French philosopher Jean Baudrillard once observed: “The confrontation between America and Europe reveals not so much a rapprochement as a distortion, an unbridgeable rift ... There isn’t just a gap between us, but a whole chasm of modernity.”
Three decades later, that chasm has only widened. What was once heralded as the transatlantic alliance now resembles a frayed relationship—full of historical baggage, misaligned expectations, and growing estrangement. The United States oscillates between isolationism and imperial overreach, between partnership and pressure. Europe, for its part, responds with inertia—and a dangerous innocence.
But Baudrillard’s point went deeper than geopolitical drift. What he identified was a crisis of recognition: The more America and Europe engage, the more distorted their reflections become. They speak the same language of modernity but mean entirely different things. What Europeans interpret as a universal project grounded in Enlightenment reason, Americans increasingly read through the lens of identity, loyalty, and power.
Erosion of Enlightenment Ideals
This is not merely cultural divergence; it marks a philosophical fracture. The Enlightenment subject—autonomous through reason (Immanuel Kant), morally responsible through judgment (Hannah Arendt), and truth-seeking through discourse (Jürgen Habermas)—is dissolving. In the United States, it is increasingly being replaced by a tribalized model of identity politics in which race, religion, and political allegiance outweigh civic ideals. The result is not just fragmentation, but the erosion of a shared public world.
One figure in this transformation is Leo Strauss, the German-Jewish émigré whose critique of liberal relativism shaped generations of American conservative thinkers. His disciples—many of whom influenced the neoconservative turn under former US President George W. Bush—called for a return to elite-led governance grounded in moral clarity and power politics. Their legacy lives on in the moralizing, anti-universalist impulses of today’s American right. What began as an esoteric intellectual project has morphed into a popular political ideology that mistrusts diversity, devalues deliberation, and thrives on conflict.
Europe, meanwhile, has clung to a post-national ideal. The European Union, a project inspired by thinkers like Kant, Arendt, and Habermas, imagines itself as a republic of states and citizens—a polity of participation, not domination. This self-understanding contrasts sharply with the American doctrine of “America First,” and it reveals a deeper civilizational split: Europe thinks in terms of the common good; America, increasingly, in terms of property and sovereignty.
Yet this isn’t just a transatlantic issue. The same struggle over the meaning of democracy, identity, and power is playing out within the United States itself. US President Donald Trump is not the origin of this rupture; he is its most visible symptom. The real battle is structural. On one side stands a coalition intent on concentrating power—rejecting institutional constraints, seeking ideological dominance, and modeling their ambitions on illiberal democracies from Budapest to Moscow. On the other side are fragmented defenders of constitutional order, civic pluralism, and liberal norms—similar in spirit to European aspirations.
Seeking Political Hegemony
What makes this moment uniquely dangerous is the intensity of belief that animates both sides. The Trump-aligned camp believes the stakes are existential—that compromise means defeat, and defeat means erasure. They are not seeking policy wins but political hegemony. Meanwhile, the defenders of liberal democracy have yet to formulate a compelling counter-narrative that resonates as deeply with the public imagination. Institutions alone are proving insufficient against a movement driven by grievance, nostalgia, and a vision of retributive justice.
If Trump believes that America’s survival depended on his return to power, compromise becomes impossible. Politics becomes existential. The traditional notion of divided government and checks and balances gives way to zero-sum mobilization. This has consequences not just for Americans, but for their allies.
Europe must recognize that it is witnessing not just a US election cycle, but a systemic transformation—and one that is also echoing across its own backyard. What happens in Washington will not remain in Washington. The rollback of democratic guardrails in the US would embolden authoritarian movements across Europe and weaken the international norms that underpin liberal order.
To pretend this is temporary, or merely rhetorical, is naive. Baudrillard was right: This isn’t “a gap”—or just a political disagreement. It is a struggle over the meaning of modernity, playing out on a global stage.
Jackson Janes is a resident senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund (GMF) and president emeritus of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC.
Markus Ziener is a professor of journalism at Media University Berlin and a visiting senior fellow at the GMF’s Berlin office.
