FROM FRIEND TO FOE

The need for a new European demeanour was never greater, nor may it ever be greater, than when, in the small hours of 9 November 2016, Donald J. Trump ascended from the gilded catacombs of his Manhattan tower to claim the presidency of the United States.

It was a moment that defied the odds. When, deep into the night, ashenfaced pundits of the US cable networks called the election for the construction tycoon and television star, they looked as if they had seen pigs fly. Something of tectonic significance had changed. Something that theoretically could not have happened just had. What had shifted was history itself. For if history was supposed to bend towards anything, it sure as hell was not Donald Trump.

It was the start of a new “Machiavellian moment” for Europe, a true confrontation with its temporal finitude, one which would force the continent, as the Florentine consigliere might have predicted, to reassess the metaphysical core of its politics and assert its own sovereign strength. Europe's assumption had always been that the threat to its liberal order would come from the marauding strongman Putin, from China's new economic might or from religious fanaticism in the Middle East. In fighting it off, it would stand shoulder to shoulder with its more muscular sibling across the Atlantic.

But it now appeared that the greatest danger hailed from the United States. The continent's mortal enemy resided not in the red-brick Kremlin but in the White House. And from this lair, right at the heart of the Western world, Trump could hurt Europe in ways that Putin or Xi or Erdogan could not even begin to imagine. The US had been chief guarantor of the rules-based international order and the awesome sovereign power that underwrote Europe's security after saving it from itself. If Trump wanted to obliterate that order and feed Europe to the lions, who was going to stop him?