European Atlanticism is in crisis. For decades, it was the glue that combined Europe and the United States into a ‘security community’ – a group of allied states whose stated liberal values coincided to such a degree that ‘war’ had become unimaginable between them. Today, these shared values are disappearing, fast. The Trump administration has made its preference for a civilisational redefinition of a much looser transatlantic relationship clear; progressive liberalism is its enemy, at home and abroad – and it will spend millions in coming years to promote this idea among its ‘allies’. Mainstays of a liberal foreign policy – the ‘rules-based order’, liberal interventionism, liberal regime change and state-building – are out of the picture in Washington, DC; what is left is a naked Machtpolitik based on self-referential claims of personal, national and civilisational supremacy.

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This has left Europe’s Atlanticists with a dilemma. Should they cling onto the assumptions they once shared with their US counterparts – on foreign policies clad in the moral imperatives of interventionism and democracy-promotion – and, therefore break with Trump’s United States; or should they prioritise the transatlantic relationship over and above the values it was – supposedly – based on since at least the end of the Cold War, and embrace a civilisational, nakedly power-political vision of ‘the West’?

This is, no doubt, a stark choice. It is also one that reveals the impasse faced by Euro-Atlanticism in the post-liberal 21st century. The first option – clinging onto an American-style liberal-interventionist messianism on one’s own – depends on illusions of power which Europe’s Atlanticists absorbed over decades of institutional and ideological enmeshment with their privileged American counterparts; the latter, civilisational option would mean Europe’s buy-in to a project which would lead to the abandonment of the liberal political and socio-economic values Atlanticists once claimed to champion, both abroad and, much more importantly, at home. Both options would, in effect, lead to the zombification of Euro-Atlanticism: its hollowing out through either its abandonment of the United States in favour of utopian values-based foreign policies burdening a slim economic and military base, or through a relinquishment of universalised values previously thought central to its very purpose in favour of a self-referential, supremacist civilisationism.

Until the end of the Cold War, Euro-Atlanticism was based on a shared threat: ‘keeping the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down’ was the glue that held both sides of the Atlantic together for decades. Its survival following the end of bipolarity was considered something of an anomaly: in the 1990s – buoyed by the dynamics surrounding European integration – many expected Europe to behave more independently from the United States within the emerging post-Cold War order. Quite the opposite occurred: NATO received a new lease of life as it enlarged eastward and expanded its purpose beyond article V, to include foreign intervention. Prevarications by those with a less Atlanticist bend – notably in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war, and during the 2008 Bucharest summit – gradually faded away as elites on both sides of the Atlantic became institutionally and ideologically enmeshed in unprecedented ways.

Europe’s Atlanticist constituency - for whom the alliance with America was an unassailable given – gained the upper hand through its presence in Europe’s commentariat, its think-tanks, its parliaments and foreign ministries, not least because of NATO’s enlargement into Central and Eastern Europe. Its ‘Americanisation’ of Europe’s elite was visible in several ways: a move away from the quasi-instinctive restraint seen in previous decades; an increased deference to American unilateralism; a binary division of the world into ‘good’, pro-Western democracies and ‘evil’, anti-Western autocracies drawn from the neoconservative playbook; a geographically maximalist, global view of entangled European and American interests; and the idea that promoting regime change – in places from Libya to Belarus - should form part and parcel of a sound foreign policy. The conversion of Germany’s Greens to liberal interventionism was perhaps the best example of this change.

In the process, Europe’s Atlanticists came to take for granted the extent to which a stated........

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