‘The Rise and Fall of American Europe’ by Glyn Morgan review

‘I am the boss!’ Donald Trump beamed as he waltzed into the 2026 G7 summit in France, eliciting nervous giggles from European leaders. It might not be advisable for them, in this desperate state, to read Glyn Morgan’s The Rise and Fall of American Europe, which portrays a powerless Europe with many hypothetical choices but no real options.

The definition of ‘American Europe’ is not entirely clear. After deciding what it wasn’t – neither a state, nor an empire, nor a vassal – Morgan comes up with the type of formula that only satisfies political scientists: a multilevel system that allocates government functions to four levels: national, European, Atlantic, and (confusingly) open-ended expansionism. Its history, though, is traced with expert knowledge.

Historians ascribe the US-built postwar order to Harry Truman. Morgan insists that Franklin D. Roosevelt was the original architect. By the time he met his Russian and British counterparts in Tehran in 1943, he had already decided to replace imperial Europe with an American-friendly version. Churchill could do little to save his ‘poor little English donkey’ from the schemes of the ‘American buffalo’. His attempts to find a respectable future under an independent European council or a union of the English-speaking peoples were rebuffed. What followed, from the Marshall Plan in 1948 to NATO the following year, consolidated America’s world hegemony.

The most intriguing part of the book is its account of the sources of America’s present hostility towards Europe. Apparently, different groups have found common cause in detesting a once proud continent reduced to ‘weakness, wokeness, and welfarism’.

Morgan starts with the MAGA crowd, incensed by Europe’s ‘civilizational suicide’ due to mass immigration. Steve Bannon sounded the alarm during his European tour a decade earlier, and JD Vance expressed it formally in his controversial Munich speech in February 2025. What can the US do? Not much, according to MAGA commentator Tucker Carlson. ‘If you’re that intent on self-harm, that anxious to destroy your own civilization’, he told an interviewer, ‘you can’t help somebody like that.’

Next in line is America’s anti-establishment populist tribunes, for whom Europe signifies the loathsome ‘Brahmin Left’, a term coined by French economist Thomas Piketty. These are academics, journalists, lawyers, celebrities, and, above all, state officials, who subscribe to social liberalism: a loosely integrated worldview that champions environmentalism, globalisation, welfarism, diversity, and alternative lifestyles. Populists are determined to banish this coalition from all public institutions, and Europe is but a sideshow in this American intra-elite skirmish. Because terms such as the Brahmin Left are ‘too obtuse to be used as rallying cries’, populists made Europe the ‘concrete focus for their animus’, Morgan suggests: nothing more than ‘a negative meme’. Equally offensive is Europe’s parasitical attitude. In the words of the late Charlie Kirk, Europeans are among the ‘deadbeats and moochers’ who suck the blood of US taxpayers. Stephen Miller, whose title as Trump’s deputy chief of staff downplays his vast influence in the White House, complained to his friends on Fox News about Europe’s overreliance on American largesse to finance its security and wealth redistribution.

This last bit – European restrictions – is the bane of perhaps the most influential faction: tech oligarchs, from Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire, to Peter Thiel and other Silicon Valley notables. These technological accelerationists, as Morgan calls them, take issue with Europe’s overregulation of social media, AI, and crypto currency. EU ‘know-it-all’ bureaucrats, Marc Andreessen protested, play ‘God with everyone else’s lives’, jeopardising humanity’s hope for technological salvation.

How can Europeans react to such enmity? Go global, bolster the EU, retrench to the nation-state-level? Morgan’s prescriptions are not entirely persuasive, particularly his coordinated foreign and defence policy against ‘Russian revanchism, American military retreat, and Chinese economic expansion’. Put this way, Europe stands no chance.

But is the situation that stark? Like all timely books, the present looms large over this one. The assumption that current trends will continue, indeed amplify, demands stronger evidence. For instance, an April 2025 survey showed that while 45 per cent of Republicans have a favourable view of NATO that figure rises to 77 per cent among Democrats. Who succeeds Trump matters. Morgan’s dissection of differences between America’s Europe-bashers should have led him to question their ability to work together on reinventing their country as ‘Civilizational America’ – another odd concept – let along overcome resistance from other parts of the US elite. Moreover, while today’s belligerence stands out, US impatience with Europe is quite old. Morgan cites Dwight Eisenhower’s very Trumpian quip about Europe ‘playing Uncle Sam for a sucker’. Tensions with Charles de Gaulle are legendary, so is the public spat over the Iraq War in 2003. Even Barack Obama and Joe Biden criticised European failure to increase military spending. In short, while the book cautions against treating Trumpism as an aberration, the jury is still out.

A final point. The book depicts a strikingly passive Europe, the casualty of changes on the other side of the Atlantic. ‘If Civilizational America were to replace American Europe’, Morgan concludes, ‘it would mark the second time since World War II that the United States has sought to remake Europe in its own image.’ But do Europeans bear any responsibility for their fate? Did they become too complacent, taking Washington for granted? And didn’t Europeans, such as Enoch Powell, inspire many of America’s populist slogans, as the book recognises? Crucially, is there nothing they can do to salvage relations after Trump departs? The Rise and Fall of American Europe raises important questions – now we need to find the answers.

• The Rise and Fall of American Europe
  Glyn Morgan
  Polity, 160pp, £20
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Hazem Kandil is Professor of Historical and Political Sociology at the University of Cambridge.