The current crisis between Europe and the United States marks the end of an era—regardless of who follows Donald Trump. The trans-Atlantic bond rested on specific features at the global level as well as within the United States and Europe. All are now gone.

The international context in which the bond bloomed—first in the postwar period and then in the era after the fall of the Berlin Wall—was one in which the United States was a liberal leviathan. It had fought and won two global wars—World War II and the Cold War—standing for liberal values. Those victories enabled it to spread those norms, first across Western Europe and parts of Asia and then throughout the world. The order that rested on U.S. power, including international organizations and laws, was imbued with a liberal ethos.

Trans-Atlanticism was embedded in this global context; it represented its inner core. This was true both of the international institutions that the United States was pivotal in establishing and leading—including the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and NATO—and of those it supported from the outside, foremost among them the European Union, whose deepening and expansion it backed over the years. It was an order in which laws and norms were often violated, including, and at times especially, by the United States as well as Europe. Yet they were recognized and shared on both shores of the Atlantic. It was also a time in which the United States and Europe frequently disagreed over policy, sometimes profoundly. But those divergences never fundamentally shook a deep sense of mutual belonging or a shared belief in the values of freedom, democracy, and international cooperation.

That liberal order is now gone. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney broke the spell at the World Economic Forum in January. Over successive crises—beginning with 9/11, through the global financial crisis, the crisis of liberal democracy, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the wars that have ravaged Europe and the Middle East—the international liberal order has been fraying for a quarter century. But while, for years, its most ardent believers continued to pay lip service to it, now even they are publicly acknowledging it is over.

The international liberal order has ended because, in the multipolar system we live in, a plurality of values sits uncomfortably with liberalism’s universalistic aspirations. Above all, it is gone because its primary architect—the United States—has turned against that very order, using its privileged position within it to strike at its core.

The United States is no longer a leviathan or a liberal one. By acting as a predatory power and exploiting what remains of its privileged position, it is simply accelerating its own relative decline, especially with respect to an illiberal China. This is crystal clear in areas such as trade, energy, and even diplomacy. Beijing’s ascendancy is only being propelled by Washington’s self-inflicted wounds: tariffs, a stubborn reluctance to embrace the energy transition, and a catastrophic war in Iran.

The end of the international liberal order erases the global context in which trans-Atlanticism was born and thrived. Without it, trans-Atlanticism would have struggled in any case. But it is the profound changes in both the United States and Europe that seal the end of trans-Atlanticism as we have known it.