Over time, however, efforts to flatter and appease Trump have appeared increasingly futile – if not counterproductive. He has continued to berate European leaders, threaten new tariffs, and question the viability of Nato and its security guarantees. When the American president threatened to annex Greenland “the hard way”, Europeans finally began to push back. The leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom issued a joint statement defending Greenland’s sovereignty as a self-governing territory of the Kingdom of Denmark. Trump ultimately backed down and withdrew his threat – likely because he was already preparing a far more consequential international move: Operation Epic Fury in Iran.

The military operation in Iran was not coordinated with European allies, even though it has directly affected them in multiple negative ways. More recently, President Trump has called for European military support as the conflict shifted from the phase of “epic fury” to one of awkward stalemate – particularly after Iran blocked traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a critical oil chokepoint through which a significant share of the world’s seaborne oil passes each year.

At that point, several European capitals decided to stand their ground. Spain closed its airspace to US aircraft involved in the war after Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez described the operation as illegal, reckless, and unjust. Other leaders avoided such harsh rhetoric vis-à-vis their American ally, but adopted similarly restrictive positions. France denied the use of its bases for offensive operations against Iran and refused airspace permissions for flights linked to the war. Even Italy – led by Trump’s European protégée, the prime minister Giorgia Meloni – denied permission for US military aircraft to land at the Sicilian air base, reportedly because Washington had not sought prior authorisation from Rome.

Other European capitals have taken a different stance. Most notably, Germany and Poland have not imposed restrictions on US military access (although there are reports that Poland declined a request to redeploy one of their Patriot systems to the Middle East). The United Kingdom has adopted a more nuanced – or, one might say, ambivalent – position. After some initial hesitation, the British government authorised the US to use bases on its territory to conduct strikes on Iranian missile sites targeting shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, framing it as a defensive measure. At the same time, Downing Street has insisted that Britain will not be drawn into a wider war with Iran and has called for urgent de-escalation and a swift resolution.

European leaders rightly argue that Nato is a defensive alliance and should not be used to support offensive operations against Iran. Indeed, Article 1 of the Nato Treaty commits its members to settle disputes by peaceful means and to refrain from the threat or use of force in ways inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations. This, however, has not prevented President Trump from questioning the very rationale of the Alliance: “You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourselves; the USA won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us.”

The stakes are high. European militaries will remain dependent on American weapons and intelligence for years to come. At the same time, Ukraine’s ability to sustain its resistance against Russia is unlikely to endure without continued U.S. military support – support that is, at present, largely financed by European taxpayers.

Historians are right to point out that the Atlantic alliance has survived for decades despite frequent bust-ups. Three decades ago, for instance, William Wallace and I protested in the pages of Foreign Affairs against a wave of Euro-bashing in the United States. Then, as now, American triumphalism went hand in hand with laments about Europe’s lack of strategic direction and overall weakness. “Europe is resigned to be a quasi-autonomous protectorate of the US,” argued Irving Kristol, while Senator Jesse Helms famously declared that “the European Union could not fight its way out of a wet paper bag”.

Make no mistake, however: this time is different. The rift between Europe and the United States is now more fundamental, threatening Europe’s very existence as a continent that has enjoyed prosperity and peace for eight decades.

In the past, the United States primarily wanted Europeans to shoulder a greater share of the costs of its security leadership. Now, President Trump fraternises with Vladimir Putin, who has openly declared war on Europe. Previously, Washington encouraged European integration to avoid being drawn into costly intra-European conflicts. Today, Trump and his allies appear to encourage parties such as Alternative for Germany, Lega, Fidesz, and Law and Justice to undermine the integration project. Liberalism once formed the ideological foundation of the Atlantic alliance; today, it – and its core pillars, such as the rule of law, free trade, and multilateral diplomacy – is under sustained pressure from the Trump administration.

Most European leaders now seem to recognise that Trump intends to turn them into America’s “vassals”, to use the term employed by several well-known European politicians. Yet they still lack a credible and unified strategy to respond to this challenge. Europe remains a mosaic of states of different sizes and capabilities, shaped by distinct histories and memories, and embedded at varying levels of institutional integration. Some states fear Russia and the spillovers from its military actions in Eastern Europe; others are more concerned about instability emanating from the Middle East. Some are governed by liberal leaders who oppose Trump’s anti-liberal agenda, while others are led by his admirers.

The United States has long tried – often unsuccessfully – to bring these diverse European states into a coherent strategic line, which helps explain why Washington consistently pushed for deeper European integration. The European Union itself was designed to make war among its members impossible through trade, democracy, the rule of law, and diplomacy. Yet it remains ill-suited to address security challenges posed by external powers that rely on force rather than norms and laws.

As François Heisbourg has put it, traditional power politics – la géopolitique de grand-papa – was largely delegated to Nato, and Washington was long reluctant to see a distinct European caucus emerging within the Alliance. Now that the United States is turning away from Nato, Europe’s security architecture may have to be rebuilt from scratch. Even admirers of Donald Trump must acknowledge that the transatlantic alliance now rests on shifting sands, and that Europe needs a “Plan B”. The crucial question is whether such a plan can provide security and prosperity without the rule of law and democracy – let alone without the environmentally responsible economy and multilateral diplomacy that Trump so openly disdains.

A European “Plan B” will not emerge overnight – a serious problem given mounting pressures. Still, several points are clear. First, Europe’s strength lies in its economic, regulatory, and normative power. Its approach to international relations has long reflected the ideas of Hugo Grotius and Immanuel Kant rather than Niccolò Machiavelli or Thomas Hobbes. These assets helped stabilise Europe after the Cold War and should not be abandoned lightly. Second, Europe’s neglect of defence integration has been a mistake. However, a fully-fledged European army may be neither feasible nor desirable. More flexible arrangements – coalitions of willing and able states, including non-EU countries such as the United Kingdom and Norway – may offer more realistic solutions.

And third, Europe cannot be secured without British cooperation. This creates an opportunity to repair ties damaged by Brexit. However, small-group formats such as an E3 (France, Germany, and the UK) cannot substitute for broader European coordination, which must include frontline states such as Finland, Poland, and Lithuania, as well as southern countries like Italy, Greece, and Spain – not to mention dynamic international actors such as Sweden and the Netherlands.

Finally, the European Union and the United States remain deeply interdependent. While the EU is the junior partner, it remains one of the world’s leading powers – comparable in many respects to China and far ahead of Russia, India, and Japan. The idea that Europe will step in to “clean up” the consequences of US actions in the Middle East reflects a profound misreading of both European capabilities and political will.

The transatlantic alliance is no longer what it once was. What began as a dispute over burden-sharing has evolved into a deeper conflict over strategy, values, and global order. Europe is beginning to push back – but it has yet to develop a coherent alternative. Whether such an alternative can preserve both Europe’s security and its normative foundations remains an open question. What is evident, however, is that the old assumptions of the Atlantic partnership no longer hold. At best, what remains is a partnership stripped of illusions, for better or worse.

[Further reading: How would a US ground assault on Iran unfold?]

Huge state infrastructure projects are being launched, such as the digital connectivity programme in Italy and the National Infrastructure Mission in Scotland. Across the world, unilateralism has prevailed over interstate cooperation in the development of a coronavirus vaccine. Leaders from countries such as the US, France and the UK have called for a national, war-like effort against the virus.

The once-heralded virtues of privatisation, deregulation and international integration have been replaced by national retrenchment and the heroic struggle for state survival.

The role of the state is emphasised in different ways depending on location and political ideology. Right-wing politicians in Hungary or Poland, for example, regard the state as a way of uniting their respective nations. For left-wing politicians, such as Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France or Oskar Lafontaine in Germany, the state is a vehicle for defending welfare systems from privatisation. For populist parties in Italy or Holland, the state stands in opposition to the neoliberal constraints imposed by Brussels. Politicians in Denmark or Belgium see the state as vital for a functioning democracy, while those in Latvia and Cyprus seek strong states to defend against more powerful neighbours – Russia and Turkey respectively.

But across the political spectrum, from far left to far right, governments and political movements have struggled to make their visions of the state come to pass. The unifying ambitions of nativist politicians in Poland and Hungary, for instance, have left their populations more divided. The fault-lines are familiar: younger and older generations have different views of the good life, while people from cities and the countryside seem to belong to different nations altogether.

Left-wing protectionist views of the state have failed to capture popular imaginations across Europe. In 2019, the German Social Democratic Party and the Labour Party in the UK suffered their worst electoral results for decades. Meanwhile, the Socialist Party in France was barely able to retain 10 per cent of its National Assembly seats in the 2017 parliamentary elections.

European progressives are right to argue that meaningful social policy is difficult to implement in a world of weak states and porous borders. But gaining control over international markets and migratory flows requires a transnational authority rather than national autarky. Even Germany, by far the largest economy in Europe, is a minor economic player on the global stage. Reducing international supply chains and nationalising utilities may well be sensible for providing public goods, but it will never deliver economic sovereignty. States need to reconcile themselves to fuzzy borders and an ambiguous relationship with markets.

As for Eurosceptics, there is growing evidence that their visions of post-European life are failing to resonate beyond their core supporters. Italy’s Matteo Salvini and Holland’s Geert Wilders, both of whom castigate the hegemonic power of Brussels, have been outflanked by more liberal prime ministers – Giuseppe Conte and Mark Rutte respectively – who argue that the EU is the agent of member states, not a super-state in the making. Britain will soon become a cautionary tale of cutting ties with the EU.

The problem for champions of the nation-state as a bulwark of democracy, such as the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, is that national democracy is scoring poorly on two counts: citizens’ participation, which usually increases at the municipal and regional levels, and system effectiveness. National governments are failing to deliver on electoral promises because many powerful forces – from financial markets to internet giants such as Google and Facebook – exist outside national jurisdictions. Surveys show growing public dissatisfaction with democracy in most European states.

States also used to be the sole providers of defence, but today they are better at organising military parades than shielding their populations from cyber-attacks and the potential threat of orbital weaponry. In Europe, no state can credibly protect its people on its own, which is why the Baltic nations in particular want to maintain Nato despite Donald Trump’s threat to withdraw the US from the military alliance. The illusoriness of a strong “national defence” especially applies to smaller states such as Cyprus or Latvia, where politicians legitimise state power by projecting external threats. Meanwhile, national armies are ill-suited to address threats such as pandemics or climate change.

States are not withering away, then, but neither are they returning to their legendary glory. Covid-19 has illustrated the need for public authority, but at the local and international levels as much as at the national level.

In many cases, the US most prominent among them, states have long acted out of narrow self-interest rather than global cooperation. The primary geopolitical challenge today is to construct a transnational public authority to cope with mounting global and regional pressures.

Another priority should be the empowerment of sub-national actors such as cities and regional authorities. Local bodies are not only closer to the daily experiences of citizens, they are often better at political innovation: accommodating migrants, developing climate-friendly policies and providing security and healthcare.

States need more intelligence and purpose, not muscle. Public administration ought to be transparent, non-partisan and committed to realising some notion of the common good.

If nations want to have global influence, they need to think beyond traditional nation-state structures based on centralised governments and large armies, and become smarter through collaboration with NGOs, city authorities and transnational markets. Cultivating a nostalgic vision of states will hamper our efforts to make the post-Covid world a better place. 

Our approach to space and the freedom of movement has never been simple. Early settlers and ranchers were fond of walls and fences, while nomads and hunters argued against them. People without “proper” documentation still have their freedom of movement constrained by national laws. Expulsions, evictions and displacements from living spaces are common in both democratic and authoritarian states.

Liberals argue that open borders generate knowledge and profits. Sovereigntists on the right claim that open borders invite migrants who steal jobs and introduce “alien” cultural habits. Sovereigntists on the left see open borders as the cause of inequalities and the source of “casino” capitalism.

A defining question of our time is whether democracy and social policy can survive in polities with open borders and fuzzy (cosmopolitan or European) cultural identities.

Whether borders are open or sealed not only depends on political decisions, but also on technological and administrative capacities. In the Middle Ages it was difficult to police territorial boundaries, and so borders were more like geographical zones rather than clear lines. Today the internet makes it hard for governments to control financial or communicative flows. Borders are always relative, as is the power of the states that administer them.

Moreover, different borders apply to different functions of the state – we should not assume an overlap between administrative, military, cultural and financial borders.

Most crucially, borders are not just lines on a map; they also represent complex institutions determining the link between territory, authority and rights. They differentiate between insiders and outsiders, between the public and the private, and between rulers and subjects.

The pandemic-induced restrictions to freedom of movement have varied from place to place. Decisions have not always been guided by medical or economic considerations, revealing a certain degree of governmental arbitrariness. For example, the rules on social distancing differ between the UK and Denmark. National borders have also been sealed, even though doctors have argued that sealing borders around small regional or urban centres is far more effective in reducing the spread of Covid-19.

In the initial stages of the pandemic, restrictions to freedom of movement were accepted by citizens. But public resistance is growing. Markets can hardly function without freedom of movement, even if certain transactions can be conducted virtually.

Measures to restrict our movements have become the new normal. Infected people are quarantined. Tracing devices are being applied. Only certain types of public gatherings are allowed. Travel restrictions persist. Governments are urging their local firms to become less dependent on international supply chains. All this amounts to a new configuration of space, authority and rights across the globe and within states.

The first implication of this new politics of space concerns relations between citizens. Lockdowns and physical distancing orders break our social affinity, bonds and habits. An atomised society is easy prey for autocratic politics. Unless restrictions on our freedom to move and socialise are lifted soon, we may see ever-more passive and self-centred citizens unable to stand up for their collective rights in the long term.

The second implication concerns relations between the state and citizens. Restrictions on citizens’ movement have been utilised by numerous governments for partisan political ends: minorities have been targeted in Hungary and parliaments have been sidelined almost everywhere. We have also seen the rise of a “paternalistic” state, to use the Italian politician Matteo Renzi’s expression, “which peeps into our lives and produces ever more ‘self-declarations’ to justify our whereabouts”.

The third implication concerns relations between states and transnational networks. In recent years, our personal relations, economic transactions and public engagements have been linked to non-territorial organisations, providing exchange of information, advocacy, lobbying and profit-making.

Networks of cities, bankers, environmentalists or media organisations have been key agents of connectivity across national borders. Networks are not only less territorial, but also more spontaneous, decentralised, informal and hybrid than states. This makes them more effective than states in obtaining and exchanging knowledge and applying it to trade, finance, communication and security.

Yet with the outbreak of the pandemic, states have reclaimed sovereignty over their borders and the subsequent lockdowns have frustrated transnational links. States have banned exports of medical equipment even within the EU; they have bailed out national champions such as the German airline Lufthansa; they have adopted national solutions to fighting the virus; they have scorned international organisations; and they have ignored transnational NGOs.

The virus may ignore national borders, but governments are busy reinforcing them. Globalisation and European integration are under threat. Transnational networks are struggling to survive in an environment of ever more walls, national regulations, and fear of “alien” cultures.

For Aristotle, only gods or brutes could be complete beings in isolation; human nature requires a community of persons, of place or territory. The politics of pandemics has deprived us of the latter and we do not know what the exit from the current lockdowns means, or what awaits us on the outside. 

Ideologically, no political project is viable without both a compelling vision of the future and a credible story about the past. Promoting particular interpretations of history and projecting different visions of the future is the life force of political parties and their strategists. Since the 18th century, the liberal tradition has understood time as a linear process of improvement. Against such progressive optimism, conservatives look back to pasts that appear morally superior to the present. 

However, it was not conservative nostalgia that shattered liberal assumptions about time and progress, but the human-made catastrophes of the 20th century. Two world wars and the deadly technologies that accompanied them rendered the end of time a foreseeable prospect. 

As the language of war is routinely used to talk about Covid-19, it may be useful to remember that the political, economic and social reconstruction that took place after the Second World War rested largely on governments’ ability to present a vision of the future as a time of recovery and growing prosperity.

Postwar politicians did not limit themselves to talking of improvements to come, but sought new ways of managing time, both privately and collectively. Against the totalitarian aspirations of fascist regimes to gain full control over individuals’ time, postwar liberal politicians promised to respect private time, while creating the conditions that would allow every citizen to enjoy it.

The management of time remains at the core of contemporary democracies. “Quality time”, “flexi-time”, and “leisure time” have become common themes of political and public debate. What these labels actually mean, however, depends largely on the political context in which they are used. When governments regulate weekly working hours, shops’ opening times, or the length of the school day, they define the boundaries that separate our collective and individual lives. 

Consider how many more free days workers enjoy in France than in Japan or the US. Or how many hours parents need to dedicate to childcare in Italy compared to Finland, where there is an extensive system of nurseries and schools. The allocation and enjoyment of time, that is, the question of how we spend our lives, is not a personal matter, but determined by political priorities. 

Similarly, governments privilege some stages of the life-cycle above others in the allocation of resources; sometimes benefiting older people, sometimes younger ones. States regulate the transfer of power and property between different generations, most notably through inheritance taxes. In all their different forms, political decisions shape the extent to which we decide to invest our time in the future. 

This extends to the most intimate aspects of our life, such as the decision whether or not to have children. The politics of time shapes social, family and individual life in very deep and concrete ways.

The pandemic has brought an enormous shock to the politics of time. The risk of contagion and the efforts to contain it have halted the usual flow of life and deprived us of something we took for granted: the ability to dispose freely of our private time. The scale of the epidemic justifies the stringency of the measures taken globally, but it does not reduce their significance. 

Paradoxically, by forcing us into our homes, the state has trespassed the very border that used to distinguish liberal democratic polities from pervasive authoritarian regimes. The domestic sphere, which was constructed by 19th-century liberal thinkers such as John Stuart Mill and Benjamin Constant as the preserve of individual freedom, is now the place of citizens’ supervised containment.

Our collective determination to survive the virus is making us comply. But what will happen once the virus is defeated? Will states quickly recede from our private time, or will they ask for ever greater powers to manage it, in order to mobilise much-needed human resources? 

As the economic crisis erodes incomes and savings, will politicians be tempted to use emergency measures to keep control of increasingly restless societies? Putting forward a vision for the future is essential to any political discourse. But will our politicians be able to present us with one?

The politics of time will be at the core of the confrontation that will take place between democrats and autocrats in the post-Covid future. 

For democrats to prevail, they will have to create a just and commonly shared vision of the future. A democratic approach to time will require not only the freedom to enjoy family or leisure time, but also a fair regulation of our working hours and the creation of a political environment that is conducive to civic participation.

The arbitrariness of selectively easing the current lockdowns does not bode well for the future. If demands are to be made on our time then we should be given something tangible in return in terms of access to public goods.

The postwar years offer lessons on how this could be achieved. But much of that vision was wiped out, not by a virus but by the political victory of neoliberalism from the late 1970s. Bringing back a decent and more caring idea of society, with no striking inequalities of “lived time”, will help us look forward to a more uplifting future. 

The alternative will be a society of resentful and nostalgic citizens trying to liberate themselves from imposed time constraints. Such a society would resemble the “goofus birds” imagined by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges in The Book of Imaginary Beings (1969): birds that built nests upside down and flew backwards, because they were not interested in where they were going, but in where they came from.

Jan Zielonka is a professor at the universities of Oxford and Venice and Stefania Bernini is an assistant professor at the University of Venice