The US and Europe may be headed for a divorce

Among the more childishly enjoyable fruits of Donald Trump’s election victory has been watching the spectacular gymnastic contortions of political leaders in Europe, where I have spent time recently, as they try to reconcile their previously expressed revulsion toward him with the political reality of his renewed status as the most powerful man on the planet.

Gold medal for the back flip with full twist and 180-degree turn goes to David Lammy, the British foreign secretary, who congratulated Mr. Trump and said he looked forward to finding “common ground” with the newly re-elected president. “I felt in my bones that there could be a Trump presidency,” he cheerily told the BBC the day after the election.

These were the same bones, presumably, that told the aspiring young Labourite during Mr. Trump’s first term that the then and future president was “a woman-hating, neo-Nazi sympathizing sociopath,” and “deluded, dishonest, xenophobic and narcissistic.”

Ah well. Times change. In any case, all is forgiven, apparently. When Mr. Lammy was at Trump Tower for dinner in September the two got on famously, with the foreign secretary gleefully recounting later how Mr. Trump had even offered him “a second portion of chicken”—crow, we can assume, having been served as the starter.

European distaste for Mr. Trump is partly aesthetic, as Mr. Lammy’s now no-longer-operative remarks indicate. But it is also substantive. And, despite their best efforts to suppress what they really think, they know the substance is even more serious this time around than in 2017.

In fact the next four years will almost certainly see serious and sustained breaches in trans-Atlantic comity, in ways that will irreparably impair the alliance that has, for all its fractious tendencies, been the cornerstone of civilizational progress in the world for a century.

On at least three main fronts, the second Trump administration will strain relations with Europe to the breaking point.

The first is the war in Ukraine. European leaders realize now that U.S. assistance to Kyiv stops next year and that some form of peace deal will be struck; they are convinced it will leave Russia strengthened and emboldened.

The second is trade, where an already fragile European economy could be hammered by tariffs on exports to the U.S. and where broader global economic strife threatens the continent’s creaking stability.

The third is a bucket of global tensions, all likely to worsen: from climate change, where Mr. Trump’s fossil-fuel-driven, go-for-growth strategy is apostasy for the European climate religionists; to the Middle East, where a staunchly pro-Israel Washington will create domestic and international tensions for the Palestinian-sympathetic Europeans; to China where an intensified U.S. effort to decouple the West from Beijing’s economy will deprive Europeans of crucial export markets.

No doubt Mr. Trump’s style will deepen the fissures, but there is no escaping that the Europeans have essentially themselves to blame for their plight.

On Ukraine, the European Union and Britain have gone along with the Biden administration’s increasingly feckless policy of what some wise heads in Europe have called “self-deterrence”—arming Ukraine enough to keep the war going but not enough to have any chance of winning it. Realization of how flawed this approach has been is dawning in European capitals. A handful of public and private sector figures last week told me they now don’t know whether to be more alarmed by the prospect of a stronger Vladimir Putin in four years under Mr. Trump, or the possibility of all-out war in President Biden’s remaining two months as his administration escalates in its waning days.

On the wider question of their own security within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Europeans are finally acknowledging that the days of free riding on American military spending are at an end.

On trade, Europe has pursued its own protectionism in a number of sectors. It also has severely constrained its economic performance with regulatory measures that have suppressed innovation and dynamism, condemning the EU to fall further and further behind the U.S. Trade wars seldom produce good economic outcomes for anyone. But Europe is in a much worse condition to deal with the consequences than other parts of the world.

On the compendium of global issues, Europe has created its own messes. Its obsession with reducing its carbon footprint at the cost of growth has done little to “save the planet” from warming while dramatically undermining the European economy. In the Middle East, the embrace of the Palestinian cause has led Europe to growing hostility to Israel, the only democracy in the region. Witness last week’s ludicrous indictment of Benjamin Netanyahu at the International Criminal Court and the earnest pledges by European leaders to arrest him if he sets foot on their soil. On China, reckless European pursuit of economic relations has created a dependency that will prove hard to break and has increasingly negative implications for Europe’s own security.

It was inevitable, given the rise of the Indo-Pacific, that the trans-Atlantic relationship would diminish in significance. It is regrettable too, since that relationship has proved so beneficial to the world for a century or more. The U.S. can survive the fraying of those ties. It isn’t clear Europe can.