{"id":8023,"date":"2026-09-04T09:26:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T07:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/?p=8023"},"modified":"2026-09-04T09:26:00","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T07:26:00","slug":"the-loveless-marriage-with-america-didnt-start-with-trump-a-conversation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/the-loveless-marriage-with-america-didnt-start-with-trump-a-conversation\/","title":{"rendered":"The loveless marriage with America didn’t start with Trump. A conversation"},"content":{"rendered":"
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New York, N.Y.: Rescue workers search for survivors at ground zero of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, New York on Sept. 13 2001. (Photo by Viorel Florescu\/Newsday RM via Getty Images)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There’s a poll someone should run to explain the relationship between Washington and Brussels: how many American officials who entered foreign policy after 2001 actually know the EU’s institutions? Max Bergmann, who runs the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at CSIS, one of the most important American think tanks, has the answer. “Over these twenty-five years we’ve lost a whole generation of experts who came in after 9\/11 and never developed any real familiarity with Europe \u2014 they don’t know the difference between the European Council, the Commission, and everything else.” The attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon pulled America away from Europe, through the careers of a few thousand people who, in Washington, decide what matters.
\nThat Tuesday twenty-five years ago, Bergmann was in Vienna, a student traveling around Europe on his way to the London School of Economics. Before the attack, American students would sew a Canadian flag onto their backpacks as a precaution, so as not to be recognized. “After 9\/11, we tore those flags off” \u2014 given the outpouring of European solidarity. He was already working in foreign policy, but “what 9\/11 did was pull me away from Europe.” When he returns to Washington intent on working on the European Union, he discovers that no one cares anymore. Think tanks shut down their programs on the continent. Bergmann spends years at the State Department in various roles, including as a speechwriter for then-Secretary of State John Kerry, with his focus almost always on the Middle East and Asia. “I could list every province in Afghanistan for you,” he says. “Not because I was an Afghanistan expert. Because anyone in Washington working on national security had to deal with it.” He would return to Europe for reasons that offer little comfort: in 2014 Vladimir Putin invades Crimea, in 2016 Moscow interferes in the American elections, and jobs focused on Europe reappear.
\nHe has no doubt that the European solidarity of 2001 was genuine. But it lasted twelve months. “Then the Bush administration completely squandered that moment by invading Iraq. It split NATO, it split Europe, it undermined any European cohesion on defense.” What comes after, Bergmann sums up in one line: “Europe becomes a solved problem.” A closed file. “We only pay attention to it when it hurts an American company or an arms sale.” His image for it is a marriage gone dry. “Nobody wants a divorce, but the love is gone. From the American point of view, the mutual interest is over.”
\nFrom there on, administration after administration, there is substantial continuity. “Bush: a mix of hostility and ambivalence. Obama: ambivalence. Trump: outright hostility.” Beneath the presidents, an unmoving doctrine persists, set out by Madeleine Albright in 1998 to define the limits of European defense in relation to the Alliance’s obligations: no duplication, no discrimination, no decoupling from NATO. “At the State Department under Obama, we had talking points on European defense identical to Bush’s.” Obama attends a single EU summit and never returns to one. The first Trump term changes less than people think, and that’s precisely what lulls Europeans into complacency: Jim Mattis and H.R. McMaster, the national-security figures of Trump 1, remain loyal to NATO, Congress passes sanctions on Russia against the president’s wishes, and allocates more money for European defense than Obama did.
\nThen comes Biden, and \u2014 in Bergmann’s view \u2014 the most serious missed opportunity of all. March 2022, Versailles: after the invasion of Ukraine, Europe is debating whether to issue Eurobonds for defense, the way it had for the pandemic. Biden is in Brussels, the first American president to attend a European Council meeting. “And he says nothing.” It would have been enough to say: you borrowed for Covid, borrow for the war. “No request ever came, not from the White House, not from the Pentagon, for the EU to do something big on defense.” The mistake runs both ways. “Emmanuel Macron and Ursula von der Leyen never went to Biden and said: we can’t get Europe aligned on defense debt, we need your help. Most likely America would have said yes.”
\nUnderlying all of it is the vacuum that Bergmann considers America’s real anomaly. “Over the last twenty-five years, the United States has not had a strategy for Europe.” Washington churns out strategic plans for the Indo-Pacific and Central Asia. “We’re flooded with strategic plans. I have never seen one for Europe.”
\nAnd today, what’s the situation? “It feels like crossing a minefield every day, where one wrong step doesn’t lead to death but to losing a limb.” The best example is Greenland. At Davos, things came very close to a presidential order to send American forces. It didn’t happen, and the explanation Bergmann arrived at is instructive. “That week I watched big American companies start asking themselves: wait, what is this anti-coercion instrument the EU has? Markets got nervous. And it became clear that the Europeans could land a punch in our face.” The military option vanished from the table. “Trump respects strength \u2014 it’s a clich\u00e9, but it’s true. He operates like a schoolyard bully. And the Europeans let themselves become a target.”
\nDespite everything that has happened to American and European foreign policy over the last twenty-five years, Bergmann is writing a book titled “Europe Rising: The Forging of the Next Great Superpower.” It falls to an American to bet that Europe is the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a poll someone should run to explain the relationship between Washington and Brussels: how many American officials who entered foreign policy after 2001 actually know the EU’s institutions? Max Bergmann, who runs the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at CSIS, one of the most important American think tanks, has the answer. “Over these twenty-five […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":8092,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"iawp_total_views":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-senza-categoria"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8023"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8023\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8151,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8023\/revisions\/8151"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}