Dear America,

I used to be a committed Atlanticist. I am now simply a European.

I have lived in the United States. I have close friends and colleagues across the country. I admire the Constitution, the pioneering spirit, the openness of its people. American sports and culture shaped me in ways that stay with you. I say this because what follows is not hostility. It is a conclusion I have been pushed to, slowly, by a long chain of signals that all point in the same direction.

Greenland – one NATO ally openly contemplating the annexation of another, while Washington said nothing. JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference, addressing Europe not as a partner but as a problem to be lectured. A national security doctrine that classifies the EU as a strategic adversary. An open threat to give Putin a free hand in Europe. Campaign support for Orbán. Tariffs imposed on partners, not enemies. And then the Iran war, in which Europe denied the United States access to bases and airspace – not out of hostility, but because its own populations did not want that war. Trump calls that betrayal. It is democracy. The gap between those two readings shows how deep the fracture has become.

In Berlin, Paris and Brussels, there are still voices calling for appeasement. The hope of keeping Trump engaged, preserving the nuclear umbrella, maintaining the alliance in formal terms. I understand that hope. I no longer share it.

The United States is not coming back – not in the form Europe took for granted for 77 years. Anyone still building European security policy on that return is building on sand. Europe does not need a new Trump deal. It needs its own future – its own deterrence, its own logistics, its own strategic agency. Beyond fixed dependencies.

That is not anti-Americanism. It is realism.