Source: Time

By Ian Bremmer

The historic concord between the U.S. and Europe made the West safe and rich. Now it’s in danger of collapse

For decades, the transatlantic partnership has been crucial tointernational security and the stability of the global economy. Through organizations like NATO, U.S. and European leaders have worked together to advance democracy, liberty, rule of law and the market-based values that have helped lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty around the world. There has never been a greater alliance of capable and like-minded partners.

But today that alliance is weaker and less influential than at any other time since the 1930s. Americans and Europeans are distracted by challenges at home. Anger at government and public anxiety over the impact of globalization are on the rise. Emerging powers in Asia and elsewhere are asserting new values, and the U.S. and Europe are increasingly at odds over how best to adapt to a changing world.

Neither side seems to realize that an alliance that has been the backbone of the postwar era is crumbling. Europe is preoccupied with internal challenges like the migrant crisis, the upcoming referendum on Britain’s membership in the E.U. and ongoing disputes with Russia. In the U.S. presidential campaign, the transatlantic relationship has been less than an afterthought, overshadowed by antitrade rhetoric over China and posturing about American greatness. The horrific mass shooting in Orlando on June 12 and its possible connection to ISIS will only demand more attention from an exhausted and angry electorate.

Yet the decades-old U.S.-Europe partnership remains essential. “Globalization seems to have made the Atlantic wider, when it needs to become smaller,” says former British Foreign Secretary David Miliband. “A multipolar world does not diminish the need for transatlantic cooperation. It enhances it. From the pivot to Asia, which is necessary on both sides of the Atlantic, to the management of the global commons, shared values need to be turned into shared priorities.”

The transatlantic rift has been years in the making. In the 1990s, the war in the former Yugoslavia generated intense resentment among Americans who were frustrated that Europeans depended on the U.S. to solve European security problems. The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 provoked unprecedented resistance from France and Germany. The global financial crisis stoked European skepticism of U.S.-style laissez-faire capitalism. The U.S. National Security Agency was caught spying on friendly governments, including European ones, raising fears that American Internet companies had given U.S. intelligence agencies deep access to European secrets–which led German Chancellor Angela Merkel and others to call for a European Internet walled off from the U.S.

Yet these events are symptoms, not sources, of the cancer infecting transatlantic relations. The problem is that there is no credible Cold War–scale rival to unite the U.S. and Europe in the face of a common threat. China is no democracy, and the state plays a heavy role in its economy, but there is a deep economic interdependence in its relations with both the U.S. and Europe. Russia can cause trouble, but it lacks the Soviet Union’s global military reach and broad ideological appeal. Without an existential enemy, it’s easy to imagine that it’s not worth the trouble to bring the U.S. and Europe together.

And right now it is trouble–a lot of it. After the bloody, exhausting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Americans have turned inward. In Donald Trump, a major political party is likely to nominate a candidate who questions the basic value of the transatlantic relationship. The E.U., faced with a bewildering number of internal challenges, is fragmenting. On June 23, British voters will go to the polls to determine whether the U.K. will remain in the E.U. A vote to leave would create tremendous turmoil for both the British and E.U. economies. It would remove Washington’s closest E.U. ally from the union. And it could encourage exit referendums in countries like France, Italy and the Netherlands, where public support for a vote is already dangerously high. Unlike Britain, these countries are core members of the euro zone and the Schengen Agreement on open borders. Their exit could derail the entire European project.

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