If anybody truly lived in Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” world, it was us. We were the first children of the new Czech democracy, born in the 1990s, at the end of the century which subjected our country to two world wars and totalitarian oppression. And my generation knew none of that. Our history was always within reach; we only needed to ask our parents or grandparents. But it was history, it had ended, and it was our responsibility and our lot to move forward — to leave history behind and pull ourselves into the future. Or so we thought.
It is hard to overstate our shock during the few months of Donald Trump’s second presidency. As a Czech who has been studying in the U.S. for the last two years, I’ve felt this shock on both sides of the Atlantic. Some emotions prevail on both continents: astonishment, for example. “How can he single-handedly do this?” is the most common text my mother, a deputy mayor of a small Czech village with no special interest in American politics, sends me. I try to investigate, to find an answer for her, but often, the Americans with whom I speak are equally uncertain.
Yet, there are also differences between the way my American friends and my Czech countrymen experience the return of Donald Trump. The Americans feel anger, uncertainty, fear. But the Europeans feel something else, something like outright vertigo. Not because anyone harbored illusions about Trump’s affinity for the old continent, but because his presidency seems to fatally question what we believed to be a foundation of our existence — that history had, in effect, ended. At least on our continent. And if there was someone who bought into this promise of permanence and stability most strongly, it was the Czechs of my generation.
America has been a fact of life for us. I was born in 1995. Long before I became aware of politics, the Czech Republic was comfortably seated in both NATO and the EU. The path forward was simple: we would keep doing what we were already doing. Catching up with the “old Europeans” seemed never-ending, and even thirty years after the Velvet Revolution, the Germans were still making more money than us. Growing up Czech in the 21st century meant that our economy would be managed by the EU and our security by America. This is what the international order meant to us. Quite frankly, we did not think much about it. The closest we got to imagining any of this could change was in fantasies of some Czech eurosceptics, but their calls for a “Czexit” always fell flat. Our relationship with America and its order was never seriously questioned, not by us and certainly not by the Americans.
The apparent normalcy of the liberal order into which we were born concealed that it was a remarkable achievement. It was remarkable, especially for us Czechs, for whom normal once meant political uncertainty or repression. The American-led order was a successful turn away from the logic of the previous century and the 1938 Munich Agreement. In September of that year, the leaders of France, Great Britain, and Italy jointly demanded that Czechoslovakia cede parts of its territory to Hitler’s Germany. Czechoslovakia, whose territory was at stake and which had an alliance treaty with France, was excluded from the negotiations. The smaller country was sacrificed to appease the dictator. In the minds of my generation, the Munich Agreement came to symbolize a kind of outdated great power politics. Furthermore, the futility of such politics was supposedly discredited by nothing less than history itself. We were raised to believe we did not have to fear its return. We were fooled.
The Munich analogy is probably the most important contribution of Czech (Slovak) history to the global lexicon of international politics. Since 1938, politicians and pundits have plotted multiple “new Munichs“ across the world (some less well plotted than others). Today is no exception. “Trump Is Offering Putin Another Munich,” wrote the historian Robert Kagan this March, in reference to the ongoing Ukraine negotiations.
But for the Czechs, Munich always had a specific meaning: a betrayal of a lasting kind. “Every Czech holds a deep-seated feeling, inherited from his parents and grandparents, that we were betrayed by the democratic West,” says Martin M. Šimečka, a Slovakian journalist, former dissident, and long-term observer of Czech and Slovak society.
Many in my generation, myself included, did not know what to think about the inherited feelings of betrayal. Munich seemed truly like a thing of the past. We would not dispute its importance, but wanted to move on. Because we grew up in a system that was built as a rejection of the Munich logic, we felt we had a seat at the table. In his Kidnapped West: A Tragedy of Central Europe, Milan Kundera, the Czech novelist who went into exile in France, wrote about the tension between the philosophical and political orientation of Central European nations under communism. Their philosophy belonged to the West, their politics to the East. With the 1989 revolution, it was time to make Europe whole. And while the post-1989 politics of Eastern Europe eventually proved to be anything but linear, we, the 1990s generation, saw opportunities for reconciliation.
America provided one of the roads to reconciliation. It was also only after the fall of communism that America came to play a prominent role in Czech politics. As Šimečka points out, anti-Communist dissent was oriented much more towards European and especially British intellectuals and activists. “During communism, we saw America as the only actor strong enough to defeat the Soviet Union. That does not necessarily mean we looked up to America. It was playing a big geopolitical game and small states like us were oftentimes beyond the level of recognition,” says Šimečka.
That changed in the 1990s. Czech politicians quickly realized that America was the key actor when it came to NATO enlargement — our ultimate aspiration in that decade. The fact that the Czech Republic was among the first post-communist countries to join NATO is still seen as one of the biggest successes of our post-1989 politics.
Quickly, however, NATO membership became more an unquestioned fact of life than a historical, contingent success. Once in place, we had little reason to doubt the security of the architecture undergirding our safety — a safety which we took for granted, just as we took for granted the alliance with America, and American commitment to liberalism, upon which that safety was based. Why wouldn’t we? It seemed nonsensical, oxymoronic even, for America to turn on the world order that it had imposed and with which it had so totally synonymized its own interests. Yes, there were times when this assumption was tested. But given American foreign policy adventurism, it was usually Europe that was short on commitment. The question of whether Europe would stand with America was raised explicitly by the invasion of Iraq, the most glaring example of a modern rift in transatlantic relations.
Today, the question is reversed, hence the vertigo. Many say that we already have the answer: if under threat, America will not stand with Europe and NATO. A March survey of public opinion in major NATO member countries conducted by a Czech research team found a dramatic decline in trust in the U.S. collective defense commitments. Asked whether if Russia attacks Latvia, they believed the US would come to its defense, only forty-five percent of Germans and thirty-seven percent of Brits said “yes.” When asked the same question in January before Donald Trump’s inauguration, the numbers were higher by roughly 20 percent.
The unease is widespread and publicly voiced. The Economist, traditionally a preeminent transatlantic publication, argued in February that “Europe must prepare for abandonment or extortion, even if that risks accelerating the very collapse of NATO.” Its Czech equivalent, the weekly Respekt, for which I have written, recently ran a valedictory cover: “Goodbye America! A new era has begun. Europe must act fast and not betray Ukraine.”
It is not an accident that Respekt’s farewell to Washington came paired with a rallying cry for Kyiv. A century ago, German sociologist Karl Mannheim defined “generation” as a group of people who are born during the same period and are “exposed to the social and intellectual symptoms of a process of dramatic destabilization.” For my generation, the “dramatic destabilization“ was the war in Ukraine. It upended our understanding of the future and our role in it. Two events, first the war in Ukraine and then Donald Trump’s return, mark the death of Fukuyama’s Eastern European children.
First February 24, 2022, when the full-scale invasion of Ukraine started: For a couple of days, nobody knew where or whether the Russian army could be stopped. Americans, with their bulging muscles and the ocean between them and their enemies, cannot begin to imagine what such precarity feels like. “Fear of invasion” is a fiction, a creative exercise — the war of 1812 has blessedly faded from American collective memory. But no ocean divides us from one another or from the past. Reading about that fear in 2025, it is difficult to resuscitate or recall that early terror given the strength of the Ukrainians which they have evinced every day since. But back then, the fear was real, physical, and paralyzing. It would come again and again with various war developments. Fear became one of the symptoms of our new reality.
The second watershed event for us came on February 28, 2025, when Donald Trump and J. D. Vance berated Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. That scene, almost violent in its atmosphere, made clear the contempt of the current American administration for its relationship with Europe. More than anything else, those ten minutes of “good TV” broke our faith in alliance with the United States.
What connects both moments is our feeling of hopelessness. Europe was not prepared to defend itself without America. “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything,” Trump famously said on the Access Hollywood tape about women. When you’re Europe today, you too let America do anything. We all watched the ambushed Ukrainian president and we knew that any other European leader could have been, or may one day be in his place. The humiliation and fear made it clear that something had to change.
Finally, some might say. It is true that no one should be surprised that the U.S. wants to retreat from Europe. We all knew the American attention had been shifting away ever since Obama’s declared Pivot to Asia. Yet, Donald Trump is not merely restructuring the relationship: he is attacking its basis for existence. As one Czech official recently told me after a private meeting with members of the current American government, the Americans tried to hammer the point home. “Madeleine Albright is dead,” they reminded the Czechs, preempting any nostalgic references to this monumental figure in Czech-American relations. Fittingly enough, it was Albright who famously titled America the “indispensable nation.” She is dead indeed.
It is hard to tell whether declaring the end of transatlanticism, not even four months into Donald Trump’s presidency, is an expression of crude realism or hot-headed impulsiveness. What is easy to say is that for Czechs, the vertigo is real, and that it has no easy cure. For my generation, Trump represents a collapse of one of the pillars of the world we grew up in. Unlike in 1938, the situation in Europe is more favorable for us. But if we are forced to look back at Munich once again, it is to remind us that being a small and less powerful country is a liability. And if we run out of ideas and luck, our future might get dictated again by the big players. America included.
The optimists in my generation always said that we don’t know what the future holds for our relationship with Russia. We were open to something other than the old, bloody dance. This, by itself, was in the context of post-communist Europe an exercise of hope (or naivety, as some countered). It is incomparably easier to be hopeful for our future relationship with America. But maybe that ease is not justified and merely reflective of an outdated historical familiarity. Maybe the future is over, and the past is sealed.
Where does all this leave my generation? I must admit the vertigo and adrenaline that question inspires is not only terrifying but also exciting, like teetering on the ledge of a skyscraper. I remember countless debates with people who lived through the fall of communism and who were in the streets, theaters, or clubs when the Velvet Revolution was taking place, doing anything they could to help. Even thirty years later, many felt like they got to be part of something extraordinary. They made history.
I could not help but feel a little envious. My generation was asked to be a responsible custodian of the legacy of 1989, but at times, it was unclear what our contribution might be. We, too, wanted to experience history happening. As the combined crises of the war in Ukraine and the American implosion have shown, for 1989 to survive, it will need more than just custodians.