There is something profoundly discordant, almost obscene, in seeing Donald Trump rail against Europe, treating it as a dead weight, a ballast from which to free himself. it may be the usual Trumpian tactic, but it strikes just the same. It’s not just political shortsightedness: it’s cultural suicide. Because if there is one thing that history teaches – the true one, the one that cannot be scrapped with a tweet – it is that America was born European. And denying her means sawing the branch on which she is sitting.
The United States has father and mother in the Old Continent: just go back to that vessel that crossed the Atlantic in the 17th century, to the villages of the Puritans of the North-East, to the surnames that still populate American politics and society today. The United States is a patchwork of Irish, German, Scottish, French, Italian, Polish. And Trump himself, who today is an anti-European bully, has German blood. Does he deny it? It would be like denying himself.
This link is not textbook rhetoric. It is history written in blood. In the two world wars, the western shore sent its boys to die to save a continent that was not theirs, but which they felt was part of the same civilization. Just climb the cliffs of Normandy, walk in the middle of the green lawn among the thousands of white crosses of the American cemetery: there you understand how much it cost America to defend Europe. And how deeply the two destinies were intertwined.
This is why it is infuriating today to see Washington treating Brussels as a nuisance, a partner to be sold off to the highest bidder. It’s as if America amputated its arm, convinced it would lose weight. In reality he loses balance, perspective, memory. A superpower that forgets its roots always ends up losing its reasons too. Not to mention the relationship with England, that “special relationship” that has lasted for centuries, about which Winston Churchill, of an American mother and an English father, joked: “Two brotherly peoples divided by a common language”.
Europe and the United States are not a marriage of convenience. They are a historical, cultural, even emotional bond, difficult to break without causing disasters. It is not possible to look only from the shore of the Pacific: the Chinese, the Japanese and the Russians are not part of the roots of a continent discovered by an Italian. Trump can scream all he wants, but the truth is simple and stubborn: the America that today renounces Europe would never have existed without it. And by turning her back on her, she risks no longer even recognizing herself.
