When Change Turns Against Reason

This morning I read Heather Cox Richardson’s latest piece, and something in me tightened. I’ve followed the policy shifts, but her article cut through the noise: the U.S. is not merely drifting from Europe; it is actively weaponizing our oldest alliances for domestic political gain.

And that, more than any tariff, speech, or doctrine, is what worries me.

Richardson describes how the new National Economic and Security Council frames Europe not as a partner to be strengthened, but as an economic threat to be disciplined. The idea is not cooperation or even hard negotiation — it is subjugation. It is humiliating allies to prove dominance. It is turning the institutions that sustained 80 years of peace into props for dom

estic resentment. Reading it, I felt a familiar disbelief: they are not stumbling into conflict; they are constructing it.

I understand the exhaustion that got us here. I understand why people feel betrayed by the neoliberal model, why inequality, migration, and cultural anxiety fuel a sense of abandonment. But none of that justifies the leap into this new vision: a politics that demolishes institutions without offering a serious blueprint to replace them.

A politics that treats complexity as weakness and interdependence as a trap.

A politics that demands the world bend not to reason but to grievance.

I’ve written before — in The Architecture of Trust and in What I Stand For — that institutions are slow, imperfect, and often maddening, but they are the machinery that allows strangers to cooperate, continents to trade, and democracies to endure. When a superpower begins to weaponize its economy against its closest allies, that is not strategy; it is an act of decay. And it is always the most vulnerable who pay the price.

What strikes me now, with a kind of quiet sadness, is that this project is not rooted in realism. It is, as Richardson shows, a narrative designed for domestic consumption — a story in which Europe becomes a convenient villain, a warning of what happens when you embrace regulation, climate policy, or social welfare. It is an argument that says: look at Europe’s weakness, and fear it.

But this argument is built on sand.

The world is not three power blocs. It is a web — of supply chains, energy systems, digital dependencies, financial flows. You cannot navigate a networked world by smashing the bridges that bind you to your partners. You cannot strengthen America by destabilizing the continent that has been its most reliable ally. And you cannot build a prosperous future by treating cooperation as surrender.

I am someone who believes in change. I’ve changed places, careers, and ideas. I understand that the model of the last forty years is exhausted and that the next era requires new thinking, new institutions, and new social contracts. But change that abandons reason and knowledge is not transformation — it is vandalism. And today’s U.S. posture toward Europe feels exactly like that: a demolition project disguised as strength.

I am writing this because I don’t want to stay silent in a moment when silence feels like complicity. I still believe, stubbornly, that justice, freedom, equality, and institutions worth repairing are not relics. They are our best chance. And they are being tested by leaders who confuse destruction with renewal.

Richardson ends her piece with a warning. My response is more personal:

I have not felt this worried in a long time.

Because this time, the uncertainty is not coming from the world outside the democratic West, but from within it.

And if we cannot find the clarity and courage to defend what we stand for — starting with the truth about what is happening to Europe — then we may wake up to a world that we fundamentally failed to protect.