A Europe in Emotional Shock Grapples With a New Era

"It remains to be seen how far President Trump’s embrace of Russia and abandonment of traditional allies will go. But “the West” may be gone.

For decades a core objective of the Soviet Union was to “decouple” the United States from Europe. Decoupling, as it was called, would break the Western alliance that kept Soviet tanks from rolling across the Prussian plains.

Now, in weeks, President Trump has handed Moscow the gift that eluded it during the Cold War and since.

Europe, jilted, is in shock. The United States, a nation whose core idea is liberty and whose core calling has been the defense of democracy against tyranny, has turned on its ally and instead embraced President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Gripped by a sense of abandonment, alarmed at the colossal rearmament task before it, astonished by the upending of American ideology, Europe finds itself adrift.

“The United States was the pillar around which peace was managed, but it has changed alliance,” said Valérie Hayer, the president of the centrist Renew Europe group in the European Parliament. “Trump mouths the truth of Putin. We have entered a new epoch.”

The emotional impact on Europe is profound. On the long journey from the ruins of 1945 to a prosperous continent whole and free, America was central. President John F. Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in 1963 framed the fortitude of West Berlin as an inspiration to freedom seekers everywhere. President Ronald Reagan issued his challenge — “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” — at the Brandenburg Gate in 1987. European history has also been America’s history as a European power.

But the meaning of “the West” in this dawning era is already unclear. For many years, despite sometimes acute Euro-American tensions, it denoted a single strategic actor united in its commitment to the values of liberal democracy.

Now there is Europe, there is Russia, there is China and there is the United States. The West as an idea has been hollowed out. How that vacuum will be filled is unclear, but one obvious candidate is violence as great powers duke it out.

Of course, as the almost daily whiplash on new tariffs has made clear, Mr. Trump is impulsive, even if his nationalist tendencies are a constant. He is transactional; he could change course. In 2017, on a visit to Poland during his first term, he said, “I declare today for the world to hear that the West will never, ever be broken. Our values will prevail.”

The president has since stripped himself of the shackles of such traditional thinking and of the establishment Republican entourage that buttressed it. He appears to be a leader unbound.

The challenge for Europe is to judge what constitutes maneuvering on Mr. Trump’s part and what is a definitive American reorientation.

A week after the ugly Oval Office blowup with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, accused of  trying to start nuclear World War III  and failing to say “thank you” for American military assistance that has since been “paused,” Mr. Trump has agreed to a meeting next week of senior Ukrainian and American officials. He has also threatened to impose further sanctions on Russia if it does not enter peace talks.

“Whatever Trump’s adjustments, the biggest danger would be to deny his abandonment of liberal democracies,” said Nicole Bacharan, a political scientist at Sciences Po University in Paris. “Trump knows where he is going. The only realist position for Europe is to ask: What do we have as a military force and how do we integrate and grow that power with urgency?”

President Emmanuel Macron of France declared this week that the continent faced “irreversible changes” from America. He urged “massive shared financing” for rapid European military reinforcement, announced a meeting next week of European chiefs of staff and said “peace cannot be the capitulation of Ukraine.” He also offered to extend France’s nuclear umbrella to allies in Europe.

These were indications of big strategic shifts. But nowhere in Europe has the impact of American realignment been more destabilizing than in Germany, whose postwar republic was largely an American creation and whose collective memory holds sacred the generosity of American soldiers offering the first succor to a devastated nation.

Christoph Heusgen, the German chairman of the Munich Security Conference, teared up last month as he contemplated the end of his three years in the job. It was easy, he said, to destroy a rules-based order and a commitment to human rights, but hard to rebuild them.

He spoke after Vice President JD Vance accused Europe of denying democracy by trying to block the advance of far-right parties and taking away freedom of speech from citizens.

“It was a terrible sight, the whipping boy and the weeping boy,” said Jacques Rupnik, a French political scientist who has written extensively on Central Europe. “Europe must step up now to fight for democracy.”

For many Germans, the idea that America, whose forces did so much to defeat Hitler, should opt to cosset a party, the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, that includes members openly supportive of the Nazis feels like an unpardonable betrayal.

The AfD is now Germany’s second largest party.

In the words of the British historian Simon Schama, interviewed this week by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, this combined with the cutting-off of American military and intelligence aid to Ukraine, at least for now, constituted “horrible infamy.”

Germany’s incoming conservative chancellor, Friedrich Merz, reacted with words that felt like the death knell of the old order. “My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the United States,” he said. The Trump Administration, he suggested, was “largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.”

In moments, a triple German taboo fell. Mr. Merz’s Germany would exit American tutelage, examine the extension to Berlin of French nuclear deterrence and permit growing debt to finance a rapid defense industry buildup.

Even at a time of economic difficulty, Germany is a bellwether for Europe. If French-German military cooperation does grow fast, and is complemented by British military involvement, as seems likely under Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Europe may shed its reputation as an economic giant and strategic pygmy. But it will not happen overnight.

Europe’s major powers, it seems, have concluded that Mr. Trump is no outlier. He has plenty of support among Europe’s growing far right who are anti-immigrant nationalists. He is the American embodiment of an age of rising leaders for whom postwar institutions and alliances are obstacles to a new world order built around great-power zones of influence.

If Mr. Trump wants to grab Greenland from a European Union member, Denmark, what other European conclusion is credible? The outlier of the past decade now looks like President Biden with his passionate defense of democracy and a rules-based order, destroying the power of America.

Of course, the ties between Europe and the United States are no small matter. They will not be easily unraveled; they are much more than a military alliance. According to the latest E.U. figures, trade in goods and services between the 27-nation European Union and the United States reached $1.7 trillion in 2023. Every day, some $4.8 billion worth of goods and services crosses the Atlantic Ocean.

Mr. Trump has claimed since taking office a second time that the European Union was “formed in order to screw the United States.” It was a statement typical of his a-historical, zero-sum view of the world. In fact, by any reasonable assessment of the past 80 years, the Euro-American bond has been a prosperity engine and a peace multiplier.

“The alliance is at a very painful stretching point, but I would not call it a breaking-point, at least not yet,” said Xenia Wickett, a London-based consultant who has worked for the U.S. National Security Council. She differentiated between Mr. Trump’s demand that Europe pay more for its defense, a not unreasonable request, and his embrace of Mr. Putin.

Where that embrace leads, if maintained, is unclear. Ukraine, for Mr. Putin, is part of a much broader campaign to undo NATO and the European Union. Along with China in a “no limits” partnership, he wants his Russian resurrection to put an end to what he sees as Western domination of the world.

As Pierre Lévy, a former French ambassador to Moscow, wrote last month in Le Monde, “It’s up to the American people to understand they are in Putin’s line of fire: de-Westernize the world, end American hegemony, end the dollar’s dominant place in the global economy, and act with the backing of Iran, North Korea and China.”

For now, and for unclear reasons, Mr. Trump does not seem to care. He is not about to waver from his zero-criticism susceptibility to Mr. Putin. Europe, it seems, will just have to overcome its stupefaction.” [1]

It is not true that President Trump does not care about attempts to pit Russia against America. He told Zelensky, who tried to do so, that such a conflict would lead to nuclear World War III and deprived Zelensky of new American weapons and intelligence. This should concern anyone who does not suffer from Biden's brain-death disease and Zelensky's psychopathic inability to understand other people.

 
1. A Europe in Emotional Shock Grapples With a New Era: news analysis. Cohen, Roger.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Mar 8, 2025.  

Škotai ir airiai buvo „pasikartojantys kolonizatoriai“, kurie „amžinai atvėrė naujas žudymo vietas Airijoje ir Amerikoje“.

 „Sunkūs kaimynai

 

 Colin G. Calloway

 

 Oksfordas, 528 puslapiai, 35 doleriai

 

 Apie 1780 m. skųsdamasis Jamesui Monroe dėl, jo manymu, Amerikos politikos pablogėjimo, Anglijoje gimęs, kontinentinės armijos generolas majoras Charlesas Lee būsimam prezidentui pasakė, kad varginantis ir išsigimęs elementas užgrobė kolonijų susirinkimus. Užuot buvę demokratijos instrumentais, šios institucijos dabar atspindėjo „Mac-kratiją, turiu galvoje žemos kilmės škotų airių banditą, kurio vardai paprastai prasideda Mac ir kurie yra arba importuotų tarnautojų sūnūs, arba patys importuoti tarnai“.

 

 Lee buvo kaltas dėl hiperbolės, pagrįstos fanatizmu: škotai-airiai, kurių buvo šimtai tūkstančių, nevadovavo kontinentiniam kongresui ar valstijų rūmams.

 

Atvirkščiai, didžioji dauguma išgyveno žemdirbystę Amerikos pasienyje, kur jie pasitarnavo, kaip vietinių amerikiečių išvaldymo įrankis, pirmiausia britų imperijos planų, o vėliau Amerikos ekspansijos į vakarus nuo Apalačų tarnyboje.

 

Dauguma jų buvo presbiterionų škotų palikuonys, kuriuos karališkoji britų vyriausybė XVII amžiaus pradžioje perkėlė iš Škotijos sienų per Airijos jūrą į Ulsterį, kad sutramdytų „laukinius“ katalikus airius. Po šimtmečio, atstovaudami dviem trečdaliams airių migracijos, kuri galiausiai priartės prie 400 000, škotai-airiai iš Ulsterio plūdo prie kolonijinės sienos, ieškodami žemės, vėl veikdami, kaip buferis, šį kartą prieš „laukinius“ indėnus. Kaip pasakoja Colinas G. Calloway knygoje „Kietieji kaimynai“, škotai ir airiai buvo „pasikartojantys kolonizatoriai“, „amžinai atvėrę naujas žudymo vietas“.

 

 Ponas Calloway, istorijos ir indėnų studijų profesorius Dartmute, turi unikalią kvalifikaciją išnagrinėti škotų ir airių vaidmenį, baltiesiems užkariaujant indėnų žemę XVIII ir XIX amžiaus pradžioje.

 

Joks kitas istorikas šiandien nėra rašęs plačiau ir įžvalgiau apie Amerikos vietinių tautų likimą, taip pat su didesniu niuansu ir užuojauta šioms sudėtingoms, pasmerktoms kultūroms. Tas pačias dovanas jis atneša ir knygoje „Kietieji kaimynai“, kuriame nagrinėjamas škotų-airių, kaip pagrindinių miško indėnų priešininkų, atsiradimas ir galutinis dominavimas.

 

 Amerikos pasienyje ponas Calloway įžvelgia tai, kas prasidėjo kaip „trikampiai santykiai“, iš kurių škotai, airiai ir vietiniai amerikiečiai (indėnai) sudarė du taškus. Trečioji buvo vyriausybė, kuria škotai-airiai piktinosi ir nepasitikėjo. „Kaip pasienio regionų gyventojai“, rašo ponas Calloway, škotai ir airiai susidūrė su vietiniais amerikiečiais vakaruose, „kurie buvo kaimynai ir priešai ir žiūrėjo į rytus į kolonijinę, valstijos ar federalinę vyriausybę, kuri juos pastatė prie sienos, skatino jų įsiveržimus į indėnų žemę, tada pasmerkė juos prieš frontą ir nesugebėjo apginti nuo priešų“. Vyriausybė naudojo škotus ir airius, „kaip be gailesčio prarandamas gynybines kliūtis“.

 

 Pono Calloway pasakojimas įgauna ypatingą patosą, kai jame kalbama apie tris škotų ir airių pasienio akimirkas. Pirmasis buvo Prancūzijos ir Indijos karas, kuriame škotai ir airiai tarnavo kaip britų įgaliotiniai, kovojant su vietiniais amerikiečiais, kurie buvo prancūzų įgaliotiniai. „Smurto tarp kietų kaimynų atvejai užleido vietą nevaržomam rasės karui“, – rašo autorius.

 

Karą iškentėjusiems, škotams ir airiams šis konfliktas suformavo jų, kaip indėnų žudikų, tapatybę, dažnai prieštaraujančią vyriausybei – šiuo atveju britams, kurie siekė sulaikyti juos nuo tolesnių problemų su vietiniais amerikiečiais karo pabaigoje.

 

 Prancūzijos ir Indijos karas padarė škotų ir airių uždarais ir sukėlė jų įtarimą dėl kolonijinės valdžios. Tačiau būtent Revoliucijos karas, įtikinamai demonstruoja ponas Calloway, padarė juos amerikiečiais. Prieš revoliuciją dauguma kolonistų būtų sutikę su Charlesu Lee, kad provincijos škotai ir airiai buvo nepaklusnūs neramumų sukėlėjai, vargu ar labiau civilizuoti, nei jų kaimynai indėnai.

 

 Tačiau per revoliuciją visi vietiniai amerikiečiai buvo pavaizduoti „kaip Amerikos nepriklausomybės priešai“, o tai vietinių amerikiečių žudymą pavertė „patriotine pareiga“. Škotai-airiai, pasak pono Calloway, „tapo amerikonais, žudydami indėnus“.

 

 Trečioji „Kietų kaimynų“ tema yra Andrew Jacksono atsiradimas, iš pradžių, kaip su Amerikos indėnais kovojantis generolas 1812 m. kare, o vėliau, kaip „Ašarų tako“ prezidentas ir kurstytojas. Nors ponas Calloway'us mano, kad tai „iškraipymas teigti, kad jis valdė kaip škotų ir airių prezidentas“, autorius Amerikos indėnų išvarymą iš Pietų Džeksono prezidentavimo metu laiko „škotų ir airių indėnų politikos triumfu“. Ironiška, pastebi ponas Calloway, škotai-airiai prarado daugiau, nei gavo iš Ašarų tako. Žemės spekuliantai ir turtingi vergų savininkai padidino žemės kainą buvusių Amerikos indėnų žemių, kurių nusipirkti škotų ir airių ūkininkai negalėjo sau leisti.

 

 Toliau tęsėsi škotų-airių judėjimas į vakarus. Tūkstančiai migravo iš pradžių į Misūrį ir Ozarksą, paskui į pietvakarius iki Teksaso pasienio, kur vėl tapo „kietais kaimynais“, Amerikos indėnų šalies atmetėjų avangardu. Čia iš esmės baigėsi škotų-airių, kaip aiškiai pastebimos Americana ekspansijos smaigalio, vaidmuo. Tačiau jų nuožmus gobšumas išryškėjo labiau apibendrintame baltųjų Amerikos Vakarų kolonizavime.

 

 Kaip povandeninė srovė „Kietuose kaimynuose“ yra ponas Calloway įsitikinimas, kad škotų ir airių patirtis Amerikos pasienyje suformavo šiuolaikinę Amerikos politiką taip, kaip, galbūt, net iki šiol nežinome. „Donaldas Trumpas susilaukė didžiulio palaikymo, – pažymi jis, – „šalies srityse, kuriose apsigyveno škotai-airiai ir jų palikuonys ir kur dabartinių gyventojų jausmas apie savo tapatybę, požiūris į kitus ir vyriausybę bei jų nusiskundimai buvo labai panašūs į škotų-airių, gyvenusių provincijoje“.

 

 Galima ginčytis dėl P. Calloway interpretacijos apie šiuolaikinę škotų ir airių tapatybės išraišką arba tai, kiek daugelis amerikiečių susitapatino su tradiciniais škotų ir airių bruožais. Tačiau negalima paneigti, kad „Kietieji kaimynai“ yra esminis pirmųjų Amerikos ekspansijos dešimtmečių pervertinimas.

 

 ---

 

 P. Cozzensas, be kitų knygų, yra „The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West“ autorius.” [1]

1. REVIEW --- Books: Home in a Bloody Borderland. Cozzens, Peter.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 08 Mar 2025: C9. 

The Scotch-Irish were "recurrent colonizers" who "perpetually opened new killing grounds in America"

"Hard Neighbors

By Colin G. Calloway

Oxford, 528 pages, $35

Complaining to James Monroe around 1780 about what he considered to be the cause of a deterioration in American politics, the English-born Maj. Gen. Charles Lee of the Continental Army told the future president that a troublesome and degenerate element had usurped the colonies' assemblies. Rather than instruments of democracy, these bodies now reflected "a Mac-ocracy by which I mean a banditti of low Scotch-Irish whose names generally begin with Mac -- and who are either the sons of Imported Servants or themselves imported Servants."

Lee was guilty of hyperbole based on bigotry: The Scotch-Irish, who numbered in the hundreds of thousands, did not run the Continental Congress or state houses. Rather, the vast majority eked out a marginal living farming on the American frontier, where they served as a tool in the dispossession of Native Americans, first in the service of British imperial designs and then of American expansion west of the Appalachians. Most were descendants of Presbyterian Scots whom the Royal government had relocated from the Scottish borders across the Irish Sea to Ulster in the early 17th century to tame the "wild" Catholic Irish. A century later, representing two-thirds of an Irish migration that would eventually approach 400,000, the Scotch-Irish from Ulster flocked to the colonial frontier in search of land, again acting as a buffer, this time against "wild" Native Americans. As Colin G. Calloway tells us in "Hard Neighbors," the Scotch-Irish were "recurrent colonizers" who "perpetually opened new killing grounds."

Mr. Calloway, a professor of history and Native American studies at Dartmouth, is uniquely qualified to dissect the role of the Scotch-Irish in the white conquest of Native American land in the 18th and early 19th centuries. No other historian today has written with greater breadth and insight on the fate of America's native peoples, nor with greater nuance and compassion for these complex, doomed cultures. He brings these same gifts to bear in "Hard Neighbors," which examines the emergence and eventual dominance of the Scotch-Irish as the Woodland Indians' principal antagonists.

On the American borderland, Mr. Calloway discerns what began as a "triangular relationship," of which the Scotch-Irish and the Native Americans formed two points. The third was the government, which the Scotch-Irish came to resent and distrust. "As inhabitants of frontier regions," writes Mr. Calloway, the Scotch-Irish faced Native Americans to the west, "who were neighbors and enemies, and they looked east to the colonial, state, or federal government that positioned them on the frontier, encouraged their incursions on Indian land, then denounced them and failed to defend the frontiers when contestation turned to conflict." The government used the Scotch-Irish "as expendable defensive barriers."

Mr. Calloway's narrative gains particular pathos when it addresses three watershed moments in the Scotch-Irish frontier experience. The first was the French and Indian War, in which the Scotch-Irish served as proxies for the British in battling the Native Americans, who were proxies of the French. "Instances of violence between hard neighbors gave way to unrestrained race war," the author writes. For the Scotch-Irish who suffered through the war, the conflict shaped their identity as killers of Native Americans, often at odds with government -- in this case the British who sought to restrain them from provoking further troubles with the Native Americans at war's end.

The French and Indian War made the Scotch-Irish insular and suspicious of colonial authority. But it was the Revolutionary War, Mr. Calloway convincingly demonstrates, that made them into Americans. Before the revolution, most colonists would have agreed with Charles Lee that the backcountry Scotch-Irish were unruly troublemakers hardly more civilized than their Native American neighbors.

But the revolution depicted all Native Americans "as enemies of American independence" and turned the killing of Native Americans "into a patriotic duty." The Scotch-Irish, Mr. Calloway tells us, "became American by killing Indians."

The third theme in "Hard Neighbors" is the emergence of Andrew Jackson, first as an American Indian-fighting general in the War of 1812 and later as the president and instigator of the Trail of Tears. Although Mr. Calloway considers it "a distortion to suggest that he governed as a Scotch-Irish president," the author does regard the expulsion of Native Americans from the South during Jackson's presidency as the "triumph of Scotch-Irish Indian policy." Ironically, observes Mr. Calloway, the Scotch-Irish lost more than they gained from the Trail of Tears. Land speculators and wealthy slave owners drove up the price of former Native American lands beyond that which the Scotch-Irish farmers could afford.

The westward movement of the Scotch-Irish continued. Thousands migrated first to Missouri and the Ozarks, then southwest to the Texas borderland, where they again became "hard neighbors," the vanguard of dispossessors of Native American country. There the role of the Scotch-Irish as the clearly discernible spearhead of Americana expansion largely ended. Their fierce acquisitiveness, however, found expression in the more generalized white settlement of the American West.

Running as an undercurrent throughout "Hard Neighbors" is Mr. Calloway's belief that the Scotch-Irish experience on the American frontier has shaped contemporary American politics in ways we may be unaware. "Donald Trump won massive support," he notes, "in areas of the country where Scotch-Irish people and their descendants had settled and where the current inhabitants' sense of their identities, their attitudes to others and to government, and their grievances bore remarkable similarities to those of the Scotch-Irish on the backcountry."

One may dispute Mr. Calloway's interpretation of the modern expression of Scotch-Irish identity, or the extent to which many Americans have come to identify with traditional Scotch-Irish traits. There can be no denying, however, that "Hard Neighbors" represents a seminal reappraisal of the early decades of American expansion.

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Mr. Cozzens is the author of "The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West," among other books.” [1]

1. REVIEW --- Books: Home in a Bloody Borderland. Cozzens, Peter.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 08 Mar 2025: C9.