I perched on a heating unit at the rear of an overfilled auditorium. My fingers were stiff and my ears stung from the cold outside. I looked around. For the twelfth time, current and former heads of state, ambassadors, foreign ministers, academics, artists, and financiers had arrived with hundreds of students to discuss rearmament, nuclear risk, diplomacy and technology at the Harvard European Conference. 

With Europe and the university under stress from the U.S. administration it was not an auspicious time for a meeting on the transatlantic relationship. Yet the air thronged with shop talk: “I’ve been on the Kremlin blacklist since before it was fashionable”, “Iceland brings geography to NATO”, “To what extent should we be concerned about the rhetoric coming out of Svalbard?”

Moderators asked that remarks not be attributed. The Chatham House Rule was not applied at the meeting in 2023, where one chest-puffing dignitary considered his remarks during a panel discussion so momentous as to constitute “interventions”.

This year’s remarks were more guarded, the diplomats stuffy and often stuck. Where there was criticism, it was by allusion or contrast. One speaker sought to challenge Europe’s reputation as ageing and finicky by inviting the audience to see a continent with safe schools, cities “built for people, not cars” and societies “that invest not only in markets, but in meaning”.

Eventually, though, there was a clash. It happened during a panel on Arctic security. A Washington insider explained the U.S. position on Greenland. America must, we were told, control the world’s largest island because it is insufficiently defended against Russian and Chinese adventurism, because its mineral resources are essential to U.S. prosperity, and so America can install missile defences. The speaker thrice attempted a separate justification that “if you can’t defend your property you have to sell it” but did not substantiate the point. 

The Nordic panellists looked on with concern. Their bottom lips jutting, eyebrows arched and leaping; outrage was in their folded arms and side-eyes as their ally explained with apparent sincerity that the reason public opinion on the island had swung against an American takeover was that “the Danes have gaslit the Greenlanders”. 

Although this exchange lacked a shared basis in principle or fact, I admired the American who had come to the conference as an outsider. They may have prickled at times, advanced unsteady lines of thought, and lobbed incendiary comments which fizzled in groans, but they had nevertheless chosen to engage in company where their views were considered fringe. It was so much more admirable than not showing up.

While no current representative of the U.S. administration attended the conference, it’s attitude is described in their National Security Strategy:
“It is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies”

One former ambassador described the document, which elsewhere makes favourable reference to European research and cultural ties, as a “love letter to Europe”. A Dane replied that someone who habitually intimidates their partner is not a healthy person to see. 

It may be that the American was aware of the 16th century Middle Dutch word boele, whose meaning evolved from lover to bully, and that the Dane considered that alleging domestic abuse was unlikely to foster the healing of the nations. I cannot say. But one could not miss the rift. While European leaders acknowledged that “outsourcing our defence to the American taxpayer made us dependent”, they seemed more rueful at “having to spend money on weapons we’ll never use”. Next door an American tub-thumped the need to “win the civilisational struggle that is going on”. 

Evasion and ominous warnings distracted from the tangible stuff of which relationships are made. In Greenland, there is a deal to be done. The U.S. can be supported to redevelop military bases on the island along with whatever mining permits it suits the Danes and Greenlanders to grant.
“Would that be enough?” I asked the person most in position to know.
“We’ll see”, they said, and walked away. 

Europeans sometimes note that interactions in America feel like transactions: What do you want, what’s in it for me, can we make a deal. This can seem calculating, but in a society so fragmented, where the land is vast and there is so far to fall it makes sense to take what you can. Americans on the other hand, for all their power and might, often feel patronised by Europeans. Their attitude sometimes becomes: Why should we pay to look after people who sneer at us? 

Feeling disrespected, their resentment curdles easily to contempt – and contempt brings careless hell in reach. Atul Gawande, the surgeon, author and ex-official, describing a few days later the razing of USAID – at a reported cost of over 700,000 lives to date – said that “the deeper issue is whether we rely on dominance, force and extractive transactions or whether we solve things by cooperation”. 

His remark caught the drift of the Atlantic relationship too. This erosion is, however, more emotional than strategic. Time and again delegates spoke of family.
”We want to stay in the marriage but you have to take a signal from your partner”…“Is this a quarrel in the family or a post-divorce spat?”…“It’s like your rich Uncle took away your allowance and now you have to look after yourself”.

This was unhelpful. For though we share some blood and memory, America and Europe are not kin. We are, however, a product of our recurrent choices.

What Europeans find unsettling is that from the standpoint of certain Americans NATO and its obligations represent more liability than asset to a power able to prosecute its interests alone. 

So the fear, for Europe, is of losing a friend. Against the dread of abandonment come supplications of family, marriage, history, treaty, law. Please don’t leave me. But care cannot be compelled this way. 

Yet relationships are formed not among countries but between people. I thought of a friend I made in America, a soldier. He was thoughtful, rigorous and fair, and contributed far more to our class than he imbibed. We swapped stories of conflict and medicine over moscow mules in Charlie’s, a Cambridge bar, and years later gave a sprawling tutorial on the American Civil War on the road to Harper’s Ferry in West Virginia. We remain friends because life is better that way. 

One’s life can feel as nothing weighed against the world’s ills. But however we guess and fear, there will be a future and in that future we will need to find a way to live together. That accommodation or combustion will be struck by individuals.

Near the end I looked around the forum. A woman bounced her baby on her lap. Two organisers in green lanyards napped on one another’s shoulders. An AV technician watched the Winter Olympics on a split screen as a politician wore on below. Students lined up behind a microphone stand with questions. A police officer surreptitiously ate a biscuit.

Outside snow was general all over Boston. It sheeted sidewalks and dusted jutting trees. It capped the frozen Charles and berms of plowed snow. It mounded on baseball diamonds and on fat cables between telegraph poles and on the fur of a squirrel which scampered by.

Despite the animosity in many rooms, it was warm inside. Warmth was in sideways glances and the squeeze of an arm; in the press of hands and in smiles. It was springing up in flashes of wit and in whispers. It was in the young and old, Americans and Europeans. It was in the way we chose to interact with one another. It was friendship – which endures so long as we choose to be something to one another. It was not dark yet.