Welcome to this new series from The Tsunami is Coming: What Keeps You Up at Night?

This is a set of conversations in which experts and thought leaders name the shifts they see coming and the fractures in the status quo that haven’t yet made headlines.

Alastair Newton is a political risk analyst who has spent decades advising financial institutions on geopolitics — starting at Lehman Brothers in 2005, where he launched a series called “What Keeps You Up at Night.”

(I borrowed the phrase. He knows.)

Newton has been writing about hegemonic transition since 2008. He wanted to talk about Europe, but not the version you’d expect.

He’s optimistic. That’s the through-line, not a twist at the end. Europe, he argues, has regained something it lost after the Cold War: the ability to take advantage of crises. Brexit was a shock. Trump is a bigger one. And shocks, Newton believes, are what Europe needs to move.

The question is whether it can move fast enough, given how much time its leaders spend, in his phrase, “bickering about angels on pinheads.” Given how hard the United States is working to pull it apart.

Newton thinks it can. Far-right parties get found out when they govern. Pragmatism wins. And Trump, paradoxically, may be the best enemy Europe could have asked for.

“If you have the opportunity to choose your enemy,” he said, “you probably wouldn’t have managed to come up with something as helpful as Donald Trump.”

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