But in the end … it didn’t work. The alliance held. The Soviet bid for dominance collapsed, as did the Soviet Union itself. Germany was reunited on Western terms: liberal and Atlanticist from the Moselle to the Oder. The deft diplomacy of President George H.W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft over-mastered the objections of Moscow—and not just Moscow. “I love Germany so much that I am grateful there are two of them” went a quip usually attributed to the French novelist Francois Mauriac. For many in London and Paris, Margaret Thatcher and Francois Mitterrand very much included, the quip was no joke. Much of the present malfunctioning architecture of the European Union—including the lethal euro currency—originated in French demands for reassurance that reunification would lead to “a European Germany, not a German Europe.”

Without the United States, German reunification would never have proceeded so smoothly or rapidly. That assistance is still gratefully remembered in Germany. But gratitude cuts only so much ice in international relations. When the U.S. tried to mobilize the European powers to manage the breakup of Yugoslavia, Germany balked at the risk. But it was the George W. Bush-Gerhard Schroeder split over the Iraq war in 2003 that definitively ended German deference to American leadership.

Since then, Germany has deferred less and less to the United States—and walked more and more its own path. Germans cheered candidate Obama in 2008, but German-U.S. relations if anything sank even lower under President Obama than under President Bush. Merkel ignored Obama’s pleas to reflate the German economy after the financial crisis of 2008 and the euro crisis of 2010. The Snowden revelations—including exaggerated claims that the United States had tapped Merkel’s ubiquitous personal cellphone—poisoned the mood even more deeply. In June 2014, Germany took the unprecedented step of expelling the senior U.S. intelligence officer in Berlin, even announcing the action over Twitter. (Never mind that it soon emerged that German intelligence had itself scooped up a Hillary Clinton phone call.) Here’s a link to an RT story gleefully—but accurately —noting that the percentage of Germans expressing trust in the United States had plunged from 76 percent after Obama’s election to 35 percent by 2014. Sixty percent of Germans characterized Edward Snowden as a hero.

Whoever was elected president in 2016 would face quite a challenge renewing and rebuilding the German relationship. Trump has instead done further damage.

Since the war, German politics has been founded on two fundamental commitments: to liberalism at home; to Atlanticism abroad. Only a tiny minority question the first, but a much larger minority doubt the second. Like Americans, the Germans remember the Nazi past. Much more than Americans, the Germans remember that British and American bombers burned the cities of Germany to the ground. Germans have gained voice to speak about their own history—and to express their own emotional distance from partners they no longer need so much as they used to. “We will never be family,” a semi-inebriated German Air Force general once insisted to me at a NATO conference in Tallinn. “Americans, British, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders: You are family. We will never be.” That feeling is reflected in strategic decisions like the German hesitation to join the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing agreement.