2025-03-12
38 分钟This is the Guardian.
The Guardian Archive, Long Read.
Hi, I'm Madeline Schwartz.
I'm editor in chief of the Dial and the author of the End of Atlanticism Has Trump Killed the Ideology that Won the Cold War?
Published in the Guardian, long reads in 2018.
I was initially interested in reporting this story because I moved to Berlin in 2017, shortly after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States the first time, and everyone in Germany was talking about the end of the transatlantic, or the Atlantic, relationship.
This was a conversation that was inescapable.
It was in newspapers, on television, everywhere I went.
But it was also surprising to me, coming from the United States, because I had never really heard the term Atlanticism, and I wondered what it actually meant.
Much of my reporting for this story really consisted of digging down into the definition of Atlanticism and asking, what does it actually mean?
The conversations that I had with people often seemed to me very vague.
There was talk of values that were often defined in very broad strokes.
But the relationship between the United States and Europe is so complex and has changed so much since World War II, and understanding what those values are seemed to me to be very important.
What I eventually found and what the piece is really about is that the transatlantic relationship is far less stable and has been far less stable than many were claiming at the time.
So much has changed since I wrote this article, and on the other hand, so much hasn't.
I'm recording this in late February 2025, and Trump has once again put European foreign policy in disarray.
Vice President J.D.
vance gave a rather chilling speech at Munich, where he accused European nations of being the United States true enemies.
And the United States has now reneged on its commitments to Ukraine and is aligning itself in Russia, creating a historic shift in United States foreign policy.
In Germany, Frederick Mertz, who was once the head of the Atlantic Brucke, a central transatlantic institution in Germany, has recently won the election and has made European defense, autonomy and independence from the United States central to his political program.