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It has not escaped anyone that the United States has been moving away from Europe by leaps and bounds since Donald Trump’s victory in November 2024. This is not merely the sign of a radical shift in their foreign policy, now openly hostile to European integration. It actually signals a deep change in the national narrative that underpins the United States’ historical destiny, one that concerns both how the country sees itself and how it views its relationship with the world.
The most striking feature of this new narrative is the desire to return to the origins of the country’s history. Since January 2025, commentators have written extensively about a return to imperial-style policy, a hallmark of the 19th century. That isn’t entirely false, but it would be even more accurate to say that the United States is returning to what it regards as the fundamentals of the nation as it was built at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th. In other words, the United States of 2026 is afflicted by an originalist syndrome. What is this about?
The transformation of the American narrative
I propose to call this process the “great estrangement,” a historical trajectory by which the United States progressively ceases to see itself as a Western power sharing a common destiny with Europe, and instead reconnects with a national narrative that is exclusively American.
From the 19th century onward, the story Americans told about themselves portrayed a nation chosen by Providence to create a paradise on Earth, first on the American continent, then across the globe. Material progress was to be the motor of this destiny, while American democracy was to serve as an example. This narrative, formalized by intellectuals and policymakers under the banner of “Manifest Destiny,” Manifest Destiny, rested on a desire to emancipate from Europe, seen as the continent of tyrannies and persecutions. This idea shaped the construction of American national identity up to World War II, during which a new narrative emerged: the saving of Europe from barbarism and totalitarianism. In 1945, American messianism found a new field of application: material reconstruction, economic modernization, and democratic reeducation of Europe. The aim was to bring about a better world and to be its guarantor. Europe, at least its Western part, largely subscribed to this narrative.
In the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall, this narrative gradually, but surely, changed, without enough attention being paid to it. We moved from the United States as saviors of Europe to a virulent critique of the “Old Europe,” a term used in 2003 by Donald Rumsfeld, then Secretary of Defense in the Bush administration. This evolution accelerated dramatically with Donald Trump’s election in 2016, and especially with his return to power in 2025. It now seems as if the United States has stepped back toward the 19th century, and even the 18th, to return to the America of origins and to distance itself from Europe once again. The examples are numerous.
Many digital entrepreneurs are fascinated by figures from early America, especially Thomas Jefferson, one of the drafters of the 1776 Declaration of Independence and the United States’ third president (1801–1809). They see themselves as direct heirs of the spirit of the 1776 revolution and as the creators of a “Jeffersonian new democracy” , embodied by cyberspace, where individuals are completely free to express themselves, in line with the First Amendment of the Constitution. Their belief in technology’s power to forge a new civilization is accompanied by a dream of returning to an idealized America that they attribute with all democratic virtues, while pretending to forget that it rested on a racist intellectual substrate and a slaveholding society.
In 1945, American messianism found a new field of application: material reconstruction, economic modernization, and the democratic reeducation of Europe.
Ludovic Tournès
Another example of this underlying shift is the rise, among jurists, of the originalist doctrine, which reads and interprets the Constitution as it was drafted by the Founding Fathers, rather than as a living text to adapt to changing historical contexts and society. This doctrine, which has gained momentum since the 1970s, is now well represented on the Supreme Court, where five of its nine members defend it, including three appointed by Donald Trump (Neil Gorsuch in 2017, Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, and Amy Coney Barrett in 2020).
Third example: the multiple references to the 19th century in Trump’s discourse. While he was not much of a historian during his first term, the second term is marked by repeated tributes to Andrew Jackson (1829–1837), a populist president and champion of white America, whose portrait hangs in the Oval Office, or to William McKinley (1897–1901), the tariff president. This growing mobilization of historical references bears the unmistakable mark of ideologues such as Steve Bannon or members of the Heritage Foundation, who helped shape the ideological framework for Trump’s second term. In his inauguration address on January 20, 2025, the president also revived the myth of pioneer America by declaring: “We will pursue our manifest destiny among the stars, by sending American astronauts to plant the American flag on the planet Mars.” One could cite other seemingly trivial hints, but which clearly reveal this originalist obsession, such as the sum of $1.776 billion allocated to the fund created in May 2026 to compensate those prosecuted by the Biden administration for their participation in the January 6, 2021 attempted coup (the fund’s creation currently being frozen by the federal judiciary).
Finally, one must not forget the Trump administration’s focus on writing, or rather rewriting, American history. This is evident in particular in an offensive against the Smithsonian Institution museums, accused of “wokeness,” and ordered, after the decree “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” of March 27, 2025, to provide “corrections” in how the history of slavery is presented. The aim is to tone down what the Trump administration regards as a negative vision of the national narrative. This rewrite attempt is also visible on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence: in December 2025, the Trump administration created a parallel task force to bypass the bipartisan commission tasked by Congress with organizing the festivities. Several planned events were canceled because of their supposed “woke” orientation.
Taken together, these elements sketch the image of a country in an identity crisis, eager to retreat into its founding episodes, and seemingly following a fundamentalist path reminiscent of radical Islam. Those who still think that Trump’s presidencies are merely a hiatus after which normalcy will return will surely be disappointed. There will be no return to normal. Or rather, that return is precisely taking place, but the “normal” is not the one people think. Many Europeans picture American normalcy through the lens of the 1945–1989 period, when the United States played a decisive role in ending World War II, rebuilding the international order, and establishing multilateralism, the rules of which it largely respected as long as they did not contradict its national interests.
Those who still think that Trump’s presidencies are merely a pause after which normalcy will return will surely be disappointed. There will be no return to normal.
Ludovic Tournès
But Donald Trump’s 2024 victory invites us to reinterpret American history differently: what if this period was actually only a long interlude that closed at the end of the Cold War, when the United States gradually returned to unilateral, nationalist, and exceptionalist logic that characterized its history from 1783 to 1941? Seen from this angle, it is President Trump II who would best embody this return to American normalcy.
This face, which Europeans of the postwar generation did not know, or did not want to see, is now revealed in all its starkness. The current presidential administration has brutally torn apart the rosy narrative of a generous, modernizing, democratic, and prosperous America that was written after World War II. This narrative, initiated by Franklin Roosevelt, was meant for the whole world: in his Four Freedoms speech, delivered on January 6, 1941, he stressed that these freedoms should apply “everywhere in the world” (everywhere in the world). Western Europeans could internalize this narrative because it included them in a transatlantic alliance built against the common enemy, the USSR.
But today, the originalist narrative of the America First Trump version is tailored for the United States alone. On the ground, it translates into abandoning Ukraine in favor of Russia, seeks to annex Greenland, conducts a trade war against Europe, offers democracy lessons to Europeans in Munich as J.D. Vance did, and supports far-right forces in Germany or Viktor Orbán in Hungary’s April 2026 elections.
By reviving the origin story, the United States (re)become foreign to Europe, which is why I call this subterranean process the “great estrangement”. If the 1945 American narrative could seem desirable to Europeans, the 2026 version is no longer at all.
Affirming a European narrative
While the American estrangement threatens Europe, it also opens a historical window of opportunity to seize the ground left vacant and to assert a distinctly European narrative. Not in a naïve impulse that would present Europe as a continent free of all ills, but to highlight values exactly opposite to the drift the United States seeks to impose: the rule of law within borders, respect for international commitments abroad, a refusal to brutalize political debate and the rule of the strong, and an unwavering commitment to ecological transition, among others.
It isn’t that difficult: the current drift of the Trump administration only heightens the need for a narrative in which Europe takes its destiny into its own hands. This narrative has already begun to be written under the pressure of recent events. Indeed, the war in Ukraine is giving birth to a new narrative, that of a Europe conceived as a whole. Several indicators do not lie.
First, there has existed since the 19th century a fracture between Western Europe, urbanized and industrialized, and Eastern Europe, rural and agricultural; the Cold War deepened this gulf. Despite the integration of the former Eastern Bloc democracies into the Union since the 1990s, this boundary has not disappeared. It is the invasion of Ukraine that is currently erasing it, making Europeans realize that a common destiny is at stake in facing the Russian aggressor. Before 2022, the idea that Ukraine belonged to Europe might have raised doubts. Today, it becomes increasingly evident. Indeed, by participating in defending Ukraine, Europe ensures its own defense, as Putin’s Russia already imagines war against the Union, considering some countries as part of its natural territories (the Baltic states) and others as within its sphere of influence (the former Eastern Bloc).
Secondly, the massive military engagement of certain Eastern European countries and the eastward shift of the Union’s center of gravity contribute to erasing the border between these two Europes. This development accompanies a new continental dynamism whose chief drivers are no longer only the Franco-German couple and the founding states of the EU.
It’s not that difficult: the current drift of the Trump administration only intensifies the need for a narrative in which Europe takes its fate into its own hands.
Ludovic Tournès
Third, the narrative of a Europe sharing common interests is being written without the United States, whose disengagement is perhaps only at its beginning; as for NATO, this organization born of the Cold War and American leadership, history calls for it to disappear or to morph into a European defense organization. This process, which will likely take one or more decades, marks the end of the West as it was built during the Cold War. We will have gained if the disappearance of this U.S.-led West allows Europe to regain the geopolitical independence it enjoyed up to World War I.
This narrative arising from the new international order falls to Europeans to help shape if they want to complete their cultural decolonization with respect to the United States. It would be naïve to think culture emerges spontaneously. Just as there is no invisible hand of the market, there is no invisible hand of culture. The work of Anne-Marie Thiesse, for instance, has shown that the construction of collective identities, whether national or not, results largely from deliberate actions. What nations achieved in the 19th and 20th centuries must now be achieved at the scale of the European nation.
The writing of this narrative must be supported by the Union, but that cannot be enough. More fundamentally, we must call upon the professionals of storytelling who are writers, filmmakers, playwrights, musicians, visual artists, or videographers, not to build an official European tale that would merely be a pale European substitute for Russian or Chinese propaganda, or Trumpian historical revisionism, but to develop plural narratives of Europe in all its diversity, its complexity, its tragedy but also its beauty.
Europe has a chance it underestimates: it possesses an incredible abundance of artists from all countries and sensibilities. If historians are there to write Europe’s history, the role of artists is to write Europe’s stories: about individuals, ordinary or exceptional, about landscapes, about love, grand narratives or everyday tales, comic or tragic stories, stories from all countries and not the history of an abstract continent. If culture is the narration of a collective destiny, we need these narratives to shape this destiny as it is being written in the Ukrainian trenches. These artists should belong to all forms of expression and come from all geographic, aesthetic and social backgrounds: we cannot simply resurrect the culture of the elites that illuminated the continent until the early 20th century, that of Stefan Zweig, Thomas Mann, or Paul Valéry, rightly celebrated many times, but which represents only a small portion of today’s European culture.
This narrative arising from the new international order is something Europeans must help shape if they want to complete their cultural decolonization with respect to the United States.
Ludovic Tournès
The souring minds will say that such a call is mere incantation, and that European culture does not exist, so indivisible are national cultures. Nothing could be further from the truth. Not only does European culture exist, but it exists in complementary relation to national cultures rather than in opposition to them. A hint can be found by looking at the profusion of structures and manifestations through which it expresses itself. Obviously, the institutional programs supported by the Union, such as Europe Creative or the European Capitals of Culture (73 cities laureates between 1985 and 2025). But above all, it is necessary to highlight the vitality and diversity of cultural actors, which are often overlooked amid fatalistic laments about American cultural imperialism and hegemony. European cultural industries are numerous and active in all domains, from publishing to film studios, including music labels and streaming platforms. Moreover, in practice, there is a profusion of festivals that place Europe at the heart of their projects, far beyond the opportunistic effect triggered by Union funding. Among dozens of examples, we can name Europalia (Brussels), the European Literature Days (Wachau), SUNS Europe (Udine), the International Festival of Literature and Translation (Iași), the Forum on European Culture (Amsterdam), European Literatures Cognac (Cognac), the Festival of the European Short Story (Zagreb), the European Stadium of Culture (Podkarpackie), the European Music Festival (Sofia), the European Poetry Festival (Copenhagen), the European Media Art Festival (Osnabrück), the European Festival of the Night (Dublin), the Scanorama Film Forum (Vilnius), the European Month of Photography (Luxembourg), the Festival of Europe (Torremolinos), or Europavox (Clermont-Ferrand). These events multiplied in the 2000s, from East to West and from North to South across the continent. Finally, there are numerous initiatives to coordinate and network cultural activities, whether from states (the creation of EUNIC, the European network of national cultural institutes) or from private actors (the European Festivals Association, Literature Across Frontiers).
This broad map sketches a living culture, far from the image of a culture administered from above by Brussels’ bureaucracy. The success of these manifestations and their anchorage in the regions and over time (Europalia has existed since 1969, the European Literatures of Cognac since 1988, and the Festival of the European Short Story since 2002) show that they meet an audience expectation, an expectation that is likely to grow in the years ahead, given that the United States no longer represents Europe’s future. It would be naive to think that artists alone will write this narrative. But they can at least help make visible a shared destiny that already exists.