My Farewell to America

I remember when America was Richard Scarry's colorful pages, where I'd lose myself for hours. I must have been about five years old. His drawings became my reality – bright yellow school buses I'd never seen, orange pumpkins larger than my head, mailboxes with little red flags, and fire hydrants dotting sidewalks. I didn't know it then, but I was learning to love a place I hadn't yet visited, adopting its imagery as universal.

I remember when America was a bedsheet hung with ropes in a dusty garage, where my father projected black-and-white Laurel and Hardy films on my sixth birthday. We enjoyed American culture, humor, society, and even the urban landscape—a far-away land filtered through a decades-old Hollywood lens.

I remember that America was the reason why my parents survived to meet at all. Without the sacrifices of your soldiers, my father might never have emerged from imprisonment at the end of the war in Europe. Without your victory, my mother would surely have perished in her concentration camp in Asia. The extermination order was already issued, including the instruction to leave no trace.

Their unlikely survival and the strange coincidences that brought them together on a ship crossing the Indian Ocean in 1946, I owe to you, America. I would learn all this only many years later, but before I knew you, you had already saved my future.

At home, America was where everything was better—an ideal to live up to. Wednesday afternoons were sacred – the only time children's programs appeared on our television. I'd watch, mesmerized by glimpses of this other world: Flipper and Lassie, your reruns of the sixties were our premieres in the seventies.

When we believed in each other

We believed in each other when I was twenty, flying to your shores with nothing but an open return ticket and the soundtrack of Bruce Springsteen in my head. I went straight from JFK to New Jersey, where I made friends who took me to beaches, boardwalks, and bars. One had spent an evening drinking with Springsteen himself—a claim that felt like touching divinity by proxy. Suddenly, I was living inside the lyrics that taught me English while I memorized them in my Dutch bedroom; I was standing "outside the 7-Eleven store" like in "Racing in the Street," my life momentarily merging with your mythology.

We believed in each other when I first emerged from the Port Authority onto 42nd Street in Manhattan. The city rose around me exactly as Simon and Garfunkel had promised, as countless films had depicted. I immediately loved that vibrant chaos, a feeling that has never left me. I wandered those streets as if I'd been there before, which, in my imagination, I had been.

We believed in each other as I crossed your continent by Greyhound busses, sleeping in seats and strangers' homes, passing Cadillac Ranch that I recognized because it accompanied the lyrics on Springsteen's "The River." One night, I woke up on a bus somewhere in Texas to realize I'd turned 21 in my sleep.

In Albuquerque, I met with students who then adopted me for days at a lake house where I could sleep on a couch. We drank beer and rode jet skis I'd only seen in a James Bond movie until I decided to travel further west; Pet Sounds encouraged me to discover California. At every turn, America, you welcomed me with the casual generosity that was your hallmark.

Years later, I would stand on a corner in Winslow, Arizona, just because the Eagles had sung about it in "Take It Easy." I sought out the sign on the pavement marking the exact spot, a pilgrim to a shrine of American music that had shaped my youth.

I've walked the Narrows in Zion Park, watched the sunrise turn Bryce Canyon to flame, and traced the Colorado River from its source to the Mexican border. I returned so often that these landscapes became as familiar to me as my childhood's Dutch polders and tulip fields.

Something changed after the towers fell

Something changed after the towers fell. I watched the smoke rise on CNN, surrounded by my colleagues in the office, feeling your pain as my own. "We are all Americans today," our newspapers declared. We meant it. In that moment of shared horror, Article 5 of NATO was invoked for the first and only time in history—we pledged our unconditional support. Your tragedy was ours; your enemies became our enemies.

But then came the wars you asked us to join – first with you, then behind you. We followed you into Afghanistan without question, bound by solidarity. Iraq, however, divided us. "You're either with us or against us," your president said, and for the first time, some said those words felt like a threat rather than an invitation. However, we trusted Colin Powell and anything he presented to the UN Security Council. His presentation of alleged evidence of weapons of mass destruction seemed so certain, so meticulously researched. It would be unthinkable that he would risk his and America's credibility on the global stage to justify an unnecessary war.

Continental drift accelerated once we found out the evidence was flawed. I remember seeing Colin Powell walking into a conference room several years later on the other side of a hall during a ministerial meeting. I wonder if everyone else also had flashbacks of the UN Security Council presentation.

The first hairline fractures had appeared earlier, during Reagan's years, when your course began drifting from how we had organized our societies in Europe. Small philosophical differences in governance, economics, and social policy widened gradually; they were hard to notice at first. Different visions of what made a good society began to emerge on either side of the Atlantic in the 1980s.

When you started looking Elsewhere

Then we became "Old Europe," and you pivoted to Asia before "America First" was reinvented. Do today's voters know about the America First Committee? The isolationist group opposing U.S. involvement in World War II, known for anti-Semitic rhetoric and perceived sympathy toward fascist regimes, quickly dissolved after Pearl Harbor. I had never expected that the slogan and what it stood for would someday be dusted off and reused. But in a country where the people remember fascism only as a danger on other shores that never found fertile ground in the U.S., voters can more easily fall for its slogans.

"America First" wasn't just a slogan—it was the formalization of what we'd sensed for years: that the relationship had become transactional. "They need to pay their fair share," your new president insisted. Reducing seventy years of shared sacrifice and mutual protection to a balance sheet, like in a bad marriage where the relationship is reduced to who pays for what, the magic began to fade.

Separation because one of the partners found another lover. First, your gaze turned to Asia—lucrative markets and rising powers seemed more exciting than old, familiar Europe. Then, strangely, you seemed to prefer the company of dictatorships—relationships with fewer demands and fewer shared values to honor. And you decided perhaps you'd rather be alone—a solitary superpower, grabbing what isn't yours, a contradictory mix of swagger and fear.

So here we are, 500 million strong in Europe, no longer able to rely on 350 million Americans to defend ourselves against 140 million Russians. Reluctantly, we'll need to establish separate households and divide our assets. New arrangements need to be made, and since you are in a hurry to leave us, we are in a hurry to unite further than we had planned or even feel comfortable with, but it fits with our destiny as an ever-more-united continent.

This wasn't supposed to be our story

This wasn't supposed to be our story. We had planned a different future, you and I, one where our values aligned and our security remained indivisible. It feels strange to see the fabric of a complex relationship unravel.

And what is America? Is it the government or the people? Many of my American friends share my worries. Added to their stress and fear is another feeling: shame. 'This isn't us,' they say, even as they recognize that perhaps it is—at least a significant part of them. They apologize for their country in conversations, email signatures, and social media profiles.

On this side of the Atlantic, we discuss European strategic autonomy, European defense capabilities without American support, and hiding under a widened French nuclear umbrella – concepts that would have been considered unorthodox just months before.

We admired Obama across Europe, a brief respite from the growing distance. But Trump's first term left Europeans not merely unimpressed but profoundly unsettled. Biden worked to heal what was broken, and slowly but surely, he started to regain our trust. History will be kind to him. And now, since January 20th, we find ourselves in complete shock as the second Trump administration unfolds. That the country that liberated us from fascism, that guaranteed our freedom for decades, could seemingly overnight turn toward another direction is nothing short of traumatic.

Whatever happens next, whatever path America chooses going forward, something fundamental has shifted. Trust, once broken, cannot simply be restored to its original state.

I still see you in small things

I still see you in small things, in the Springsteen song that plays in a café and takes me back to my university days when American music was the soundtrack to European freedom movements. In a memory from 2014, when Yale University selected me as a World Fellow, and I lived in New Haven, Connecticut—a return to your academic embrace that proved transformative, influencing choices I made in subsequent years. The professors, students, the entire community, and other international fellows created an atmosphere of inspiration that reminded me of your greatest strengths.

I still see you in the crowd at the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm, where I sat waiting for Bob Dylan, the poet of my adolescence, who didn't show up to receive his award. Even in absence, America, you remained magnetic, defined by your cultural gravity. Patti Smith filled the empty chair instead, and we all shared her vulnerability when she faltered during 'A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall,' momentarily overcome by the weight of Dylan's prophetic words. I see America in those lyrics with their existential warnings—dead oceans and sad forests, a sense of impending doom that feels more prescient now than when Dylan first wrote them in 1962. But Patti also shared a rainbow of hope and resilience with us; her voice recovered, stronger and more determined. I still carry her dream of beauty and promise while recalling her stark warning about the state of the world—another American paradox, offering both apocalyptic visions and stubborn optimism in the same breath.

I still see you in the eyes of Americans I've met while walking the 500-mile Camino de Santiago in Spain. Along that ancient path, I've listened to Americans express wonder at European healthcare, education, and work-life balance. How safe our streets are, how well we take care of each other. Some spoke of moving to Europe, a curious reversal from my youth when Europeans dreamed of studying and staying in America. The American pilgrims saw the very things America once promised in Europe: opportunity regardless of birth, the chance to rise through merit rather than inheritance—the myth of the American Dream, now attainable on European soil.

Last summer, I moved back across the Atlantic to live in the old continent again, the sixth European country that I call home. I filled the bookshelves of my new house with American authors. I see Michener's Centennial from the couch where I'm writing this. The first real book I fully read in your language, I must have been about 15 or 16. The town of Centennial doesn't exist in Colorado, but since reading the book, the Centennial State has forever remained the real America for me. I have visited it more times than I can count. Washington, D.C. may break away, but not Colorado with my friends, my memories, and its magnificent nature. I see my collection of Hemingway's books on another shelf. Including the first small book I ever read in your language, it was a requirement for school a couple of years before I could read Michener. We all chose the smallest one: The Old Man and the Sea—so many memories. I cannot untangle your stories from my formation any more than I can remove the English words that have become part of my Dutch vocabulary.

The hope

Perhaps one day, we'll meet as equals, America—not as protectors and protected, not as leaders and followers, but as two powers who recognize that what binds us remains stronger than what separates us. Geography and history have made us different, but my many American friends still share the same common values, even though they are hard to hear due to the political noise. The relationships between our people remain strong even as our governments drift apart.

Europe has also grown more polarized, with more citizens voting for extremes and less consensus than before. Yet compared to what I see in American discourse, in the sharply divided worlds of American social media, Europe remains more harmonious. Perhaps we can remind each other of what we both risk losing when societies fracture beyond repair.

Today, I canceled a planned visit to Arizona, where I had hoped to further explore the desert beauty that always draws me back. These trips have become a kind of pilgrimage on four wheels, where the Spanish historic monuments along the Camino are replaced by fast-food chains dotting highways in the American West against the backdrop of some of the most splendid landscapes I've ever known. I had longed to find balance among the red rocks of Sedona, to watch the sun cast its final light on the Grand Canyon, and to share my thoughts with you while writing in one of my favorite cafés in Flagstaff. Instead, I'll retreat to nature in Europe, finding quiet time in new locations before returning to the windswept dunes of my beloved island in the North Sea.

My American friends ask if I've given up on their country. I tell them no – I've given up on a particular idea of what our relationship was supposed to be. Like old lovers who have lost romantic feelings but retain deep care, we are learning a new way to exist in each other's lives – less idealized, more clear-eyed, but still connected by threads too numerous and complex to ever fully sever.

I'll never forget the America of my childhood drawings, of Richard Scarry's busy world. I'll remember the America of Rockport, Massachusetts, where I sat on rocks watching artists paint the coastline and that red wooden boathouse in the harbor. I'll remember the America of Sedona's red rocks, Yellowstone's geysers, and that early morning walk in Grand Teton, where the expansive Great Plains rise abruptly into the rugged peaks of the Rocky Mountains.

I'll remember the America that taught me freedom through its music, its literature, and by traveling through its wild landscapes. That America exists alongside the America that disappointed us, the one that gave us freedom and aid before denying aid and thus freedom to a European friend in need. I remember two Americas. Both are real. Both are part of my story as I experience and share it.

This story hasn't ended; a new chapter has opened, one that I had never imagined reading. But I won't forget the earlier chapters I've lived through; I just wish I wouldn't have to turn the page to chapters I haven't imagined yet. This farewell isn't to the America I love—the friends, landscapes, and cultural touchstones that shaped me—but to an America that promised to stand with its friends rather than tower over them, an America that once understood that true strength comes from alliances rather than isolation.