‘Europeans have to understand that it’s over’: historian Robert Kagan on Trump’s coming ‘dictatorship’ and the end of the western alliance

If you want to understand what’s happening in the world right now, the best guides are not politicians or pundits, but historians.

“People don’t really understand that the world we’ve known is gone and is not coming back any time soon.” Those words belong to Robert Kagan, a conservative thinker and foreign policy adviser to successive US presidents.

I spoke to him on Monday evening after being chilled by an interview he gave to the New Yorker, in which he argued that Donald Trump’s power grab was almost complete and that the United States was on the brink of dictatorship.

Since that interview, Trump has made his extraordinary claim on Greenland and opened hostilities against his Nato allies – including the UK. I interviewed Kagan and asked him to speak directly to Britain and Europe at what feels like a critical moment, because our politicians and much of our press appear to be spectacularly failing to meet it.

This was not a comforting conversation. But Kagan’s analysis has a clarity that is in short supply right now.

Watch the interview here. An edited transcript follows below.

Carole Robert, I contacted you because I listened twice to the New Yorker interview you did. It just felt to me that it was the single thing that I'd listened to that I felt explained what was happening with sufficient gravitas and urgency and clarity. And I’ve wanted everybody to hear it, particularly people in Britain this week because my perception is just that people haven't really taken in the gravity of the crisis as yet. And having the historical perspective is what we need at the moment to make sense of what's happening. 

So what is your message for Britain and for Europe in terms of what we are facing this week and what we need to do?

Robert Well, it's a major crisis for Europe because, I don't know how much Europeans have come to understand that it's over. I feel like people have been treating this like a bumpy marriage, and if only we do a little counselling and make a compromise here and do that, then they can make it all work out. But people really need to understand that the world we've known is gone and it's not coming back any time soon. Because, for one thing, Trump is a phenomenon. The people who support Trump are not going away even when Trump goes away.

And the message that I'm giving people in the United States is stop counting on the elections to save us, because I don't think Trump is going to allow a free and fair election in 2026, much less 2028.

So for Europeans, they need to stop waiting for the America that they know to come back, because it isn't. 

I think it's just vitally important that Europe now, to the best of its ability, comes together and really undertakes what would be a dramatic strategic revolution. Europe needs to become self-sufficient in both military and economic terms. It needs to start understanding that it is faced by aggressive powers on both flanks. They face an aggressive Russia in the east, and they face an aggressive America run by a megalomaniac in the west.

And so it's not about the alliance any more, it's about Europe coming together, building the capability. This is not marginal. It's not like going from 2% to 2.5%. This is a real revolution. Europe has done this in the past. They've had to, and I just hope they can do it now.

And speaking directly to the UK, if I may, it's extremely unfortunate the UK took itself out of Europe because this is a moment when I think the UK historically would have a leadership role in this, but I'm not sure the UK has it in it any more to really resist the United States. So it's going to be quite a challenge.

Carole Can you just explain your background, and how you've reached this analysis? You wrote this amazing piece back in 2016 before Trump had even won the nomination. You set it out very clearly how you thought that if Trump came to power, that would be the way that America embraced fascism. And this came from your longstanding track record as a historian. Can you just explain that, and why you saw that so clearly with Trump?

Robert Well, Trump himself is a unique phenomenon. He really is a megalomaniac in a way that we haven't seen even with our most powerful presidents, For him it's all about domination. You know, people think that he's transactional. The only transaction he's interested in is one where he dominates you and you accept that he's dominating you. And we can see that in his tariff policy.

So Trump is to some extent a remarkable character. But the forces that he has put himself in front of in the United States, and quite deliberately – when he ran first for office in 2011, his sole issue was the birther controversy about whether Barack Obama, our first black president, was actually an American. And in so doing, he signalled to a very old and very potent movement of, basically, white Christian supremacists. These were the people who ran the South in the 19th century and throughout much of, right up until the civil rights movement. They've been bitter ever since.

In the 50s, they talked about “status anxiety”. But we're basically talking about people who feel like they are the true Americans. And to them all these immigrants and brown people and people of other religions have come in. And now they have too many rights. And they basically want to restore the America that existed in the 1920s, at the height of the Second Ku Klux Klan.

And the people who are running all this, the Stephen Millers and Russell Voughts, they are true believers in what they call post-liberalism, but is really anti-liberalism. They're not just opposed to, like, the left – they're opposed to the founders, the American founders' liberal government. And some of them – the ideologists of this movement – are quite frank in saying that they want to change that government that the founders created. And that's what's happening. And the vehicle is this power-hungry Donald Trump.

Carole So the thing which I’ve heard you say that is different from what I hear other people say – much of the language around this is still being couched in this “threat to democracy”, like, if we don't do X, then there is this threat. But what you're saying so clearly is: it's already happened. They are already inside the house; and the militarisation that we're seeing in Minneapolis, this is the kind of end times. Is that correct?

Robert Yes, and I think people are not seeing clearly, although, goodness knows, I feel like the administration has done everything except climb up on the roof of the White House and yell what they're going to do. Trump is already talking about how you don't really need these midterm elections.

But, more importantly, the model that they have now displayed to us in Minnesota is the model they have deliberately sent in ICE, to spark protest because of their behaviour. They're deliberately provoking people into protesting so that they can then declare a national emergency and invoke the Insurrection Act, so they can get the US military directly involved in putting down protesters, and calling everybody who protests a “domestic terrorist” is the legal justification for that.

Now imagine this on a national scale during – who's to say that, during an election, they don't flood some heavily Democratic area with ICE people, which inevitably provokes protest and potentially even violence, which then justifies sending in the military under the Insurrection Act and seizing the ballot boxes, which is what Trump wanted to do in 2020? He's made no secret of his thoughts, at least, and I think we're now seeing the beginning of the implementation.

And the other thing about Minneapolis is it's designed to desensitise everybody, get us used to the fact that this kind of thing is going to happen. And so I think we're at a very critical juncture. And people are just not quite waking up to it in time, in my view.

Carole The critical thing that it doesn't feel to me has landed in America is that people are alarmed, scared, but it's still this sort of impossibility of processing something that is so massive. Is that your perception as well?

Robert Yes. Now, the really bad news is I think that at least 40% of Americans are completely down with it. You know, I think that they are willing to have a dictatorship if the people who are being oppressed are the right people.

And I also think that the leaders of the Republicans in Congress, John Thune and Mike Johnson, they're willing – they're perfectly willing – to live in a dictatorship if it means holding their jobs. And they're certainly not going to risk their jobs to prevent a dictatorship.

So it's not just Trump and then everybody not getting it. There are people who are down with it. Then there's a lot of people who are either unaware or indifferent or they don't really see it, etc. So you're really talking about a minority of Americans who even can see clearly what's happening. And I don't know what it would take to change that and have a much broader part of the American public understand it.

We're still in the case where, if there were four Republican senators, willing to stand up to this, I think they could still stop it. But since there's no prospect, apparently, of that, of finding four Republican senators, I don't know who's supposed to stop it. The courts are not going to stop it, put it that way.

Carole So the messaging today from Keir Starmer here is still: we're in a special relationship with the United States. They're fundamental to our security. We've got to talk it out. We’re not going to get into trade wars and it seems to me to be spectacularly underplaying what is happening here and what is required of us in this moment.

And, you know, in the British press, it was like this whole, “oh, the British government played a blinder because it put on this state visit and Trump loved the banquet”. It's all we managed to pull out of the bag! What's your take on that, and what should we be interpreting of what's happening in this moment?

Robert Well, again, it's just a faulty analysis to think that if you can flatter Trump enough and call him daddy, that means he'll leave you alone. As we see, he's not leaving anybody alone. It's really just – in fact, with him, it's an invitation to come back and demand something else and push you around. So you can't buy anything in that way.

Now, the reason that these nations of Europe and Britain are doing this is because the alternative is ghastly. I mean, the alternative is you have to understand that America is no longer an ally. You have to understand that there is no special relationship. You know, I talk in this larger piece that I wrote for the Atlantic, which is about the end of the world order, and how America set it up against the rest of the world, is that, you know, Europe risks becoming a collection of fiefdoms of the great empires of the world right now. Some of them will be under Russia's thumb, some of them will be under America's thumb, maybe some of them will be influenced more by China.

But I'm a little worried that Britain is already in that category, that I don't know that Britain has it in it at this point to remove itself from being essentially an American protectorate. And, you know, I have such admiration for the British people and there's been so many times in history when Britain itself has saved the world, not the United States. But I don't see signs of that Britain at this particular moment.

Carole So, Robert, one of the things which most alarms me, because it's my special area of interest – is that the British government has undertaken massive deals with US tech companies. This came out of that state visit. It includes – two weeks ago, I think it was – Britain signing a £240m deal to put Palantir in the middle of our armed forces, our Ministry of Defence. It just seems like total madness to have a Trump ally literally in our defence infrastructure. What's your take on that?

Robert You're right, that's madness. But look, I mean, a lot of what Trump is able to do has been greased by the powerful tech companies and the billionaires in the US who are only interested in making money. And America's not the only one who suffers from that problem. But this notion that you can buy the Americans off by making these kinds of deals is just wrong. And honestly, Palantir now is a very pernicious force in the United States. It's the big keeper of the surveillance technology that ICE is using in America. And I expect them to think about using it in Britain too.

But again, the European countries and the UK are going to have to realise that they now are out of the world that they think they've been in, and that they think is still existing. That world is gone, and it's time to understand that it's going to be every country for himself now, or Europe shows the kind of unity that it has occasionally shown in the past and rises to the occasion. I wish I were more optimistic.

Carole Robert, can I ask you one last question, which is: the other thing which frustrates me incredibly is, from 2016, actually before then, Nigel Farage and his far-right parties have been in succession. They in the UK have very clearly aligned themselves with Trump. They've also been very pro-Russian and they're still treated in this sort of cosy British way. Have you got any advice for us in that we're just a couple of years behind you in some respects? In terms of understanding these far-right parties who are aligned with the Trump agenda – what we should be doing?

Robert Well, I'm not going to advise you on how to deal with your own politics, but I will just say all of us have not understood, which I feel is the most basic thing, that liberalism, which is to say, freedom and the protection of individual rights, is at death's door right now. If America is not going to support individual rights and freedoms any more and is itself going to become a dictatorship – I don't know where liberalism will survive.

The only place that I can see it surviving is in the UK and Europe. The people have to understand what the stakes are. It is like the 1930s again, even though there's no Hitler, in the sense that I really do believe liberalism is a fleeting moment in world history. I mean, as a historian, I can say we've been living through a unique period since 1945 and there is no guarantee that it lasts. And I just think people have been very slow to understand what the real stakes are. And the real stakes are freedom.

Carole Robert, that's totally terrifying! But it’s also in a way comforting to have somebody of your authority and credibility saying this stuff, because I feel I'm just not hearing it in the mainstream media enough. Thank you.

Robert Once you have gotten yourself into the mode of understanding what's happening, then everything that occurs fits a pattern. Whereas if you're still living in a previous world when all these events happen, people are just puzzled, or they're like, “what's the motive here?”, etc. The motive is domination, and in Trump's case, it's domination in the United States and also global domination. I think the world is waking up to that now, and unfortunately, it's going to be very bad for the United States as well as for everybody else.

Robert Kagan is a conservative historian and former Republican foreign policy adviser. His 2025 book, Rebellion, How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart Again, is published by Penguin.