Originally published at Project-Syndicate | Feb 21st, 2025
Just four years after Joe Biden announced that “America is back,” Europeans are now watching in dismay as America abandons transatlanticism and everything it stood for. If there is any silver lining, it is that America’s embrace of illiberal nationalism has shaken European leaders out of their complacency.
MUNICH – Each February, members of the transatlantic strategic community head to Munich to discuss the state of international security, making the Munich Security Conference a not-to-be-missed event on the foreign-policy calendar.
This was true even during US President Donald Trump’s first administration, when it seemed as though very little was still binding the West together. After watching the debates at the 2019 conference, when key figures talked past each other and failed to find common ground, I coined the term “Westlessness” to describe the new state of play. Not only was the rest of the world becoming less Western, but so too were many Western societies.
Eager to reverse the tide, those attending the Munich conferences in recent years took great pains to signal Western unity and determination, as if to suggest that Westlessness had been just a passing phenomenon. Joe Biden’s election to the US presidency led Europeans to believe that America was back, and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine a year later gave the West a new sense of shared purpose. But by the time that the 2024 gathering arrived, Western self-doubt had returned; and at this year’s conference, Westlessness returned with a vengeance.
Following the news of Trump’s call with Putin and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s comments acceding to Russian demands before negotiations had even begun, the audience in Munich anxiously looked to Vice President J.D. Vance for clarity on the new administration’s transatlantic security strategy. But the speech that Vance gave did not seem to be about security at all. Instead, he used his time to scold Europeans for their alleged departure from “shared values,” condemning Europeans’ interpretation of freedom of speech even as his own administration uses lawsuits and other threats to crack down on America’s free press.
With Germany’s federal elections just a week away, Vance then condemned European governments’ unwillingness to rein in “out-of-control migration” and lambasted German liberal-democratic parties for refusing to work with the far right. “I’ve heard a lot about what you need to defend yourselves from,” he noted. “But what has seemed a little bit less clear to me and certainly, I think, to many of the citizens of Europe, is what exactly it is that you’re defending yourselves for.”
To those in attendance, these remarks looked like a direct attack on the values at the heart of the North Atlantic Alliance. Vance offered up the illiberal-nationalist alternative to the liberal-internationalist order that has underpinned intra-Western relations – and debates at the Munich Security Conference – for many decades.
The Europeans in Munich duly pushed back. Shocked to find themselves being lectured to by a government that is waging war on the rule of law and freedom of the press at home, they rejected Vance’s attempt to interfere in their domestic political affairs. “We do not only know against whom we are defending our country, but also for what,” German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius replied. “For democracy, for freedom of expression, for the rule of law, and for the dignity of every individual.”
These are the principles that once bound the West together. While members of the broad transatlantic community often disagreed (sometimes vehemently) about specific policies, their shared commitment to these values always allowed them to mend fences and overcome whatever crisis was at hand.
But now the ballroom in the conference hotel, not much larger than a basketball court, must accommodate two fundamentally incompatible worldviews. The Trumpists and their European critics each maintain that the other side has deviated from the norm. As Vance sees it, the biggest threat “is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within.”
Despite Vance’s insistence “that we are on the same team,” the majority view at the conference was that the United States has become a free agent. Just a month after Trump’s inauguration, it has already abandoned its role as a benign hegemon and the leading power within a global community of liberal democracies. To Europeans’ shock and dismay, America is behaving like a nineteenth-century great power, seeking territorial expansion and pursuing deals with other powers to carve out spheres of influence.
Four years after Biden announced that “America is back,” Europeans see America abandoning transatlanticism and everything it stood for. Trump’s America is not only making deals with the liberal West’s enemies. It is also openly supporting illiberal, anti-democratic forces within the West.
If there is any silver lining, it is that America’s volte-face has shaken European leaders out of their complacency. They agree that they must come together to increase defense spending and reduce their dependence on the US. If they follow through, we could well end up with a rejuvenation of the transatlantic partnership between two equal powers.
But this outcome is unlikely. The Trump administration’s support for illiberal, anti-European, and pro-Russian forces within Europe will make it far more difficult for Europeans to focus on their own security together, even though that is ostensibly what the Trump administration wants.
In this respect, Europeans can agree with Vance: the greatest threat to the West is indeed coming from within.
Tobias Bunde: Professor of International Security at the Hertie School in Berlin, is Director of Research and Policy at the Munich Security Conference.