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The End of Atlanticism

Trump’s realists are reorienting American power from Europe to the Indo-Pacific.

Government bureaucracies change very slowly. There is a tendency among governments — call it bureaucratic inertia — to keep doing what you have been doing for decades, even in the face of changed conditions. The United States emerged from the Second World War with a globalist outlook because, alone among the world’s great powers, it escaped the worst consequences of that war and faced a global ideological and geopolitical challenge from the Soviet Union. Those circumstances created in the United States an Atlanticist outlook that prioritized Europe over Asia with the Marshall Plan and the formation of NATO.

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