The Light Goes Out
Watching America’s travails from across the Atlantic elicits a special kind of horror.
This is the moment we’ve long feared. The nightmare of an American democratic collapse turns, with each passing day, into reality. It’s a stress test of hyperpower dimensions—the machinery of checks and balances straining like an 18-wheeler hurled into a hairpin turn as Donald Trump goes pedal-to-the-metal, unbound and unhinged. “This is going to be great television,” Trump told Volodymyr Zelensky, after berating the Ukrainian president in the Oval Office with the cameras rolling. He was right; we cannot bear to look away.
Watching America’s travails from across the Atlantic elicits a special kind of horror. Europe is preparing for war. Defense budgets are soaring; Germany’s military spending alone increased 23% in 2024. In an era of European economic stagnation and declining social spending, the military industrial complex is booming. The Düsseldorf-based arms maker Rheinmetall, for example, posted a 38% increase in net profit last year. “With a 50% sales growth in the defence business,” the firm’s CEO exulted, “Rheinmetall is on its way from being a European systems supplier to a global champion.”
War profiteers aside, the mood in Europe is dour. The European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wants to raise the cap on member states’ deficit spending and secure 150 billion euros of new loans, all of which would go to defense. “We are living in the most momentous and dangerous of times,” von der Leyen told the press. “I do not need to describe the grave nature of the threats that we face. Or the devastating consequences that we will have to endure if those threats would come to pass.” The same day, the Dutch Justice and Security Minister issued a recommendation that every household stockpile enough to survive 72 hours without basic services. The subtext was clear: prepare for war.
That message is harder to swallow in the absence of American power. For decades, the US military shield has allowed Europe to under-invest in defense. That era is over, yet even with the current spike in European military spending, America’s willingness to uphold the security guarantees at the heart of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is far from certain. NATO chief Mark Rutte is regarded as a “Trump whisperer,” but the president’s criticism of Europe and adulation for Russian president Vladimir Putin has infused the alliance with instability.
NATO is critical to European defense, but there’s more at stake than the tripwire of US soldiers stationed in former Cold War bases across Western Europe. Ever since president Woodrow Wilson arrived at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 with his Fourteen Points, the United states has claimed the moral high ground on the world stage. Wilson was not successful. He alienated allies, ignored colonial nationalists, and failed to convince the US Senate that America should join the League of Nations. But the president’s call to “make the world safe for democracy” through collective security, national self-determination, and free markets created a blueprint for American liberal democratic internationalism that has lasted a hundred years.
It was this vision that guided the American policymaking at the end of the Second World War. The pillars of the postwar order—the economic order hammered out at the Bretton Woods conference, the creation of the United Nations, the rehabilitation of West Germany and Japan—were rooted in Wilsonian principles. Likewise, the defining US initiatives of the early Cold War—the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the creation of NATO—were infused with American liberal democratic internationalism.
Let’s be clear: from the Cold War to the War on Terror, American foreign policy was full of smoke and mirrors. Time and time again, U.S. actions on the world stage fell short of the moral imperative that US policymakers claimed to uphold. In the name of anticommunism, the United States unleashed a torrent of covert and overt operations, from orchestrating regime changes to assassinating foreign leaders, from leveling embargos to supporting illiberal strongmen, and from waging proxy wars to carrying out full spectrum invasions. In the name of anti-terrorism, the U.S. embarked on a “Forever War” that has killed an estimated 940,000 people. Suffice it to say, in recent history, the United States has rarely followed its moral compass.
But even critics of American power have rarely dismissed American Exceptionalism outright. That belief—that the US is a city on a hill, with a mission to bring its light unto the world—is deeply rooted in American history and culture. Is there any other nation so convinced of its own beneficence? More often, critics have imagined what it would be like if America actually lived up to its ideals. In the words of Langston Hughes, “Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed.”
Trump is significant because he rejects not only Wilsonianism, but American Exceptionalism writ large. If Trump’s America is a city on a hill, it is walled off from the world, the light extinguished. “Give us back the Statue of Liberty,” a member of the European Parliament recently demanded. “It was our gift to you. But apparently you despise her.”
The Trump administration demurred. “My advice to that unnamed low-level French politician would be to remind them that it’s only because of the United States of America that the French are not speaking German right now,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters. “So they should be very grateful to our great country.”
Leavitt was right. The French should be grateful for the Wilsonian impulse that underpinned American participation in World War II. Yet that brand of liberal democratic internationalism is anathema to Trump. Instead, he has cozied up to Putin and disparaged Zelensky, threatened Mexico and Canada, and mused about taking Greenland and the Panama Canal. At the same time, Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) chief Elon Musk has ransacked the US tool kit for promoting a liberal world order: USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Institute for Peace, the list grows longer, day by day.
The result will be an acceleration of the tide of authoritarianism sweeping the globe. “Democracy is not a fragile flower; still, it needs cultivating,” president Ronald Reagan told members of the British House of Commons in 1982. Less than a decade later, the fall of the Iron Curtain and the dissolution of the Soviet Union sparked a wave of democratization across Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America. “We are living in very extraordinary times,” Czech playwright-turned-president Vaclav Havel enthused to a joint session of the U.S. Congress in 1990. “The human face of the world is changing so rapidly that none of the familiar political speedometers are adequate.”
Today, the excitement of the early post-Cold War era seems like ancient history. In our time, democracy is in retreat. Not since the 1970s have so many people been yoked to autocracy, the V-Dem Institute estimated in its 2025 annual report, some 72% of the world’s population. Liberal democracies are now the least common regime type in the world.
Democratic backsliding is a global phenomenon, but the possibility of an American collapse is uniquely worrying. The United States may not be the “indispensable nation,” as National Security Advisor Madeline Albright put it, but even the critics among us fear the darkness that would follow an American democratic eclipse. And we are nearing the tipping point: Trump has unleashed DOGE on the federal bureaucracy, fired inspectors general, installed loyalist hacks in the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and threatened the press, law firms, and universities. He stands astride the corpse of the Republican Party, its non-MAGA members too craven to stand up for the rule of law.
In the face of such an authoritarian assault, the judicial branch is the bulwark of democracy’s defense. But Trump’s maximalist understanding of presidential power recognizes no checks or balances on the executive. “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” the president wrote on social media. And with a Trump-appointed ultraconservative majority, the Supreme Court is a slender reed of hope. “If it continues like this, the United States will not score as a democracy when we release [next year’s] data,” V-Dem chief Staffan Lindberg recently predicted. “If it continues like this, democracy [in the U.S.] will not last another six months.”
Watching the crisis unfold from across the Atlantic, Europeans democrats cannot help but feel the earth tremble. Politics is polarizing here, too; as in America, the European far-right is on the rise. And the war in Ukraine feels close to home. “You have a nice ocean and don’t feel it now,” Zelensky warned Trump in the Oval Office. “But you will feel it in the future.”
Five years before Woodrow Wilson arrived at Versailles, British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey reflected on the coming war. “The lamps are going out all over Europe,” he said, “we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” Today, we watch the flickering of American democracy. We know that for so many at home and abroad, in the words of Langston Hughes, “America never was America to me.” Yet in this dark age, we still fear what will happen when the light goes out.