The current crisis, according to this calendar, is happening pretty much on schedule. And in every case so far, the West has bounced back.

Could this time prove different? Perhaps. But there are good reasons to believe that this too shall pass. At the very least, it’s useful to situate the current tempest within the context of past storms that have swept across the Atlantic. The point of reviewing this history isn’t to diminish the seriousness of the present rift or to encourage complacency. But it does offer an important corrective to the doom and despondency about the future of the West—increasingly heard among foreign-policy thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic—as well as the counterproductive amnesia that overlooks just how much we’ve already gotten through together.

The first major breach in postwar transatlantic relations took place in 1956, when Britain and France, together with Israel, attempted to seize control of the Suez Canal from Egypt. Even though it was the height of the Cold War, President Dwight Eisenhower not only vociferously criticized the military gamble by London and Paris, but actually aligned with the Soviet Union at the UN Security Council to demand the removal of their forces. Anticipating a French and British veto, Washington then took its case to the General Assembly, where it again linked up with Moscow to pass an even stronger resolution. Eisenhower went on to impose crippling financial pressure—blocking a British loan petition at the International Monetary Fund and thereby jeopardizing London’s solvency—until Her Majesty’s government acceded to a ceasefire. The humiliating British and French withdrawal from Egypt took a battering ram to the global standing of America’s two closest European allies and shattered any notion that they retained the capacity for autonomous action. All this transpired, moreover, in the halcyon days of postwar solidarity recalled so nostalgically today.

A decade and a half later, a new set of transatlantic divisions arose as the Vietnam War inspired large-scale protests across Europe. Despite the conflict’s origins in French colonialism in Southeast Asia, now it was Washington that many Europeans saw as an imperialist bully. As a result, NATO allies declined to send forces to what the U.S. insisted was a vital front in the struggle against communism.

At the same time, political developments on the continent began to call into question fundamental assumptions of Western unity. Most alarming for the U.S. was the rise of Willy Brandt in West Germany and his pursuit of normalized relations with the communist bloc. Implicit in Brandt’s so-called Ostpolitik was the danger of a neutral, unified German state emerging in the heart of Europe that could unravel the entire postwar security order. Washington, for its part, toppled one of the economic pillars of that order in 1971 by unilaterally suspending the convertibility of dollars into gold. The move took Europe by such surprise that it quickly became known as the “Nixon Shock”; within two years, it brought an end to the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates.