A Europe in Emotional Shock Grapples With a New Era

It remains to be seen how far President Trump’s embrace of Russia and abandonment of traditional allies will go. But “the West” may be gone.

For decades a core objective of the Soviet Union was to “decouple” the United States from Europe. Decoupling, as it was called, would break the Western alliance that kept Soviet tanks from rolling across the Prussian plains.

Now, in weeks, President Trump has handed Moscow the gift that eluded it during the Cold War and since.

Europe, jilted, is in shock. The United States, a nation whose core idea is liberty and whose core calling has been the defense of democracy against tyranny, has turned on its ally and instead embraced a brutal autocrat, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Gripped by a sense of abandonment, alarmed at the colossal rearmament task before it, astonished by the upending of American ideology, Europe finds itself adrift.

“The United States was the pillar around which peace was managed, but it has changed alliance,” said Valérie Hayer, the president of the centrist Renew Europe group in the European Parliament. “Trump mouths the propaganda of Putin. We have entered a new epoch.”

The emotional impact on Europe is profound. On the long journey from the ruins of 1945 to a prosperous continent whole and free, America was central. President John F. Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in 1963 framed the fortitude of West Berlin as an inspiration to freedom seekers everywhere. President Ronald Reagan issued his challenge — “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” — at the Brandenburg Gate in 1987. European history has also been America’s history as a European power.

But the meaning of “the West” in this dawning era is already unclear. For many years, despite sometimes acute Euro-American tensions, it denoted a single strategic actor united in its commitment to the values of liberal democracy.