“From Latin America to Eastern Europe, from the Soviet Union to the Middle East and Asia, authoritarian regimes have failed over the past three decades.
And even where they have not given way to stable liberal democracies, liberal democracy remains the only coherent political aspiration.”
It was 1992. The rubble of the Berlin Wall was being broken into souvenirs and sold from the newly opened shop at Checkpoint Charlie. And an American political scientist, articulating a mood widespread on both sides of the Atlantic — but particularly powerful in the United States — ventured a bold prediction: with the collapse of communism, liberal democracy and the free market represented the final stage of humanity’s ideological evolution, and liberal democracy the final form of human government.
Francis Fukuyama had joined a distinguished historical club. From the ancient Greeks to the Roman Empire, from Napoleon’s troops marching through Jena to the rise of Stalin, generations witnessing epoch-making events have repeatedly convinced themselves that history had finally reached its destination.
After 1989, the West suddenly imagined itself central, self-sufficient and uniquely legitimate.
It had failed to reckon with the enduring characteristics of other great civilisations, shaped by psychological, philosophical and religious traditions that Western societies assumed were gradually disappearing.
Globalisation and access to international markets were expected to draw China towards liberal democracy. Instead, the Communist Party retained its monopoly on power while reviving elements of Confucian thought and hierarchy.
The political force of Islam was similarly underestimated, along with the capacity of religious identity to become a reaction against the perceived imposition of an external Western model.
The Hindu world, with its distinctive conception of history, identity and civilisation, was largely placed outside the Western analytical frame.
Against this backdrop emerged what Henry Kissinger described as an “incipient global world order”: the system created after the Second World War and built around American primacy, leadership and power.
Spared the physical devastation suffered by Europe, strengthened economically, politically, militarily and psychologically by victory in the Second World War and then the Cold War, the United States assumed leadership of the international system. Its military, economic, industrial and cultural strength underwrote an order that appeared capable of claiming universal legitimacy.
Appeared to.
Because that is no longer the world in which we live.
The Pendulum of History
Like Foucault’s pendulum swinging beneath the dome of the Panthéon in Paris, history has moved again. The United States today appears to be turning inward, rediscovering a foreign-policy tradition that dates back to the Founding Fathers: avoiding permanent alliances and distant military commitments when they are not clearly connected to domestic American interests.
It is an instinct almost as old as the republic itself. It has surfaced repeatedly throughout American history and has now returned under the banners of “America First” and “Make America Great Again”.
Donald Trump’s re-election in November 2024 reflected a growing exhaustion among American voters with the human, economic and military costs of playing the “world’s policeman”, a role the United States progressively assumed after the Second World War and consolidated after the Cold War.
Across the Atlantic, many Americans increasingly see the international commitments accumulated since 1945 — institutions, wars, overseas deployments and military obligations — as a bad bargain: one that consumes public resources without reliably producing either stability or gratitude.
Nor has the domestic record of American economic liberalism been universally reassuring. Working-class communities have been battered, the middle class has come under pressure and the gap between wealth and poverty has widened dramatically. Ageing infrastructure, an underperforming school system, prohibitively expensive higher education, healthcare under strain and a dysfunctional justice system reinforce the perception that America has neglected problems at home while financing responsibilities abroad.
Against this background, the argument that money spent on global defence and foreign assistance should instead go towards infrastructure, public services, economic renewal and border control has become increasingly powerful.
Across America’s heartland, there is diminishing appetite for sending sons and daughters to fight — and die — in wars many voters believe achieved very little. The ideological doctrines that justified those interventions, from the “domino theory” to the export of democracy, have steadily lost credibility.
It is on this terrain that hostility towards globalisation has grown. International institutions and agreements — from NATO to trade treaties — are increasingly portrayed as arrangements that disadvantage American workers while allowing allies to behave as “free riders”, “parasites” or “cowards”.
Trump’s Return: Revolution and Reaction
Donald Trump’s return to the White House has been both a detonator and an accelerator of this process.
Domestically, he has intensified political polarisation and the language of “us against them”, appealing to Americans who believe their future has been stolen from them and channelling resentment and frustration, with immigration playing an increasingly central and emotionally charged role.
But it is in foreign policy that Trump appears simultaneously revolutionary and reactionary — with profound consequences for Europe.
Revolutionary because he is dismantling assumptions that have underpinned America’s international posture since Yalta, or even since the Atlantic Charter agreed by the United States and Britain in 1941.
Reactionary because his objective is partly to restore a political order once thought obsolete: from the isolationist instincts of the Founding Fathers to the Monroe Doctrine, now expanded by what might be called a Trump corollary.
At the centre of this foreign policy stands one principle: America First. National economic interests take precedence over multilateral and humanitarian commitments.
The practical implications are considerable.
First comes the return of economic nationalism and mercantilism. International relations are increasingly understood through the prism of trade. Tariffs and economic pressure become instruments for reshaping relations even with historic partners and extracting immediate bilateral advantage.
Second comes the rejection of multilateralism and the transformation of allies into partners. America’s traditional role as guarantor of the international order is being reconsidered. The United States, in Trump’s view, must put itself first and organise its foreign relations accordingly.
Third, the traditional logic of alliances is replaced by the logic of the commercial “deal”. There are no permanent allies, only partners selected according to the requirements of the moment. Alliances are no longer necessarily grounded in lasting ideological affinities and shared values but in reciprocity and contingent advantage. Hence the preference for direct, one-to-one negotiations over large international agreements.
And that brings us to two documents that embody the ideological heart of Trumpism — and force Europeans to confront an uncomfortable question: is Uncle Sam saying goodbye?
They are the National Defense Strategy and the National Security Strategy.
America’s New Defence Doctrine
Donald Trump’s defence policy rests on the principle of “peace through strength” and an explicitly nationalist approach.
The National Defense Strategy establishes a historic reordering of the Pentagon’s global priorities. Its overriding objective is the defence of the American homeland, while reducing costly, prolonged military interventions abroad and shifting greater responsibility for regional security onto allies.
Its principal pillars are straightforward.
Military and economic power must be used directly and pragmatically to defend American national interests, with little of the old rhetoric about promoting democracy around the world.
National sovereignty and invulnerability take precedence, including advanced missile-defence capabilities and greater energy and industrial independence.
NATO allies must assume greater financial responsibility, including the commitment to increase defence-related spending towards 5% of GDP.
And deterrence should rest on overwhelming military power combined with strategic pragmatism: bilateral agreements advantageous to Washington rather than prolonged ideological exercises in nation-building.
The break with the recent past is striking.
Russia is described as a “persistent but manageable” threat, while NATO allies are expected to assume primary responsibility for Europe’s conventional defence, with critical but more limited American support. Ukraine, too, is increasingly defined as primarily a European responsibility.
Taiwan, remarkably, is not mentioned in the document.
Burden-sharing is one of its central themes. Allies are to be pushed, “sensibly and prudently”, towards assuming primary responsibility for defending themselves against local threats, with American forces providing essential but limited support.
Europe itself is downgraded because its share of global economic power is described as smaller and declining. Washington will remain engaged on the continent, but American homeland defence and deterrence against China come first.
A weaker Europe, China as the priority and American attention directed elsewhere: the new perspective could hardly be clearer.
It also helps explain why Greenland appears repeatedly as strategically important American terrain.
The document concludes with an equally revealing cultural statement: America will restore the “warrior ethos” and rebuild its Joint Force so that its enemies never doubt its determination or ability to respond decisively.
Whether this warrior ethos includes international law and the Geneva Conventions is left unsaid.
What is clear is that the music in Washington has changed.
For Europe, and for the world.
The National Security Strategy: A New Paradigm
Even more revealing of Trump’s “reactionary revolution” is the National Security Strategy published in November 2025, which sets out the broad principles of American foreign, defence and security policy under the second Trump presidency.
This is where we should look if we want to understand the thread connecting the new White House’s policies.
We should not allow ourselves to be distracted by the background noise of Truth Social posts, contradictory declarations, White House briefings or improvised remarks aboard Air Force One.
If we want to understand where America is actually heading, at home and abroad, this is the document that matters.
And reading it leads inevitably back to our question:
Uncle Sam, bye-bye?
Its two central ideas are familiar: “America First” and “peace through strength”.
But one crucial shift deserves attention. For Trump, peace is no longer founded primarily on law or rules. It rests on power.
The connection between the two principles is clear: only an economically prosperous and militarily powerful America can guarantee its own interests in an international environment defined as competitive and threatening — a world in which strength and power once again determine outcomes.
The Obama and Biden presidencies remained broadly rooted in the Wilsonian and Rooseveltian tradition of a “rules-based international order”.
The national-security strategies of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton reflected the optimism of the “unipolar moment”: first Bush’s vision of a “new world order”, then Clinton’s liberal internationalism. Yet that optimism collided with growing disorder, from the former Yugoslavia to Chechnya, Rwanda and Somalia, which tested America’s emerging role as global guardian.
After September 11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Barack Obama sought a return to strategic restraint and multilateralism, while maintaining American leadership of a rules-based order and confronting both global terrorism and the rise of powerful competitors, above all Russia and China.
Trump’s arrival in 2017 represented a break with that post-Cold War tradition. His return in 2025, after the Biden interlude, may prove its epitaph.
“The American people elected me to make America great again,” Trump declared at the beginning of his first National Security Strategy in 2017.
The priorities were already visible: revitalising the domestic economy, defending America’s borders — particularly against illegal immigration — and rebuilding American military power. The document also identified “rogue states”, notably Iran and North Korea, and the continuing threat of radical Islamist terrorism from organisations such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS.
Seen from today, the 2017 document looks like the precursor to the much more radical doctrine of 2025.
The new strategy openly embraces neo-isolationism: not every country, region, issue or cause, however worthy, can occupy the centre of American strategy.
Foreign policy has one overriding purpose: protecting core American national interests.
The great error of previous administrations after the Cold War, according to Trump, was assuming that American domination of the entire world was itself an American interest.
Trump reverses that proposition.
The affairs of other countries matter only when their actions directly threaten American interests.
Behind this shift echoes the message Trump delivered during campaign rallies from Wisconsin to Alabama, Florida to Maine: previous leaders overestimated America’s willingness and ability to carry the burden of global order; embraced globalisation and free trade; allowed allies and partners to shift the cost of their defence onto American taxpayers; and in doing so damaged the American middle class and industrial base.
The same critique applies to multilateral institutions. Previous administrations, in Trump’s view, tied America to an international architecture in which some institutions are openly anti-American and others pursue a transnationalism that weakens national sovereignty.
These are not minor adjustments.
They constitute a break.
And they bring us to the central question confronting Europeans.
The “Donroe Doctrine”
“We want the continued survival and safety of the United States as an independent, sovereign republic.”
That is how the National Security Strategy begins.
The implications are precise: complete control over borders and immigration; resilient national infrastructure; the most powerful, lethal and technologically advanced military in the world; a stronger and more credible nuclear deterrent; next-generation missile defence, including the proposed “Golden Dome”; and the world’s most powerful defence-industrial base.
But there is also a cultural dimension: the ambition to “reinvigorate America’s cultural and spiritual health”, which the document connects to growing numbers of strong, traditional families raising healthy children — an unmistakable rejection of what the MAGA movement regards as “woke” or politically correct culture.
It is within this framework that Washington defines what America wants from the world.
Five priorities stand out.
The first is a revived Monroe Doctrine with a Trump corollary. The United States claims the right to intervene across the Americas whenever developments threaten its domestic security or stability. This includes preventing mass migration towards the United States, fighting narcotics trafficking and criminal cartels, preventing foreign powers from controlling strategic assets and supply chains, and guaranteeing American access to key locations such as Panama, Venezuela, Greenland and Cuba.
The second priority is preventing foreign actors from damaging the American economy.
China is the obvious target. Washington intends to preserve an open Indo-Pacific, protect freedom of navigation wherever American interests require it, secure supply chains and guarantee access to critical materials.
The third concerns Europe.
The United States says it wants to help its allies preserve European freedom and security while simultaneously restoring confidence in Europe’s “Western identity” and civilisation.
Significantly, Russia is barely present as an American security concern.
Europe itself is.
And Trump’s preferred mechanism for dealing with it is the primacy of nations. The nation-state, rather than the supranational institution, is treated as the fundamental political unit. The world, according to this view, works best when nations put their own interests first.
The European Union is barely acknowledged. Instead, the emphasis falls on national sovereignty and resistance to transnational organisations deemed capable of undermining it.
The remaining priorities concern the Middle East — with an evident focus on Iran — and ensuring that American technology leads global progress in artificial intelligence, biotechnology and quantum computing, sectors now definitively understood as dual-use strategic assets.
These, then, are America’s “fundamental and vital national interests”.
Washington intends to narrow rather than expand the definition of national interest and place American security at its centre.
This means peace through strength. It means a predisposition towards non-intervention — Ukraine being the obvious example of a conflict increasingly regarded as Europe’s responsibility. It means “flexible realism” rather than attempts to engineer political and social transformation abroad. And above all, it means the primacy of nations.
Trump’s America does not seek global domination in the traditional sense. But nor will it tolerate another power becoming dominant enough to threaten American interests.
Foreign policy therefore becomes flexible and transactional, governed by what Trump understands as fairness in trade and military alliances.
This is how we arrive at NATO's 5% spending target.
It is how we arrive at a gradual reduction of America's military commitment in Europe.
And it is how we arrive at the demand that others share the burden of maintaining international order.
The days when the United States carried the world like Atlas, Washington is telling us, are over.
Europe in the Crosshairs
Under this doctrine, the Americas increasingly constitute an exclusive American sphere of influence.
Europe had already been excluded from the Western Hemisphere by the original Monroe Doctrine. Today Washington seeks a similar exclusion of Chinese and Russian influence. To achieve it, the United States intends to strengthen its military and intelligence presence closer to home while — crucially — disengaging elsewhere.
China remains America's principal competitor, perhaps more economically than ideologically.
Russia, by contrast, is disappearing from the list of existential threats.
Europe is not.
In Trump's strategic worldview, Europe itself appears as something to be politically reshaped.
There is remarkably little emphasis on the tragedy of Ukraine or on Russia's invasion, which brought large-scale interstate war back to European soil.
Russia's aggression and authoritarian great-power ambitions are barely discussed. Nor is much attention devoted to the wars and military interventions through which Vladimir Putin has altered Russia's borders and the geopolitical balance since 1999: the second Chechen war, Georgia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Crimea, Syria and finally the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Instead, Washington's criticism is directed towards the European Union, portrayed as restricting freedom of speech — an evident reference to the Digital Services Act and regulation of Big Tech — while holding “unrealistic expectations” about the war in Ukraine.
Trump's vision goes further still, promising American support for what it calls “genuine democracy”, freedom of expression and the uncompromising celebration of Europe's individual national histories — while presenting the growing influence of European “patriotic parties” as a source of optimism.
The political implications are unmistakable.
Washington wants Europe to take primary responsibility for its own defence and spend considerably more on it; pursue strategic stability with Russia; resist the continent's current political trajectory; open European markets further to American goods and services; strengthen bilateral relations with individual states in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe; abandon the assumption that NATO must expand indefinitely; and help confront Chinese mercantilism.
This is no longer simply a debate about burden-sharing.
It is a debate about what Europe itself should become.
“Parasites”
Anyone who imagined these ideas were merely an intellectual distillation of American nationalism destined to remain buried in strategic documents had failed to notice the warning signs.
Trump's defence and security strategies were published in the autumn of 2025.
But the bell announcing the new era had already rung loudly in February.
The man ringing it was Vice-President JD Vance, perhaps the most ideological figure in the new American administration.
At the Munich Security Conference, Vance launched an unprecedented attack on the European Union — a concentrated expression of MAGA ideology unlike anything previously heard at the highest levels of transatlantic diplomacy.
It was a deliberately provocative and deeply identitarian speech, politically centred on the emergence of a new European order built around parties of the nationalist and radical right in Germany, France, Eastern Europe and Southern Europe.
For Vance, “mass migration”, rather than Putin's tanks, represented the principal danger to European security.
European attempts to regulate digital platforms were presented as an attack on freedom of expression, implicitly turning the European Union itself into an illiberal adversary.
Vance accused European leaders of censorship and of failing to control immigration. He expressed alarm at Europe's supposed retreat from fundamental values it once shared with America.
Discussing Romania's annulled election amid evidence of Russian interference, Vance effectively echoed Moscow's narrative. If European democracy could be destroyed by a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising, he suggested, perhaps it was not very strong to begin with.
A month later came an even more extraordinary episode.
A supposedly confidential Signal conversation among senior Trump administration officials became public after The Atlantic's editor was inadvertently included.
Discussing possible American strikes in Yemen, Vance argued that military action would disproportionately benefit Europeans by making Red Sea shipping safer.
His conclusion was brutally simple: if the operation had to be done, do it — but he hated “bailing Europe out again”.
Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly agreed, condemning European “free-loading” as “pathetic”, even while supporting military action to reopen maritime routes.
The reaction across Europe was intense.
Trump himself then amplified the controversy. Asked about the Signal conversation on March 25, he backed his vice-president's criticism of Europe and accused Europeans of having taken advantage of America for years.
A month later, during Giorgia Meloni's visit to the Oval Office, he denied having used some of the language attributed to him.
The underlying position, however, remained unmistakable.
The Trump administration believes European countries have benefited for decades from American military protection without contributing enough themselves.
The historical reasons why the United States deliberately became the indispensable provider of European security after the Second World War — first to win the Cold War and later as part of the fight against terrorism — receive rather less attention.
But this is now Washington's position.
And it provided the political backdrop to NATO's summit in The Hague on June 24-25, 2025, where the Alliance's 32 members, under intense American pressure, agreed to move beyond the 2% of GDP defence-spending target established in Wales in 2014 and towards defence and security expenditure equivalent to 5% of GDP by 2035.
The new formula divides that commitment between 3.5% for core military requirements — armed forces, weapons and air defence — and 1.5% for broader security priorities such as cybersecurity, critical infrastructure and technological innovation.
The Great Reversal
As political scientist Charlie Kupchan has observed in Foreign Affairs, America's strategic reversal is not the result of military, political or economic defeat.
It is voluntary.
And it reflects a profound transformation in American public opinion embodied by the MAGA movement.
Trump's objective is to rebuild America from within. International relations are therefore subordinated to domestic economic priorities.
Military power is no longer principally an instrument for protecting a global order based on values and alliances. It is a means of defending American interests wherever they happen to be.
And in doing so, Trump makes few distinctions between those who have been America's friends for the past 80 years and those who have been its enemies.
What matters, as in business, is the deal.
At a particular moment, previously opposed actors may have converging interests. If so, those interests should be pursued without excessive concern for history or sentiment.
When the business is finished, the deal is finished.
Then comes another deal.
And another theatre.
We see this in Greenland, with its rare-earth resources and strategic position at the entrance to the Arctic.
We see it in the pressure placed on Canada, as Washington seeks greater control over North America, the Northwest Passage, manufacturing capacity and energy.
We see it in Panama, where the United States wants to counter China's influence over one of the world's most important maritime arteries.
We see it in symbolic gestures intended to assert American leadership over the hemisphere.
And we have seen it in Venezuela, where American intervention at the beginning of 2026 removed Nicolás Maduro and elevated Vice-President Delcy Rodríguez, while paying little attention to the democratic opposition represented by Edmundo González and Nobel laureate María Corina Machado.
Peace through strength.
For Trump, the new international order must be established by reaffirming American power and striking agreements with countries and leaders whose interests coincide with those of the United States.
Past relationships matter less.
So do alliances built over decades.
The trade war has provided perhaps the clearest demonstration.
Trump's “Liberation Day” tariffs of April 2, 2025, opened an economic confrontation not merely with China but with the European Union and America's neighbours in North America.
The political earthquake had been announced in advance through statements that friends were sometimes worse than enemies, that the European Union had been created to take advantage of America, and that European states had accumulated trade surpluses while relying on American taxpayers for their security.
And behind all of this remains Ukraine.
As became clear in Anchorage in August 2025, Trump's ultimate objective is to reach an understanding directly with Vladimir Putin — with Europe relegated to the sidelines.
There is historical precedent for great powers thinking this way.
Franklin Roosevelt and Josef Stalin negotiated directly at Yalta, laying foundations for the post-war division of Europe and securing Soviet participation in the Pacific war against Japan.
Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong reached their own transformative understanding in 1972 during “the week that changed the world”, overlooking profound differences over human rights to counter the Soviet Union and open the way towards normalised diplomatic and commercial relations.
What prevents something similar today?
Perhaps one thing: a European Union unwilling to stand aside while others determine the future of its territory, its market and its people.
The Return of Empires
We are entering what the Italian journalist Maurizio Molinari has called the “return of empires”.
The war in Ukraine shattered the previous global order and revealed four major spheres of influence.
Three are nation-states: the United States, Russia and China.
The fourth is supranational: the European Union.
Each has its own identity, historical origins, interests and ambitions.
And the struggle for global leadership is no longer merely economic or diplomatic.
It is military.
America, China and Russia could enter a period of direct or proxy confrontation, creating endemic instability and recurring military and economic crises. Europeans can already feel the consequences in their pockets through the impact of the Gulf conflict involving Israel and the United States on one side and Iran on the other.
But another possibility exists.
Trump, Putin and Xi could seek a global accommodation based on new spheres of influence: a new Yalta that would reshape international institutions and redistribute economic power.
In such a scenario, Europe risks becoming the prize.
Foreign Affairs has itself contemplated a world in which the leaders of China, Russia and the United States negotiate a new international order, marginalising multilateral institutions while great powers dictate terms to weaker states.
Europe should pay attention.
So, Is Uncle Sam Leaving?
It is too early to conclude that Uncle Sam has decided to say goodbye.
But it is increasingly clear that he no longer intends to be Europe's elder brother, protecting the continent always, everywhere and under all circumstances.
Europe's response must combine realism with prudence.
Realism means acknowledging that a new phase in transatlantic relations has begun.
Prudence means spending less time predicting the future and more time understanding what is already happening.
What Europe cannot do is remain below deck with its head down, hoping the storm will pass without touching it.
The continent is approaching a crossroads.
That choice will become particularly stark in 2027, when France, Estonia, Spain, Slovakia, Poland and Italy face parliamentary elections and Germany chooses a new federal president.
Europe can retreat into its old nation-states, each searching for protection beneath the cloak of one of the new empires.
Or it can accelerate towards deeper federal integration and equip itself to face an age of uncertainty.
We choose the second.
The first would risk reducing Europe to something resembling Renaissance Italy: a collection of small states, divided among themselves and ultimately forced into the orbit of the great empires surrounding them.
We have reached a moment when the new century is reshaping our lives and much of what was created in the 20th century is slowly becoming political archaeology.
That does not mean it should be discarded.
It means it must be adapted, modernised and reformed.
That applies to the transatlantic relationship.
It applies to multilateral institutions.
And it applies to European integration itself.
Trying to preserve the institutions and assumptions of the 20th century in amber would condemn today's leaders to becoming the “sleepwalkers” described by Christopher Clark in his great account of Europe's ruling classes before the First World War: men unable to anticipate, interpret or understand the catastrophe towards which they were moving.
This is not the moment to perform a requiem for the transatlantic friendship, for the alliance between Europe and the United States, or for the West itself.
But it is the moment to recognise that some of their defining characteristics are changing — indeed, have already changed.
It would be equally illusory to imagine that the next American midterm elections, or even the presidential election that follows Trump's departure, will simply turn history's clock back to the world before 2024.
Sand in an hourglass falls in one direction.
History does too.
If Trump and his isolationist, reactionary-revolutionary programme have prevailed in the United States, it is because they have successfully interpreted a genuine demand among American voters.
They are the political expression of a deeper social, cultural and identity transformation that has now reached the ballot box.
Democracy requires us to respect that reality.
But also to understand it.
The weakening of the historic relationship between Europe and the United States, under pressure from rival powers and increasingly profound internal divisions — divisions those rivals are only too willing to exploit — raises an existential question for our age:
Will power continue to have limits, or will the future belong simply to those most willing to use force without rules?
Europe, the continent that created so much and destroyed so much in two catastrophic world wars, developed the idea of the state as the supreme framework governing a political community.
At an immense cost in blood and suffering, Europeans also established that the rules governing that state should be determined through democracy, popular consent, elections and freely elected parliaments.
The return of imperial politics threatens to revive a very different principle: that power has no limit beyond the limit imposed by greater power.
It is a dangerous idea.
And it risks dismantling what Europe has built over the past 80 years — not coincidentally, the longest period of peace the continent has known in its long and violent history.
Faced with these global shocks and the storms now gathering around us, Europeans must be prepared to abandon supposedly immutable assumptions and ideological rigidities without abandoning the values that brought us this far.
At Democrats Review, as reformists, we believe we possess the intellectual disposition required to do precisely that: to approach a changing world as the merchants and navigators of earlier centuries approached the unknown — flexible, enterprising and willing to confront risk in pursuit of prosperity and knowledge.
Flexible in our methods.
Open to the future.
Firm in our values.
Whether the Atlantic remains a bridge or becomes a moat will depend, in the end, on what all of us choose to do.
All the more reason to get to work.
