Can Europe Make the West Great Again?

European Straits #78

Dear all,

For more than 24 hours now, my Twitter feed, and yours too most likely, has been caught in a frenzy. No, not about the French team winning the World Cup 🇫🇷⚽—although that was definitely there as well. Rather it’s a much more worried one following Donald Trump’s Monday press conference alongside Vladimir Putin in Helsinki.

I’m still not really sure what will unfold within the US political system in the coming weeks and months. But you can sense that Trump has reached the breaking point of what used to be tolerable, even in a Trumpian world. Just consider the words used by journalists and pundits: a “sad, embarrassing wreck of a man”, the “end of the Trump presidency”, a “national-security emergency”, even “geopolitical suicide”.

As I’ve said in , I’ve long been a believer in the transatlantic alliance and the US serving as a beacon for the entire Western world. When he was elected in 2008, Barack Obama appeared as the new Franklin D. Roosevelt: not only a leader who would rebu…