The Rise and Fall of American Europe

Foreign Affairs · Andrew Moravcsik · 2026-10-20 04:00 UTC

The Rise and Fall of American Europe by Glyn Morgan offers a sobering analysis of transatlantic relations after the end of the Cold War and the rise of the “Make America Great Again” movement in the United States, concluding that a 75-year-old “American Europe” is now collapsing.

This slim volume offers a sobering analysis of transatlantic relations after the end of the Cold War and the rise of the “Make America Great Again” movement in the United States, concluding that a 75-year-old “American Europe” is now collapsing. In this extreme and sometimes idiosyncratically realist view, transatlantic relations are reduced to military dealings. European unification, in Morgan’s understanding, was little more than a project conceived and funded by U.S. diplomats to bolster an anti-Soviet military alliance. With the Soviet Union gone, the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Europe becomes inevitable. MAGA Republicans are particularly vocal in their criticism because of their ideological antipathy to Europe’s welfare states and liberal values. Morgan closes with a long analysis of policy options for reforming or replacing current NATO institutions, measures that look neither promising nor likely, owing to European disunity and weakness. Surprisingly for a book about twenty-first-century order, it hardly touches on economic relations in areas such as energy, arms, high tech, entertainment, pharmaceuticals, financial and digital services, in all of which the European Union remains active and U.S.-European links robust. Such issues, not military defense, may well be the critical battleground among the United States, China, and other great powers in the decades to come.

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