If you follow these things closely, you may have seen a clip of the chairman of the Munich Security Conference breaking down in tears, unable to speak any further while reflecting on Vice President JD Vance’s speech there. This breakdown is remarkable because the chairman, Christoph Heusgen, is not a minor apparatchik but a sophisticated and knowledgeable official who was former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s national security adviser from 2005 to 2017.

He had a front-row seat to Merkel’s epochal decisions –to shut down nuclear plants in 2011, admit 1 million Muslim male “refugees” in 2015, and hold defense spending far below the 2% level sought by the second Obama and first Trump administrations. His previous appearance on social media came when, as head of Germany’s United Nations delegation in 2018, he led his colleagues in laughing derisively at President Donald Trump’s criticism of Germany’s reliance on Russian natural gas.

Heusgen’s tears were apt. Merkel’s policies, hailed by European elites at the time, now “lie in ruins,” writes the Economist.

Vance’s speeches in Munich and earlier in Paris criticized Europe generally and Germany in particular for stifling technological innovation, for suppressing speech, especially opposition to mass migration, and for spending well below NATO targets on defense. The European elites have had things their way and have led their societies on a path to decline.

All of which, the German journalist Wolfgang Munchau wrote, marked “the end of the transatlantic alliance.” Trump’s decision to conduct negotiations to end the Russia-Ukraine war with Russian President Vladimir Putin but not with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy or any European leaders furthers that impression.

This is cause for regret for those with memories of the many dazzling successes of America’s trans-Atlantic alliance in response to Soviet aggression after World War II. America revived Western Europe’s war-torn economy with the Marshall Plan in 1948, deftly prevented possible communist victories in elections in Italy and France in 1948, kept West Berlin free with the airlift in 1948-49, and established the NATO alliance in 1949.

The result was a prosperous and free Western Europe in the next three decades — les trente glorieuses, in French — and the fall of the Soviet empire from 1989 to 1991. Peace has mostly prevailed in Europe for 80 years, almost as long as the 99 years of Metternich’s Congress of Europe and Bismarck’s balance of power between 1815 and 1914.

American postwar statesmanship was less successful in Asia. American leaders found it impossible to prevent the communist takeover of China in 1949, and 37,000 Americans died preventing one in South Korea from 1950 to 1953. Some 58,000 Americans died fighting alongside South Vietnam, which fell in 1975. In the meantime, Japan’s economy boomed, followed by similar growth in Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore