It is disquieting to recall the moving ceremony on the beaches of Normandy that marked the 80th anniversary of D-Day 11 months ago, a celebration of the ironclad alliance between the United States and Europe, and their shared resolve to meet “the test of ages” and defend Ukraine.
That phrase from former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., standing shoulder to shoulder with President Emmanuel Macron of France, was part of an address in which he proclaimed NATO “more united than ever” and vowed that “we will not walk away, because if we do, Ukraine will be subjugated and it will not end there.”
I stood in the Normandy sunlight, musing on the young men from Kansas City and St. Paul and elsewhere who clambered ashore on June 6, 1944, into a hail of Nazi gunfire from the Normandy bluffs, and listening to words that drew a direct line between their singular courage in the defense of freedom and the struggle to defeat another “tyrant bent on domination.”
That “tyrant,” for Mr. Biden, was President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, since absolved of responsibility for the war he started in Ukraine by President Trump, the America-first leader who has been a perennial coddler of autocrats, denigrator of NATO, and opponent of a European Union formed, in his words, to “screw the United States.”
Never did I imagine, less than a year ago, that so much so dear to so many could unravel so fast; nor that the 80th anniversary on Thursday of V-E Day, or Victory in Europe, would come with so many Europeans no longer sure whether to regard Mr. Trump’s America as ally or adversary.
“It’s night and day,” Rima Abdul-Malak, a former French culture minister, said in an interview. “Trump has occupied all the space in our heads and the world looks alarmingly different.”
Whatever else it has been beneath an avalanche of executive orders, the tumultuous start to Mr. Trump’s second presidency has seen a great unraveling of a trans-Atlantic bond that brought peace and prosperity of unusual scale and duration, by historical standards. He has taken a wrecking ball to the postwar order; what new dispensation will emerge from the havoc is unclear.
Of course, abrupt revolutions or counterrevolutions are a recurrent theme of history. Just four years before the heroic Allied landings in Normandy, contemplating the debacle of France’s almost overnight defeat to Hitler’s Wehrmacht in June 1940, Paul Valéry, a French poet and author, wrote:
“We are on a terrifying and irresistible slope. Nothing that we could fear is impossible; we can fear and imagine almost anything.”
The same could probably be said today, even in a globalized world. Certainties have dissolved, specters risen. Fear has spread, in Europe as in the United States. Europeans acquire burner phones, devoid of content, for visits to the United States, as if they were headed for Iran.
Mr. Trump’s targeting of top universities, speech protected by the First Amendment, international students, immigrants, judicial independence and truth itself in pursuit of seemingly unbridled executive power have led to talk of “a police state taking form,” in the words of Bruno Fuchs, the president of the French National Assembly’s foreign affairs committee, after a recent visit to Washington.
“This is going to be great television,” Mr. Trump said after his public humiliation of Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, in the White House on Feb. 28. If his America is to install autocracy, it will be one made for TV. The world, or much of it, was duly riveted at the sight of Mr. Trump accusing Mr. Zelensky of ingratitude and of risking World War lll by fighting an aggressor, at a time when he did not “have the cards.”
This presidential performance seemed to mark a breaking point for Europe, where many leaders saw it as a moral abdication.
Days later, on March 5, Mr. Macron declared: “Peace can no longer be guaranteed on our continent.”
Mr. Trump, as is his seesawing habit, has since tried to mend fences with Mr. Zelensky while declaring his dislike for him. A minerals deal, whose details remain murky, has been signed between the United States and Ukraine. It will seemingly entangle America in Ukraine for some time, even if Mr. Trump’s impatient pursuit of a peace deal has stalled.
Europe, for its part, is not waiting for Mr. Trump’s next swerve. It has seen enough to become determined to throw off what Vice President JD Vance called its “vassal” status, one in a cascade of insults aimed at NATO allies. One such ally, Mr. Trump says, should cede Greenland to him, and another should welcome absorption into the United States.
Taking office as Germany’s new chancellor, Friedrich Merz headed straight for Paris on Wednesday to meet with Mr. Macron. The two leaders are united in seeking what Mr. Merz has called “independence” and what Mr. Macron calls “strategic autonomy” from Washington, a dramatic shift. Writing in the French daily Le Figaro, they said they “will never accept an imposed peace and will continue to support Ukraine against Russian aggression.”
One idea being discussed, the daily Le Monde reported, is a return to the D-Day beaches 80 years after the surrender of the Third Reich for a joint photograph echoing that of François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl, the former French and German leaders, holding hands on the World War I battlefield of Verdun.
That image from 1984, along with the photograph of Chancellor Willy Brandt of Germany on his knees in 1970 before the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto, is one of the most powerful symbols of a unifying Europe’s rebirth.
The Franco-German alliance has always been the engine of the European Union. If it kicks into overdrive, the rearmament of Europe, as a military power but also as a guardian of the values for which America fought in World War II, seems plausible over the medium term.
“Audacity, audacity again, always audacity!” said Georges Jacques Danton, a leading figure of the French Revolution. If nothing else, Mr. Trump has shown that. People are mesmerized, reduced to amnesiac stupor, by the torrent of his outbursts.
“He’s Pavlov and we’re the dogs,” David Axelrod, the chief strategist of Barack Obama’s victorious presidential campaigns, told me recently.
Europe will have to respond with a different kind of audacity if it is to develop strategic might to match its longtime status as an economic giant. Germany, obliged by history to demilitarize, but conscious that this posture has run its course, almost certainly holds the key to any such transformation. It faces the immense challenge of internalizing the consequences of a new world of raw power where rules and the law seem destined, at least for the moment, to count less.
But Europe is scarcely united, whatever the resolve in Paris and Berlin. The nationalist, anti-immigrant, anti-climate-science, anti-transgender wave that swept Mr. Trump into office last year is also potent across a continent where it has empowered Viktor Orban in Hungary and Giorgia Meloni in Italy, among others.
Rising parties of the far right, including the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, and the National Rally in France, reflect the anger of Europeans who feel invisible, isolated, poorer, and ignored by urban elites, just like their counterparts in America.
There is a fundamental difference, however. Much of Europe knows how fragile freedom is, how dictatorship is possible, and mass murder along with it, with a collective memory of the horrors of the 20th century.
It was precisely to overcome this collapse into brutality, racism and genocide that the United States, far removed from Europe but conscious that its fate implicated all humanity, sent its young men to fight their way ashore in France in 1944. In the American cemetery in Normandy, the 9,389 graves are one sobering measure of their devotion.
In the days, weeks and years after Paul Valéry’s reflection in 1940, France did indeed cede to the unthinkable. I write now from Vichy, the small town in central France from which the authoritarian regime of Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain ruled a rump France, collaborated with its Nazi overlords and deported more than 70,000 Jews to their deaths in Hitler’s camps.
Such was the French shame at Vichy, and the shredding it represented of the values and ideals of the Republic, that it took decades to confront the truth in full. The name of this pleasant spa town, far from the Normandy beaches, will be forever associated with ignominy.
At the conclusion of “Vichy France,” his magisterial book that brought France to a deeper understanding of its darkest hour, Robert Paxton, the American historian, writes: “The deeds of occupier and occupied alike suggest that there come cruel times when to save a nation’s deepest values one must disobey the state. France after 1940 was one of those times.”
Those words seem worthy of particular reflection today, eight decades after peace returned, with decisive American help, to a shattered European continent.
