Author: Maciej Dachowski

The Illusion of Interruption

Joe Biden’s presidency inflicted more damage on the Western order than Donald Trump’s first term. Not because Biden pursued bad policies, but because his presidency lulled Europe into the illusion that after every anomaly, transatlantic normalcy returns on its own. The belief that one need only wait for the next electoral cycle to return to familiar patterns proved to be perhaps the most costly political mistake Europe made in the last decade. A mistake that suppressed strategic reflexes precisely when they were needed most.

To understand where the West finds itself today, one must wind the clock back to the right starting point. Not to January 2025, when Trump assumed office for the second time. Not to November 2024, when he won the election. The correct date is January 2017. That is when the process began that continues uninterrupted to this day, though during four years of Biden’s interlude Europe preferred not to notice it. Trumpism is not an episode closed by the 2020 election results. It was and remains a project of transforming the Republican Party, which Biden’s presidency did not halt but in some sense accelerated, relieving its architects of the responsibility of governing and giving them time to accomplish what they could not have done while in power: the ideological consolidation of the party, the removal of its last Atlanticists, and a return to power with an organisation qualitatively different from the one Trump inherited in 2016 [1]. Had both of Trump’s terms followed directly one after the other, the continuity of governance would have imposed its own constraints, compromises, and costs. Biden’s interlude activated none of those corrective mechanisms.

Europe and Poland today face the consequences of a transformation that began in 2017, continued through Biden’s interlude without being arrested, and will last at least until 2029. Twelve years in total. The question of what transatlantic relations look like in 2026 cannot be answered by comparing them to what existed in 2015 or 2020. That point of reference has ceased to exist. And the sooner Europe acknowledges this, the more time will remain for an answer that is not nostalgia masquerading as strategy.

The Party That Changed Without Trump

Poland has invested more in its relationship with Washington over the last decade than any other European ally: military bases, equipment purchases, and political capital spent on building its position as the United States’ key strategic partner in the region [2]. That investment rested on the assumption of bipartisan continuity in Atlanticism. That assumption is now fundamentally in question, and to understand why, one must look deeper than Trump.

American isolationism has deep roots in the United States’ political tradition and its own canonical figures. Calvin Coolidge, president from 1923 to 1929, articulated a conviction that returned in various forms over the decades: that the business of America is business, that what matters is what is measurable, concrete, and domestic, and that involvement in others’ affairs is a luxury the republic should not afford itself [3]. Coolidge was not the inventor of isolationism, but he gave it a formulation capacious enough to survive nearly a hundred years. It is no coincidence that during Trump’s first term, Coolidge’s portrait hung in the Oval Office [4], and that Trump himself repeatedly invoked his philosophy of limited government and the primacy of the national interest as a reference point for his own policies. When Trump says today that allies must pay for their own security or fend for themselves, he speaks a language Coolidge would recognise without difficulty.

That philosophy nonetheless had its weaker moments within the GOP. Wendell Willkie, the Republican presidential candidate in 1940, supported aid to Great Britain and American engagement in Europe in defiance of the dominant isolationist faction within his own party [5]. He lost the election, but his vision of a mutually interconnected and indivisible world shaped the postwar order, with NATO at its centre. Figures like Willkie disappeared from the GOP gradually. Barry Goldwater in the 1960s shifted the party toward hard-line anti-communism, in which European allies ceased to be partners in a shared civilisational project and became states that America protects unilaterally [6]. Reagan restored the rhetoric of Atlantic solidarity, but built the party around a cult of American strength and exceptionalism rather than around the idea of mutual interdependence. The Contract with America and the Tea Party successively drove out of the GOP those for whom Atlanticism was something more than a bargaining chip in budgetary disputes with Europe [7].

When Trump won the 2016 primaries, the party was already ideologically ready for what he brought. He did not kill the Atlantic tradition within the GOP. He found it already dead and was the first to say so publicly. Biden’s presidency did not revive that tradition, because it could not: Atlanticists did not disappear from the GOP because Trump won, but Trump won because the Atlanticists were already disappearing. Four years of Biden’s presidency only convinced the party that it could win without them and without their sensitivity toward alliances.

The United States’ credibility as a guarantor of European security had, since the 1970s, been bipartisan credibility. This meant that regardless of who occupied the White House, certain commitments remained intact [8]. That bipartisanship did not collapse with Trump’s victory in 2024. It collapsed much earlier, and the current term is merely its most visible symptom.

Trust as a Non-Renewable Resource

A thesis recurs regularly in the debate on transatlantic relations: that after Trump it will be possible to rebuild the alliance on the old terms. That the next Democratic president will make the appropriate declarations, send the appropriate officials to the appropriate summits, and the relationship will return to its pre-2017 state. That thesis is false, and for structural rather than personal reasons.

Trust in international relations is not a state that can be restored by declaration. It is a resource built over years of predictable behaviour and destroyed asymmetrically, far faster than it accumulates. The most instructive illustration of this mechanism is what occurred in the Persian Gulf after 28 February 2026, when the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran [9]. For decades, the presence of American military bases in Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates was understood as a concrete and material security guarantee. Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, Camp Arifjan in Kuwait were not merely military installations. They were the physical expression of an American commitment to regional stability [10]. When Washington conducted strikes on Iran from Qatari territory without prior agreement with Doha, and Iran retaliated by striking Qatari gas installations at Ras Laffan, that assumption collapsed. Qatar, which only weeks earlier had publicly opposed the use of its territory for attacks on Iran, found itself in the middle of a war it had not chosen [11]. Qatar’s foreign ministry spokesman stated plainly that one of the key outcomes of the war was the exposure of the breakdown of the concept of a regional security system in the Gulf. It is difficult to find a more precise diagnosis of what trust looks like when destroyed by a unilateral action of an ally.

Qatar is not an exception but the most vivid example of a broader process. Saudi Arabia refused to grant airspace for strikes on Iran. The UAE and Turkey made analogous declarations [12]. States that had spent decades building their security on partnership with Washington chose distance when confronted with a war launched without consultation with them. Not because they broke with America. Because they understood that their security and interests are not a variable Washington takes into account when deciding to use force. That observation could just as easily have been made in Warsaw, Tallinn, or Riga.

For the states of Central and Eastern Europe, the key question is no longer whether Trump will honour specific commitments. It is whether any future American administration will be able to make credible new commitments, given that American voters can be persuaded to elect another Trump, and American institutions lack mechanisms to prevent a president from waging war without consulting allies. This problem will not disappear with the end of the current term. It is embedded in the structure of a political system that Europeans for years treated as a stable anchor, failing to notice that its durability depended on a bipartisan consensus that no longer exists.

The American system guarantees on average a change of power every four to eight years. Poland and other states on NATO’s eastern flank are building defence capabilities that require a twenty- to thirty-year planning horizon. The asymmetry of time horizons has always existed, but for decades it was offset by the bipartisanship of Atlanticism. When that bipartisanship disappeared, the asymmetry became a strategic trap. A state that plans its security on the basis of an alliance whose continuity depends on the outcome of elections in a third country falls into a dependence it cannot control and whose outcomes it cannot predict.

The Board of Peace, the alternative conflict management architecture proposed by Trump that operates outside the framework of international law, is in this sense not so much a political project as a signal that Washington no longer intends to operate within the system of which it was itself the principal architect [13]. The United States is waging war in the Persian Gulf without activating any alliance mechanisms, without consulting European partners, without a collective mandate. NATO as an institution is silent, because it was not consulted and is not a party to the conflict being waged by its key member. This is a deliberate choice by Washington, demonstrating that the United States reserves the right to take military action entirely outside the structures of an alliance it created and whose Article Five it is supposed to guarantee.

It is from this that conclusions are being drawn by those on the American side who question the purpose of NATO in its current form. Voices are emerging, including from circles close to the Trump administration, calling for its replacement by a new military alliance, a coalition of states genuinely ready to act, in which there might be a place for Poland and even for Ukraine. The proposal sounds appealing, particularly to states that for years felt treated by NATO as peripheral rather than central. But it raises a question that remains unanswered: can an alliance proposed by an administration that has just demonstrated it wages war without consulting anyone be trusted more than the institution that same administration is now undermining? Trust in NATO was built over seventy years of joint exercises, procedures, planning, and mutual guarantees. A new architecture proposed from Washington would be an alliance without that history, created by a party that has just shown how it treats existing partners. For Europe and for Poland, the response to that proposal must be cool and strategic.

What the Villa Mannerheim Teaches Us

On 26 March 2026, Helsinki hosted the summit of the Joint Expeditionary Force, a defence coalition led by the United Kingdom and comprising the states of Northern and Baltic Europe [14]. For the first time in the history of this format, part of the discussions was devoted to the question of European security architecture on the assumption of a possible United States withdrawal from NATO. One of the diplomatic sources cited stated bluntly: NATO is paralysed, the alliance is collapsing, Europe cannot wait for its complete disintegration. The location was not coincidental. Finlandisation, the art of preserving sovereignty in proximity to a hostile neighbour and without American security guarantees, was for decades a synonym for an unwanted compromise. Now it is Finland that hosts the first meeting at which European democracies are beginning to seriously consider security without Washington’s protective umbrella.

At the table in Helsinki sat the United Kingdom, seeking after Brexit a new formula for European engagement, the Baltic states, which earned the bitter right to say: we warned you, and Canada, whose prime minister joined remotely in a gesture significant in the context of American threats directed at Ottawa [15]. Poland was not at that table. This is a symptomatic absence. Poland is a state that made one of the largest contributions to arming Ukraine, has the longest land border with areas of conflict, the largest defence budget among Eastern European NATO members, and real military capability. And yet Polish security policy for the last decade was built on the assumption of durable American engagement, which proved more fragile than anyone was willing to admit.

The question facing Poland today, and more broadly Europe, is not whether NATO will survive the current crisis. It may survive. It may not survive in its current form. The real question is whether Europe will manage to build credible defence capability before we learn which of those possibilities materialises. In 1943, Wendell Willkie wrote that the world had become small and mutually interdependent and that the United States must assume the leadership history had entrusted to it. That thesis shaped the postwar order, NATO included. Eighty years later, the Trump administration is building an architecture based on entirely different premises: that the world is divided into the spheres of influence of great powers, that the security of smaller states becomes a bargaining chip between the stronger, and that international standing depends on capability rather than on legal or alliance commitments. This is not a deviation from the norm. It is the result of a nine-year transformation that Europe treated for too long as a temporary anomaly.

The dinner at Villa Mannerheim was not the beginning of a new era. It was the first public acknowledgement that the old era has ended. For Poland and for Europe, the appropriate task is not to wait for the return of a normalcy that will in all probability not return in its former shape. It is to understand the world in which they have woken up, and to act in accordance with that diagnosis, before others define their place for them.

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[1] Lilliana Mason, Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2018; Thomas E. Mann, Norman J. Ornstein, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, Basic Books, Nowy Jork 2012.

[2] NATO, Defence Expenditure of NATO Countries 2014-2024, komunikat prasowy, 17 czerwca 2024.

[3] Calvin Coolidge, Address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Washington D.C., 25 stycznia 1925. Pełny tekst: Miller Center, University of Virginia, millercenter.org.

[4] Portret Coolidge’a cieszył się szczególnym uznaniem Reagana, który przeniósł go na honorowe miejsce w Gabinecie Gabinetowym. Zob. Amity Shlaes, Coolidge, Harper, Nowy Jork 2013, s. 3-12; PBS American Experience, Calvin Coolidge, www.pbs.org.

[5] Wendell Willkie, One World, Simon & Schuster, Nowy Jork 1943; Samuel Zipp, The Idealist: Wendell Willkie’s Wartime Quest to Build One World, Belknap Press, Cambridge 2020; Stewart M. Patrick, “Why Wendell Willkie’s Vision of Internationalism Remains Essential Today”, Council on Foreign Relations, 22 lipca 2019.

[6] Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, Hill and Wang, Nowy Jork 2001.

[7] Theda Skocpol, Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, Oxford University Press, Nowy Jork 2012.

[8] G. John Ikenberry, A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of Global Order, Yale University Press, New Haven 2020.

[9] Szczegółowy przebieg wydarzeń: 2026 Iran–Israel war, Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org; Reuters, U.S. and Israel launch strikes on Iran, 28 lutego 2026.

[10] Muhanad Seloom, “Four Things the Gulf States Will Expect From the U.S. After Trump’s Iran War”, Foreign Policy, 24 marca 2026.

[11] Oświadczenia katarskiego MSZ: Al Jazeera, “Qatari PM and US officials discuss strategic ties amid Iran war”, 27 marca 2026, aljazeera.com.

[12] “U.S.-Iran War: How the Interests of Gulf States Are Diverging”, Foreign Policy, 7 kwietnia 2026.

[13] Biały Dom, Presidential Statement on the Establishment of the Board of Peace, styczeń 2026.

[14] Joint Statement from the leaders of the Joint Expeditionary Force, 26 marca 2026, www.gov.uk; Office of the President of the Republic of Finland, JEF Leaders’ Summit in Helsinki, www.presidentti.fi.

[15] Office of the President of the Republic of Finland, President of the Republic of Finland to host JEF Leaders’ Summit at the Presidential Palace in Helsinki, 17 marca 2026, www.presidentti.fi.