After all, the last half of the 20th century was spent living, visiting, trading with and accepting the presence of a huge neighbor whose leader had said just 50 years ago, "we will bury you."
They can do the same with the USA. Visit, take the money when we visit, listen to our music, watch our movies, sell us cars, have friends and/or relatives there--and yet at the same time consider us (in our present form) a clear and present danger to their economies, their defense position and their environment.
Europeans are used to this because the history of Europe of the last thousand years is like an amœba, always changing, never the same form as it was a few decades ago. What's different is that since the election of 2000, our image as the rock of democratic stability has been lost. They had hopes that Cheneybush was a glitch, and that Hillary Clinton would carry on the common sense presidency, even if Congress had been Citizens-United into a cesspool. But with 2016, they see that it was Obama's common-sense presidency that was the glitch, and that we are suddenly incapable of putting our best man/woman forward, even when the choice is so obvious, any child can see what to avoid.
If we don't manage to put things back on track in 2020, there will be some serious writing off of the USA as a reliable partner, both in trade and in Geopolitics. Yes, there will still be the German engineering grad student doing his doctorate at Stanford or the French medical prodigy doing ground-breaking cancer research at Emory, but those will be exceptions that do not break the rule. As one in the thick of it over here, I would dearly love to see us avoid that.
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