Right-wing politicians and commentators began to use Europe as a stand-in for American liberals. It’s a bunch of godless socialists, just like those heretics in Berkeley and Cambridge. Euro-bashing became a unifying conservative trope.

Progressives fell into the poisonous trap of racialism. They looked at the glories of Aristotle, Shakespeare and Mozart, and the most interesting thing they had to say about them was that they were dead white males. Future historians will marvel at how sophisticated people willfully made themselves so simple-minded. Eurocentrism became a code word for colonialism, oppression and privilege, taking a piece of European history for the whole of it.

Europeans didn’t help. In the wake of the Cold War, they have dedicated themselves to a post-nationalist project that is too top-down and technocratic and is now crumbling.

The Euro-American political project is now nearing end times. George W. Bush feuded with Europe over the Iraq war. Barack Obama pivoted away. Now, as Robert Kagan writes in The Washington Post, Trump is taking a sledgehammer to the Atlantic alliance.

Trump could have gone to last week’s NATO summit and taken credit only for increased European military spending. Instead, he moved the goal posts, humiliated the Europeans, reasserted his trade war talk and made it impossible for European leaders to do anything that might seem to support him. These are the actions of a man who wants the alliance to fail.

His embrace of Putin Monday was a victory dance on the Euro-American tomb.

“This is not just another family quarrel,” Kagan writes. “The democratic alliance that has been the bedrock of the American-led liberal world order is unraveling. At some point, and probably sooner than we expect, the global peace that that alliance and that order undergirded will unravel, too. Despite our human desire to hope for the best, things will not be okay.”

Kagan was writing before Monday’s press conference, and now his core point is doubly true. If you thought we could ride the Trump storm and then return to normal, you can surely see now this view is mistaken. The fundamental arrangements of our world are being remade.