Rome's gift, America's empire: Why Europe misread 80 years of US power

For 80 years, Europe told itself a story. The United States crossed the Atlantic not for conquest, but for principle—to defeat tyranny, rebuild shattered nations, and anchor a rules-based order. The Marshall Plan, NATO, and the Truman Doctrine stood as monuments to American exceptionalism. Livy’s description of Rome liberating Greek city-states seemed, at last, to have found its modern incarnation.

The Liberator’s Fine Print

Yet Livy’s account carries a warning Rome’s contemporaries missed. The Republic granted Greek liberty not out of ideological conviction, but tactical necessity: denying Philip V of Macedon and Carthage access to Greek armies and ports. Fifty years later, once Rome’s dominance over the Mediterranean was absolute, that same liberty was extinguished. The generosity was always conditional on strategic utility.

A Pattern Ignored, Repeated

Washington’s post-1945 benevolence followed a similar logic. Containment required keeping Eurasia’s industrial heartland out of Soviet hands—a goal that dovetailed with European recovery but never erased America’s parallel record of overthrowing democracies in Iran, Guatemala, and elsewhere when interests diverged. Türkiye received an early lesson in 1964, when President Johnson’s letter made clear that NATO solidarity was subordinate to Washington’s regional calculus.

Europe’s Comfortable Amnesia

Council of Europe Secretary General Alain Berset’s recent New York Times essay captures the current mood of bewildered betrayal. He laments that a founder of the postwar order now questions international law itself. This astonishment, however, requires selective memory. For over a decade, European members of the Council have armed and funded designated terrorist groups in Syria when geopolitics deemed it convenient. International law, it seems, was universal only until it constrained Western preferences.

The Roman Reckoning

If Europe now faces an American president who speaks openly of annexation and treats alliances as transactional, it is not an aberration—it is the veil finally lifted. Rome did not become predatory overnight; it simply stopped needing to pretend otherwise. Turkish policymakers, who have long navigated this reality, understand that self-reliance is not cynicism but prudence. The question for European capitals is whether 80 years of comfortable dependency has left them capable of forging their own path, or whether, like the Greeks, they mistook a tactical alliance for a permanent vow.