Like many Christmases before, my husband and I flew from London to Palermo on the 12th of December, trading cold rain for winter sun in Sicily’s capital and the promise of too much food. The tables became parliaments. Between courses, between laughter, between the pouring of wine that never seemed to stop, politics arrived and refused to leave.
On the first night, my friend Ciccio, who lives in Bologna, put down his fork mid-bite. “You know what keeps me awake?” he said, his voice cutting through the chatter. “Not Putin. We know Putin is dangerous. What terrifies me is that Trump doesn’t care if Putin rolls through Eastern Europe. NATO used to mean something. Now it’s just… conditional.” Around him, heads nodded. Someone from Paris murmured agreement. The table went quiet. There was the kind of silence that acknowledged an uncomfortable truth.
The Atlantic alliance is fragile because it was built on assumptions that no longer describe reality.
Different lives, different professions, different generations. Yet the conversation converged with unsettling precision. Trump. Not as spectacle this time, but as diagnosis. His return, everyone seemed to agree, marked something darker than mere American dysfunction. It signalled abandonment. Europe, suddenly, felt alone.
Caught Between Empires
What struck me across these tables was the unanimity. Across ages and ideologies, the verdict was identical: Europe is exposed. The Atlantic alliance, which for seventy years provided the architecture of European security, now appears transactional, unreliable, ready to dissolve at a tweet’s notice. These were not catastrophists speaking, but ordinary Europeans. They are lawyers, teachers, doctors, and artists who diagnose a structural moment with clarity that many elites still avoid.
The threat is double. Trump signals American withdrawal precisely when Russia remains an active danger on Europe’s eastern frontier. Putin’s war in Ukraine grinds on, a brutal reminder that conquest has not disappeared from European affairs. Europe finds itself trapped between American and Russian imperialism, a geopolitical vice tightening with each passing month. Europe spent decades depending on American protection, never quite building its own. Now, with the threat materialized and the protector departing, Europe discovers it has outsourced not only its security but its sovereignty.
The Christmas tables diagnosed Europe’s illness with bracing clarity.
And then there is Greenland. Trump’s renewed imperial appetite for the Danish territory, framed as strategic necessity but performed as naked transaction, reveals his rationale at work with brutal clarity.
Allies become assets. Sovereignty becomes negotiable. The man who threatens to abandon NATO simultaneously covets European territory. For Trump, as for Putin, power takes what it wants. Your value is measured by your power.
The Memory of Futile Loyalty
Two nights later, at a friend’s apartment overlooking the harbour, the mood turned sharper. Sofia, a teacher in her early thirties, was visibly angry. “My students ask me why we should care about democracy when America elects someone like Trump,” she said, refilling her glass.
“What do I tell them? That rules matter? They see Putin doing whatever he wants. They see Trump doing whatever he wants. And they ask: why are we the only ones playing by the rules of democracy but nobody else respects?”
On Christmas Eve, after midnight mass, a smaller group gathered in our friend’s kitchen. My husband’s friend, whose brother had served in Afghanistan, brought up Iraq unprompted.
“Do you remember how they sold us that war?” he asked, his voice thick with wine and bitterness. “Weapons of mass destruction. We sent our soldiers. French, British, Italian, Spanish… we all went. For what? For lies. And now Trump acts like NATO is a protection racket and we are delinquent on payments.”
The asymmetry is stark. Europe bled for American wars of choice; America now shrugs at European wars of survival. This is not alliance to many Europeans. It is subordination, and subordination without reciprocity becomes humiliation.
When the Powerful Do What They Wish
When the powerful do what they wish, might eclipses right. America invaded Iraq on false pretenses; Russia invades Ukraine on fabricated ones.
The scales differ, the justifications vary, but the underlying logic converges and tells us power, when unconstrained, acts. Trump embodies this without embarrassment. He offers no liberal internationalist rhetoric, no pretense of a rules-based order. Trump speaks the language every empire speaks when masks drop: transaction and force. Power without justice.
Europe, lacking equivalent power, clings to legalism. It speaks of international law, human rights, multilateral institutions. Yet this might sound like the language of the weak who need rules because they cannot impose will. There is nobility in this, certainly. But there is also naiveté. Rules work when the powerful accept constraint. When they do not, rules become irrelevant. Europe’s moral vocabulary, however admirable, cannot stop tanks or deter autocrats.
The Dangerous Temptations of Fear
The anxiety voiced at those Christmas tables was real. It was justified. Europeans are waking to their military inadequacy, their political drift, their strategic irrelevance. But anxiety, unchecked, breeds dangerous responses. In this fear lies temptation that aims to answer power with power, to abandon liberal scruple for authoritarian efficiency, to trade democratic hesitation for strongman decisiveness.
Europe has been here before. The memory is not distant. The risk now is that Europe, staring into the abyss of its own vulnerability, begins to resemble what stares back. In its rush toward strategic autonomy, it may grow strong by growing cruel. It may build walls to protect values it abandons in the process. Picture a house fortifying itself against intruders by becoming a fortress. Defensible, yes. But no longer a home.
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Human rights and democracy are not negotiable. Europe has practiced them imperfectly, often hypocritically, but they remain the only foundation worth defending. Without them, sovereignty becomes mere dominance, and power becomes indistinguishable from tyranny. This is the tightrope Europe must walk: acquiring the power to defend itself without losing what makes itself worth defending.
The Cure Remains Contested
The Christmas tables diagnosed Europe’s illness with bracing clarity. The cure, however, remains contested. Strategic autonomy is necessary but insufficient. Europe must decide what kind of power it wants to become—whether it will honour its principles or sacrifice them to necessity, whether it can grow up without growing cold.
Trump’s return has clarified what many preferred to ignore. Europe’s dependence was always a choice, and that choice is now producing consequences. The Atlantic alliance is fragile because it was built on assumptions that no longer describe reality. America has other priorities, other adversaries, other interests. Europe was never the centre of American concern, merely a useful periphery.
What remains is a continent forced, finally, to confront its own future. The verdict from those Christmas tables was unanimous and unsparing: change or remain victim. But the shape of that change, its character and direction, is Europe’s to determine. The fragility everyone sensed is both danger and opportunity. What held for seventy years is breaking. What comes next is ours to shape. The tables have spoken their verdict. The response belongs to Europe alone.
