or 70 years, the transatlantic relationship rested on a fiction that flattered both sides. America was the guarantor of a rules-based order, and Europe was its co-architect. The fiction was useful, and for a long stretch it was even partly true. But it hid a harder fact, and that fact is now impossible to ignore. Europe was never the coauthor of that order. It was its protected interior. The arrangement had a name we were too polite to use: a protectorate.
After the Protectorate: America, Europe, and the Return of the Decision
America is not abandoning Europe; it is forcing Europe to confront an uncomfortable truth: a continent that cannot enforce its own rules cannot claim to shape the world.
