Comment by wongarsu
The US has been like that for a long time. But Western European and American interests were well aligned for a couple decades. First the whole WW2 business. Then Western Europe needed funds for rebuilding and a strong deterance against further expansion of the Soviet Union, while the US felt threatened by the idea of communism. Then in the early 90s we had a couple years where we had common ground in commercializing and integrating post-Soviet states.
During the Bush and Obama eras Europe was at least important as a staging ground for war in the Middle East, but the US wants to get away from putting boots on the ground there.
But now most of the common ground is gone, and the gloves are coming off
You talk about Europe as it were a single country. I live in Switzerland and basically nothing of what you say is or was true here. What you describe is losing the few allies you had here, not "Europe". Trump is using these words so wrongly it hurts. There never was a common Europe on Americas side to begin with.