The Atlantic Shame Gap

Why Epstein-linked names trigger resignations in Europe—and shrugging in the United States.

Buckingham Palace has a reflex older than the tabloids and sharper than the courtiers who pretend to manage the royals. When a story threatens the Crown’s standing, the first response is not contrition. It is containment.

The old “never complain, never explain” line is often described as dignity. In practice, it’s a bunker drill — ride out the worst of it, concede only what must be conceded, and keep the institution intact even if a person has to be cut loose to do it.

An art installation featuring statues depicted Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in September. (Joe Flood via Wikimedia Commons).

The royal family’s invisibility cloak — to make a passing Harry Potter reference — lost its protective power in the 1980s, when Princess Diana turned the monarchy’s private weather into public climate. Once the spell was broken, the Royal Family learned that shame has momentum. You cannot negotiate with it. You can only decide when to absorb the blast and how much of the structure you are willing to sacrifice.

Prince Andrew’s fall from grace followed the same logic. It wasn’t a sudden moral awakening; it was a calculation about survivability. When the coverage became corrosive, the institution chose separation.

The Justice Department’s Jan. 30 release of a second tranche of Epstein documents only added fuel to Andrew’s funeral pyre. But the larger effect has been centrifugal: It has pulled more names, more intermediaries, and more denials into the open — enough to make “association” itself a political problem, even when criminality is not alleged.

In the United States, some political and business leaders, such as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and billionaire Elon Musk, who had framed their contact as incidental, are now in the headlines for having a closer association with Epstein. The more common reflex has been to deny, minimize, lawyer up, and wait for the news cycle to tire — a strategy that often works because the U.S. political ecosystem is now calloused to absorb scandal as noise. If the Diana era taught the monarchy that shame can break containment once it becomes cultural rather than merely journalistic, the American trajectory has run in the opposite direction: shame is increasingly treated as survivable so long as your side holds.

Less so in Europe. The same document release has produced visible political consequences — more than public shame. In Britain, Peter Mandelson was sacked as UK ambassador to the United States and subsequently resigned from the House of Lords. In Norway, senior figures have faced formal scrutiny and suspensions, and authorities opened a corruption investigation into former prime minister Thorbjørn Jagland. In Slovakia, national security adviser Miroslav Lajčák resigned.

More names are surfacing, and several European governments have already launched broader reviews that could widen the fallout.

It is best to understand that Europe’s reaction to these latest disclosures does not reflect a purity test nor a transatlantic morality lecture; it is institutional self-defense. In parliamentary politics, distraction is not a background annoyance. It is a governance risk. Cabinets depend on party cohesion and, often, coalition arithmetic.

The actions in the United Kingdom do not reflect righteousness. Its governing system, like its monarchy, is built around legitimacy, which is a scarce resource. When legitimacy wobbles, the response is quick triage. Remove the liability. Signal recognition. Reassert control.

Norway’s reaction illustrates a different engine producing a similar outcome. Britain’s shame runs hot because the press runs hot. Norway’s runs cold — and that can be more dangerous. High-trust societies don’t just dislike corruption; they are built on the assumption that elites will not behave like a separate species. When that assumption fractures, institutions respond quickly because the alternative is a slow leak of legitimacy that is difficult to repair. Norway’s political and diplomatic class also lives in a smaller ecosystem: fewer degrees of separation, fewer places to hide, fewer opportunities to wait out the news cycle. In a compact environment, reputational contagion spreads faster and lands harder.

Slovakia is the useful counterexample for anyone tempted to reduce the story to “British tabloids and Norwegian probity.” Slovakia has neither a Fleet Street ecosystem nor Norway’s high-trust brand. Yet the logic of the resignation there — whether framed as responsibility, prudence, or simply avoiding damage to the government — fits the same institutional pattern. In smaller parliamentary environments, a senior adviser can become a single-point failure for credibility. In smaller parliamentary environments, a senior adviser can become a single-point failure for credibility.

In Europe, each tranche creates a fresh moment when institutions must choose: cut now or be seen later as defending what cannot be defended. Europe is choosing the former. The shame doesn’t need proven criminality to do damage; it only needs to raise enough doubt about fitness, judgment, and boundaries to make delay look like complicity.

That brings us to the transatlantic implication — but it’s not the one that requires a roster of American names. The more interesting point is how Europe’s fast self-policing changes perception. When European institutions move quickly and the United States appears, from across the ocean, to absorb scandal as noise, an old caricature becomes newly usable: the Ugly American. Not the tourist stereotype — loud shirts and louder opinions — but the deeper political version. The America that cannot be embarrassed, and public trust is treated as a partisan argument rather than a governing necessity.

Europe’s reaction to Epstein-linked revelations, then, should be read less as sanctimony than as a signal about what European systems think is fragile right now. They are not proving they are better. They are proving they still believe legitimacy is worth protecting.

The United States, by contrast, is spending down the asset. Treating embarrassment as survivable — and legitimacy as optional so long as power is maintained — may be a rational adaptation to hyper-partisanship.

It may also be a strategic liability. Because the more America looks unembarrassable, the more it invites a familiar European — and also Asian and Latin American and Africa — conclusion: that the United States is not merely loud; it is unreliable.

Brian O’Neill, a retired senior executive from the CIA and National Counterterrorism Center, is an instructor on strategic intelligence at Georgia Tech. His Safehouse Briefing Substack looks at what’s ahead in global security, geopolitics, and national strategy.

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