A phrase that once sounded like academic shorthand has begun to appear in political speeches with unusual urgency: Pax Americana. For decades, it described a rough order built around American power, American guarantees, and an assumption—sometimes admired, sometimes resented—that Washington would anchor the West’s security architecture.

This week, Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, declared that era “largely over” for Europe, urging leaders to stop indulging nostalgia and start asserting their own interests with greater independence. The speech landed less as a philosophical meditation than as a warning: that the United States under President Donald Trump is now perceived in European capitals as transactional, unpredictable, and increasingly willing to treat allies as bargaining chips rather than partners.

Merz’s remarks came ahead of high-stakes meetings in Berlin involving Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and a U.S. delegation led by Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy, with Jared Kushner also participating. The talks were framed publicly as a renewed push toward a cease-fire. But the diplomatic atmosphere around them suggested something more fraught: Europe’s fear that Washington’s peace formula could pressure Ukraine into concessions that Europe believes would invite future Russian aggression.

In speeches and private conversations, European officials have become more candid about the dilemma. They want an end to the war. They also want an end that does not reward invasion. That balance—between urgency and deterrence—has become harder to maintain as Trump’s team signals impatience and portrays compromise as synonymous with speed.

Zelenskyy, in a striking shift, has indicated openness to abandoning Ukraine’s NATO ambition in exchange for binding security guarantees. To some European leaders, this is the language of realism: Ukraine attempting to salvage sovereignty when a full victory is out of reach. To others, it reads as coercion: a country being asked to trade away the core principle that its future alliances should be chosen in Kyiv, not dictated in Moscow—or negotiated in a foreign capital.

The tension is amplified by what Russia says it wants. In repeated statements, Russian officials have signaled that they view peace not as compromise but as capitulation—an end-state in which Ukraine becomes neutral, weakened, and permanently constrained. Europe’s anxiety is that a cease-fire without meaningful guarantees could function as a pause, not a conclusion: a chance for Russia to rearm, consolidate territory, and return later with new demands.

Trump’s defenders argue that the old approach—supporting Ukraine indefinitely while insisting on maximalist goals—has produced stalemate, not stability. They say Europe must accept that American resources are finite and American priorities have shifted. In this view, pushing for a deal is not betrayal but pragmatism, and Europe’s louder rhetoric is partly an attempt to preserve an arrangement in which Washington carries the heaviest burden.

Critics see something darker: not simply a change in emphasis, but a change in alignment. They argue that Trump’s posture creates space for Moscow to portray itself as the inevitable power on Europe’s eastern flank and for European publics to wonder whether American guarantees are still credible. When leaders begin to speak of the “end” of Pax Americana, it is not only a complaint about style. It is an admission that assumptions about U.S. reliability have weakened.

European officials have responded in two ways. First, by emphasizing independent defense capacity—more spending, more procurement coordination, more urgency about readiness. Second, by inserting themselves more directly into negotiations, signaling that any settlement that reshapes Europe’s security order cannot be decided by Washington and Moscow alone, with Ukraine left to accept whatever survives.

That is the subtext of Berlin: a European effort to reassert agency in a conversation that, in past decades, would have been led almost entirely by the United States. Merz’s positioning—both rhetorically and diplomatically—suggests a Germany trying to move from reluctant follower to active coordinator, while France and Britain seek to remain essential to the continent’s strategy.

Trump, for his part, appears to relish the confrontation. His politics has long been powered by the argument that alliances are bad deals, that admiration abroad is meaningless, and that American leverage is squandered when it is exercised as stewardship rather than dominance. From that perspective, European discomfort is not a warning sign; it is proof that the old hierarchy is being rewritten.

The question is what replaces it. If Europe’s answer is strategic autonomy without cohesion, the result could be fragmentation—multiple capitals improvising, competing, and hedging. If America’s answer is unilateralism without legitimacy, it may discover that influence cannot be commanded indefinitely by insistence alone.

For Ukraine, the consequences are immediate. For Europe, they are structural. And for the United States, the danger is reputational: once allies conclude that American commitments are conditional on the temperament of a single leader, the safest policy becomes preparing for American absence—even when America is still present.

The era Merz described as ending was never as stable as memory claims. But it did provide a shared expectation: that when crises came, the Atlantic alliance would hold. The test now is whether Europe’s newfound bluntness produces renewal—or marks the first chapter of a long, permanent divorce.