There’s a mood of confidence in Moscow bordering on triumphalism. Russia is dictating the grim outcome in Syria. It has annexed with impunity part of Ukraine and set limits on the country’s Westernizing ambitions. It has influenced through hacking the outcome of the American election. It has fostered the fracture of the European Union. All this from a nation President Obama dismissed in 2014 as a mere “regional power” acting “not out of strength but out of weakness.”

In addition, whether or not Donald Trump was ever lured into some Moscow honey trap (the oldest trick in town for Vladimir Putin’s intelligence services), Russia has reason to regard with satisfaction the coming presidency. Trump has called Putin “very smart” and “very much of a leader” (more than Obama); he has cheered on a British exit from the European Union; he has signaled deep skepticism of NATO; he has, in short, intimated that he may be ready to be complicit with Putin in the dismemberment of the Western alliance.

America’s European allies are in a state of high anxiety. For the first time in decades there seems to be a possibility that the White House will deal with Moscow at Europe’s expense. The last thing Europe needs at a time of huge internal pressures, and in the year of the French and German elections, is a crisis in trans-Atlantic relations, or an American president who is openly dismissive of the European integration that brought peace to a war-racked continent.

“There have never been so many uncertainties about the future of the trans-Atlantic bond,” Wolfgang Ischinger, the chairman of the Munich Security Conference, told me.