Donald Trump and his administration have a problem: As I have outlined elsewhere, I think that the United States is pursuing a strategic foreign policy – often called the Donroe Doctrine – that aims at carving out a hegemonic position in the Western hemisphere, while maintaining a strong footprint in Europe and Asia. Maintaining said footprint would be much easier if the regional powers would not be coerced into accepting American hegemony but would actively support it. Alas, for reasons I will try to explain in this essay, the US has been using lots of sticks, but not too many carrots. With the Supreme Court now limiting Trump’s ability to coerce others via tariffs, the inability to make friends (and the talent to create unnecessary tensions, as with Denmark over Greenland) could become a serious problem. Although not a cold war but transforming relations with Europe into a “cold friendship” has, simply put, not been a boon to US grand strategy. But I believe the current troubles reveal something deeper: The United States has never truly mastered the finer art of diplomacy, and there is a historical reason for that.
For starters, unlike Europe, America never needed it the way the European powers did. Geography made diplomacy a secondary skill. Two vast oceans to the east and west, and non-hostile neighbours to the north and south—Canada and Mexico—meant that for most of its history the United States could afford bluntness. The subtle sword of diplomacy was a tool to be used sparingly, not an art to be cultivated. Europe’s experience was the opposite. On a crowded continent where great and middle powers continuously jockeyed for influence, diplomatic sophistication was a matter of survival. Since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the European state system has forced rulers to refine the craft of negotiation and statecraft simply to endure.
In the United States, diplomacy developed as a defensive posture, not an imperial vocation. The Monroe Doctrine, America’s ventures in the Philippines, and its interventions in Latin America were all framed as acts of self-protection or “civilising” missions rather than a candid imperial project. The US became an imperial power by accident and often denied it was an empire at all. Isolationists in Congress, well into the 20th century, argued for keeping America aloof from European power politics and limiting engagement in world affairs. While European thinkers like Rudyard Kipling articulated the moral and strategic logic of empire, American political discourse rarely developed a comparable, self-conscious imperial doctrine, even as Washington exercised effective dominion across the Caribbean, the Pacific, and Central America.
There were moments of brilliance in American diplomacy, yet tellingly, they came when European minds helped shape it. Theodore Roosevelt’s Nobel Prize for mediating the Russo-Japanese War marked one such era, and he was part of a generation deeply influenced by European scholarship and concepts of balance-of-power politics. Roosevelt spent time in Germany in his youth, and was deeply influenced by European thinking.
Before 1945, the great universities of knowledge were not Harvard or Yale but Heidelberg, Berlin, Göttingen, and Vienna, which attracted aspiring scholars from across the world and set the intellectual standards to which others aspired. The catastrophe of Nazism uprooted that world, sending Jewish and liberal intellectuals across the Atlantic and shifting the centre of gravity of global scholarship to the United States. It is no exaggeration to say that the post-war rise of American universities is inseparable from this forced migration of German-speaking and European talent. No figure embodies this transfer more clearly than Henry Kissinger. Born in Fürth, Germany, he fled Nazi persecution and became an American, but his intellectual formation remained profoundly European. His Harvard dissertation, later published as A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812–1822, was a study of the Congress of Vienna and Klemens von Metternich’s diplomacy in reconstructing a durable post-Napoleonic order. Kissinger’s analysis of how legitimacy and equilibrium underpin a stable system, rather than brute force alone, came straight from the old European school of statecraft. It helped make him the last truly grand strategist of the American century. His record—détente with Moscow, the opening to China, the first SALT and ABM arms-control agreements, and the reshaping of the Middle East balance after the 1973 war—speaks for itself.
Behind Kissinger stood another European: Fritz G.A. Kraemer. A German from Essen who emigrated to the United States and became a key Pentagon adviser, Kraemer discovered a young Henry Kissinger in the US Army in 1944 and became his intellectual mentor. Later he would help bring Alexander Haig into Kissinger’s orbit in the Nixon White House, thereby shaping two future American secretaries of state. Kraemer saw himself as a “missionary of freedom,” preaching his famous maxim, “No provocative weakness, please!”—a concise formulation of the peace-through-strength doctrine in foreign policy, where credible power is combined with disciplined restraint. Two American foreign ministers emerging from the school of a single German émigré is a striking illustration of how deeply European thinking once infused Washington.
The great diplomatic moments of post-war America—the opening to China, the disengagement from Vietnam, the architecture of détente with Moscow—bear this European imprint. As long as transatlantic intellectual capital helped guide American policy, Washington produced leaders who thought historically and acted with strategic restraint. During the most dangerous Cold War confrontations—the Korean War, the Berlin crises, the Cuban Missile Crisis—the key actors were steeped in concepts of balance, credibility, and escalation that came as much from European diplomatic tradition as from military doctrine. They understood that the purpose of power was not simply to win, but to construct an order in which catastrophe was avoided.
This is why the Greenland episode and Trump’s subsequent NATO rhetoric matter beyond the immediate insult to Denmark. NATO has never been a charitable project in which the United States benevolently subsidizes freeloading allies; it has been a central pillar of American self-interest. The alliance prevented Soviet domination of Western Europe, anchored US influence on the continent, and created a security environment in which American economic and political power could flourish. When an American president claims the US has “never gotten anything” from NATO, he not only misreads history; he signals to allies that their sacrifices—often proportionally higher than those of the United States—are taken for granted.
Denmark is a case in point. With roughly 50 military deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq combined, it ranks among the highest per-capita contributors of blood in US-led wars, yet its veterans now openly question whether their loyalty is reciprocated. When a Danish soldier who fought in Helmand hears Washington suggest that NATO gave America “absolutely nothing”, why should he or his children be willing to fight for the alliance again? That is where the absence of diplomatic tact—the inability to recognise and publicly honour allied sacrifice—turns from a stylistic problem into a strategic liability.
Donald Trump is not a man socialised in European history or the great diplomatic disciplines. He speaks as he thinks, and that authenticity appeals to many, at times even to those who disagree with him on policy. But when he treats a close ally like Denmark in a way that leaves its citizens feeling dismissed and expendable, he illustrates how far the United States has drifted from the Kissingerian model of historically informed, alliance-conscious diplomacy. The loss is not just aesthetic, it is geopolitical.
Compounding the problem is a broader erosion of diplomatic expertise in the West. On both sides of the Atlantic, historians, regional specialists, and practitioners of classic statecraft have been pushed to the margins of policy in favour of short-term political tacticians and communications strategists. The kind of historically literate grand strategists who once linked the Vienna Congress to nuclear deterrence are increasingly rare. Europe, too, has trimmed its diplomatic services and often substitutes moral grandstanding for hard-nosed strategy, even as its security environment deteriorates.
The lesson is clear. America’s finest diplomatic achievements came when European thinking—and particularly German-speaking strategic thought—helped shape its foreign policy. Today, as that heritage fades, the deficits in Washington’s statecraft become painfully visible. But Europe should not greet this with schadenfreude. It should treat it as a warning to itself. Diplomacy is not a luxury; it is a survival skill on a dangerous continent. Metternich understood this when he pieced Europe back together after Napoleon. Kissinger understood it when he sought a “world restored” in the nuclear age. The question is whether today’s generation—in Washington, Brussels, Berlin, and beyond—still has the will to learn it.
The death of technocracy and the return of politics