With authoritarianism on the rise — and Russia attacking its neighbors to the East — Europeans rightly wonder if they can still count on the U.S. to remain their primary economic, military and political partner, the rock upon which what was once called the Western Alliance of democratic nations was sustained. I was in Brussels recently to discuss the results of our midterm elections and their implications for all of these questions as a guest of the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the Foundation for European Progressive Studies, a Brussels-based think tank.
I wrote a bit on what European leaders were asking and what my take was in this OpEd for the Maine Sunday Telegram. Bottom line: the U.S. is not out of the woods yet and Europeans would be well advised to be developing contingency plans for a possible world where an administration in Washington is on the side of Putin and other authoritarians.
I was in Europe on a similar mission in 2016 — after the primaries and before that disastrous presidential election — after which I wrote this Telegram OpEd warning what a disaster a Trump presidency would be, however unlikely such an outcome appeared at the time.
COLIN WOODARD is a New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist. He is the author of six books that have been translated into a dozen foreign languages and inspired an NBC television drama. He is currently Director of Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Affairs at Salve Regina University. As State and National Affairs Writer at the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram he won a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2016. He is a contributing editor at POLITICO and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, Smithsonian and dozens of other major publications.