Empires rarely receive a formal resignation letter from history. What they encounter instead is a subtler mutation: the moment when obedience quietly reorganises itself into coordination — without them in the room. 

The recent Munich Security Conference offered an unusually empirical glimpse into this transition, becoming an open admission that Europe can no longer count on the old guarantees. As a result, Europeans have been thrust into the throes of a tortured process of introspection, self-doubt and recrimination. 

Rarely has Europe’s confidence in itself and its place in the world been so thoroughly pulverised in a matter of a few months.

At first, it appeared to be mere diplomatic friction between Washington and its traditional allies. However, it soon became clear that it reflected an emerging disjuncture between the inherited architecture of Western-led institutions and the contemporary distribution of productive capacity. 

Observers warn it was far from another passing flare-up of transatlantic tension, which has become a hallmark of the Trump era. In an arresting phrase, Munich’s own report warned that the international system has entered “a period of wrecking-ball politics”, a world in which rules and norms were increasingly upended by great-power rivalry.

During the Cold War, and even into the post-2008 era, European elites could treat deviations in US policy as episodic anomalies (Iraq, Afghanistan, Trump I). However, a second Trump presidency transforms unilateralism from accident into pattern. 

A CNN’s description of Democrats attending Munich almost as supplicants, reassuring European leaders that America might “come back to its original form”, illustrates something profound. The postwar order functioned because US leadership was experienced as temporally stable. 

Once partners begin to think in generational timelines (“it’s going to take generations before they feel comfortable”), leadership stops being a structural fact and becomes an electoral variable.

Meanwhile, debates over Taiwan, where even rising Democratic figures appear hesitant to articulate clear red lines, reveal the growing disjunction between US global commitments and domestic political consensus. The working-class critique voiced at the conference (“those institutions… have failed to deliver”) is especially telling. It suggests that the legitimacy crisis of the post-1945 order is no longer confined to the........

© The Express Tribune Blog