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The recent commemoration of D-Day on the 6th of June was timely, lavish and entirely appropriate – what a contrast with the 6th of April 2017. The 6th of April when? What happened then? The

answer is the centenary of a strategic relationship of which D-Day may be the most significant single event but is only part of a much longer, and deeper, continuum. On the 6th of April

1917, America declared war on Germany and started a commitment to the security of the European continent that endures to the present day. In doing so, President Woodrow Wilson was acting

against the core precept of hemispheric defence laid out in the Monroe Doctrine that had provided the lodestar to US foreign policy throughout the 19th Century, as well as considerable

Congressional opposition. At the tactical level (where battles are won), the US contribution was too little, too late. Although nearly five million US citizens were mobilised, American arms

had only a marginal effect on the battlefields of 1917/18. However, at the strategic level (where wars are won), US impact was decisive because the human and material resources it could

deploy meant there could be only one outcome. In the Second World War, US intervention was decisive at both the tactical and the strategic levels. In a remarkably brave and prescient act,

President Franklin Roosevelt gave Europe strategic priority over Japan, recognising that post war global security would owe more to the condition of Europe and Soviet strategic ambition than

events in the Western Pacific. Had the British fought alone in the West, Churchill would never have contemplated D Day and would have played a waiting game by fixing German armies in France

while the Red Army eviscerated them in the East. The result would have been a Soviet imperium at the heart of Europe and quite possibly extending to the Atlantic seaboard. In the event,

Europe was divided by what became known as the Iron Curtain and a permanent US presence was institutionalised in peacetime. The Cold War that followed showed the USA at its most dominant,

deploying a scale of military, political and economic power to which the Soviet Union ultimately had no answer. The last hundred odd years have therefore clearly been a strategic odyssey,

but perhaps a moral one too. Europe authored many of the abominations of the 20th Century from the Holocaust to the Gulag and was redeemed by not only the material energy of America but also

its moral purpose. So, after a century of giving the lives of its young men and its tax dollars to the defence of Europe, how was the centenary of America’s strategic generosity marked on

the 6th of April 2017? By a deafening silence. No head of state, no Brussels apparatchik, no broadsheet publication and no broadcast network bothered with thanks or even formally marked the

event. An oblivious Europe continued to luxuriate in the self-absorbed complacency that any American observer would recognise and has subsequently freeloaded on US power right up to the

present day. Is it any wonder that Donald Trump has had enough? But the American President berating European leaders about their failure to meet Nato spending targets is only part of a wider

and more disturbing picture of US diplomacy. Donald Trump might generously be characterised as Jacksonian in that he is heir to the America First tradition established by the 7th President

in the early Nineteenth Century. Less generously, his mix of adventurism, mercantilism and unreconstructed nationalism has led to what some observers have described as the unilateral

diplomatic disarmament of the United States. Under Trump, America has withdrawn from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and rehabilitated tariffs as an instrument of national power; treated Latin

America simply as a source of unwanted immigrants; and lovingly embraced those beacons of democracy and pluralism Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un and Mohammed bin Salman. It has even achieved

the near impossible in international diplomacy of alienating the Canadians. The State Department of Olympian figures like Kissinger and Holbrooke has been emasculated and is now populated by

a skeleton staff of second rankers after the best of their generation has quit in disgust. Above all, America has no unified world view that can act as a handrail to its diplomacy as

Containment did for most of the second half the Twentieth Century. The liberal optimist might respond – don’t worry, at worst it can only last for another five years and then normal service

will be restored. Except that the growing polarisation of electoral politics across the Western world is most highly developed in the United States, where Republicans and Democrats are no

longer different tribes but different species. Foreign policy has traditionally been the one area where Congress has sought bi-partisan consensus but that may not survive an increasingly

radicalised system. As a result, policy may swing wildly between presidencies and the United States become seen as an increasingly unpredictable global actor. Taken in overall context then,

there may be nothing unique in the increasingly frayed relationship between Europe and America. It forms part of a wider trend where America seems to be choosing to vacate the world stage,

not as imperial powers have historically done through exhaustion or bankruptcy, but by choice. The one area where choice will be more restricted is in the American response to the rise of

China as a peer competitor, but there is no comfort available to Europe in the focusing of US strategic attention on the Western Pacific and South Asia. If Europe then has to look to its own

security, how will it fare? The European Union has been comfortable as a normative power using its regulatory function and internal market to shape global standards on everything from

environmental protection to data privacy. Rather grandiose visons of “strategic autonomy” have been offered by that colossus of strategic thought Jean Claude Junker and seconded by Emmanuel

Macron, but Napoleonic pretensions are no substitute for hard power and Europe has been far happier developing its revered social model than contemplating a role in global security. It

doesn’t help that it is in the process of losing the United Kingdom, probably its most competent military and intelligence player; neither does the ambiguity of Germany’s reliance on Russian

gas or Italy’s flirtation with China’s One Belt, One Road initiative speak to a unified strategic destiny. But perhaps the acid test is could even a federated Europe that has found it

almost impossible to agree on the mechanisms of a common currency or immigration ever find the will to raise, train, equip and, crucially, commit to war a unified military force? To do so

would need a massive leap in political imagination that would require leaders schooled in an easy life underwritten by the American security guarantee to intellectually reconcile themselves

to the exercise of real power, and the responsibilities that attend it. It’s a tough ask, and, in the words of a former German foreign minister, perhaps Europe is happier as a vegetarian in

a world of carnivores. If America leaves and the EU fails, will Europe declare itself, effectively, an open continent? Or, intriguingly, will old, nationally based ghosts that are assumed

long buried rise again; in particular, will Germany dominate the security of Europe? The country’s unification in 1871 created a state too large, too powerful, too rich and too populous to

be effectively balanced by other European powers. The breakdown of the balance of power leads us back to the beginning of this article: two world wars, 10,000,000 American fighting men

crossing the Atlantic and the creation of Nato in order, in Lord Ismay’s wry epithet, “to keep the Soviets out, the Americans in and the Germans down”. Some form of wider European

integration then became the only conceivable solution to regulating Germany’s relationship with the rest of Europe and the European Union is the result. Seen against this background, Germany

is responsible for the shape of Europe today and the transatlantic relationship of the last 100+ years. And it has prospered as a result. The American security guarantee, the liberal,

free-trading international economic system established after 1945 and the pooling of sovereignty that banished any vestiges of nationalism has made Germans model EU citizens and custodians

of the best European Enlightenment values. But if Germany today is the product of a liberal world order, what happens if that order unravels? Beneath model citizenship is a history that has

travelled from failed liberal revolution, through hereditary monarchy, authoritarianism, frail democracy, Nazi totalitarianism and to stable democracy, all within the seven decades after

unification. Today’s doyen of European statehood lightly conceals a power that, in its modern form, has been one of the most inconsistent and unpredictable actors on the world stage. There

may be no need to fear the worst sort of strategic recidivism, no matter the rise of right wing nationalism. Yet neither is it intellectually tenable to think that Germany will not evolve

further in a Europe that America has left to its own devices, at which Russia snipes around the edges and within which the federal ambitions of Brussels have not quite turned out as planned.

The nature and form of that evolution may well define European security in the Twenty First Century.