in exactly the energy resources that could free Europe from its dependence on the aggressor’s gas. When one leader threatens to annex it as a fifty-first state, it is hardly surprising that a substantial share of its own citizens — something like forty-four percent in one representative poll — have begun to entertain a different idea entirely: not absorption into a faltering union to the south, but integration with the European one. The treaties say only European states may apply, yes. But the exceptions already exist — overseas territories that sit outside Europe yet belong to the Union, an island in Western Asia that is a full member. The formality is real and the formality is surmountable. This is not a matter for tomorrow morning. It is, however, entirely realistic, and it points at the deeper movement underneath all of it: a general gathering of agency, a consolidation of everything that still believes in open society into a single civilization capable of defending itself.
History is written by the many
I want to end with a caution against the one mistake that could spoil all of this — the belief that any of it is fated. History is not a single track laid down from the past into the future, with us as passengers. It is a probabilistic process, shot through with free will, and what emerges from this upheaval will depend not on any one actor but on the choices of a great many people across a great many countries. There is no iron law that delivers a strong, sovereign Europe; there is only the possibility, and the work.
The figures dominating this moment, for all the damage they do, are smaller than they appear, because they lack what the genuine world-historical actors possessed: an idea, a program, a roadmap for the world they meant to make. What sits at the center of the current American disruption is not a vision but a chaos, reproduced globally for its own sake. That is a weakness, not a strength. Chaos can break things, but it cannot build, and it cannot hold. Into the vacuum it creates, something will move — and the open question, the only question that matters, is whether what moves will be a consolidated, armed, self-aware Europe, or merely the next predator testing for a soft place to bite.
So no, I do not counsel despair. The order that is ending was the product of one catastrophe and four decades of borrowed time. What can replace it is not a restoration but a birth: a European civilization with its own military, its own intelligence, its own will, its own borders enlarged by Ukraine’s army and perhaps by Canada’s wealth. The conditions are present. The will is forming. Nothing is lost, and nothing is guaranteed. Which is exactly the point — because a future that depends on what we choose is the only kind of future worth defending.