In 1969, Charles de Gaulle told his friend André Malraux that America’s “desire – and one day it will satisfy it – is to desert Europe. You will see.” It has taken nearly six decades, but de Gaulle’s prophecy now looks uncomfortably close to fulfilment.

Among EU officials, a harsher conclusion is taking hold

After years of diplomatic effort to manage, placate and charm successive American presidents – and Donald Trump in particular – European leaders are coming to a grim realisation: the United States is, at best, indifferent to their interests and sensibilities and, at worst, openly hostile to them.

Some, such as Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, still believe Trump can be cajoled, that the transatlantic relationship can somehow be salvaged. Even Sir Keir Starmer was at pains this week to play down the widening rifts with Washington.

Yet among EU officials, a harsher conclusion is taking hold: this time, with Trump’s bullying of Europe over Greenland, the rupture feels real. Nato, they fear, may exist in name only, and any attempt to rationalise or excuse Trump’s conduct risks self-deception.

This is Nato’s Suez moment. Just as Britain’s withdrawal from east of Suez in the late 1960s marked the effective end of imperial pretensions, the Greenland drama may signal the unravelling of America’s post-war security compact with Europe. If Suez revealed that Britain could no longer act as a global power, Greenland may reveal that the United States no longer sees itself as Europe’s guarantor.

At first glance, none of this is surprising. Long before his Greenland gambit, Trump was a hate figure across much of Europe. His narcissism, vulgarity and bombast seemed to confirm every suspicion about America at its worst: nativist, isolationist, crudely self-interested – a fortress America led by a man with little patience for allies or alliances. His recent foreign-policy manoeuvres, from Venezuela to Greenland, appear only to reinforce that caricature.

But there is a more intriguing possibility. What if Trump’s noisy blundering is not merely the product of personal crudity, but an overdue recognition of a deeper truth – that the United States and its transatlantic allies are not natural partners?

What is usually called “the West” has never been a permanent community of shared interests. Western nations share a common history, culture and political inheritance. But a shared civilisation does not automatically translate into enduring political unity.

As the Welsh-Australian foreign-policy realist Owen Harries argued in Foreign Affairs, back in........

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