For decades, a fundamental objective of the Soviet Union was to “decouple” the United States of Europe. The decoupling, as it was called, would break the Western alliance which prevented Soviet tanks from riding through the Prussian plains.
Now, in weeks, President Trump gave Moscow the gift that escaped him during the Cold War and since then.
Europe, Jilted, is in shock. The United States, a nation whose main idea is freedom and whose fundamental call was the defense of democracy against tyranny, has turned its ally and rather adopted a brutal autocrat, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Knowed by a feeling of abandonment, alarmed by the colossal task of rearmament in front of it, surprised by the upheaval of American ideology, Europe finds itself at the drift.
“The United States was the pillar around which peace has been managed, but it changed alliance,” said Valérie Hayer, president of the Centrist Renew Europe group in the European Parliament. “Trump puts Putin propaganda. We entered a new era. »»
The emotional impact on Europe is deep. In the long journey of the ruins of 1945 to a whole and free prosperous continent, America was central. The speech of President John F. Kennedy “Ich bin Ein Berliner” in 1963 led the courage of Berlin-West as an inspiration for researchers of freedom everywhere. President Ronald Reagan published his challenge – “Mr. Gorbachev, demolish this wall! ” – At the Porte de Brandenburg in 1987. European history was also the history of America as a European power.
But the meaning of “the West” in this emerging era is already not clear. For many years, despite sometimes acute Euro-American tensions, he designated a single strategic player united in his commitment to the values of liberal democracy.
Now there is Europe, there is Russia, there is China and there is the United States. The West as an idea was hollowed out. The way this void will be filled is not clear, but an obvious candidate is violence while the great powers destroy it.
Of course, as the almost daily rabbit on the new prices clearly indicated it, Trump is impulsive, even if his nationalist and autocratic tendencies are a constant. It is transactional; He could change course. In 2017, during a visit to Poland during his first mandate, he said: “I declare today that the world hears that the West will never be broken. Our values will prevail. »»
The president has since stripped of the obstacles of such a traditional thought and the republican entourage of the establishment which strengthened him. He seems to be an unrelated leader.
The challenge for Europe is to judge what constitutes maneuvers on the part of Mr. Trump and what is an American permanent permanent reorientation.
A week after the ugly Oval Office Blowup with President Volodymyr Zelensky from Ukraine, accused of not saying “thank you” for the American military aid which has since been “interrupted”, Trump accepted a meeting next week in Ukrainian and American officials. He also threatened to impose new sanctions on Russia if she does not enter into peace talks. This can appease some of the damage, although little or no basis to end the war inspired by Russia seems to exist.
“Whatever Trump’s adjustments, the greatest danger would be to deny his abandonment of liberal democracies,” said Nicole Bacharan, political scientist at Sciences Po university in Paris. “Trump knows where he’s going. The only realistic position for Europe is to ask: What do we have as a military force and how do we integrate and increase this power to the emergency? »»
President Emmanuel Macron of France said this week that the continent was faced with “irreversible changes” in America. He urged “massive shared funding” for rapid European military strengthening, a meeting of European staffs next week said and said that “peace cannot be the capitulation of Ukraine”. He also proposed to extend the nuclear umbrella from France to allies in Europe.
These were indications of major strategic changes. But nowhere in Europe has the impact of the more destabilizing American realignment than in Germany, the post-war republic of which was largely an American creation and whose collective memory maintains the generosity of American soldiers offering first aid to a devastated nation.
Christoph Heusgen, the German president of the Munich security conference, torn apart last month when he was considering the end of his three years of work. It was easy, he said, to destroy an order based on rules and a commitment to human rights, but difficult to rebuild them. He spoke after vice-president JD Vance accused Europe of refusing democracy by trying to block the advance of far-right parties, including a German party that used the Nazi language.
“It was a terrible show, the whip and the crying boy,” said Jacques Rupnik, a French political scientist who wrote a lot on Central Europe. “Europe must now fight to fight for democracy.”
For many Germans, the idea that America, whose forces have done so much to defeat Hitler, should opt for the cosset of a party, the alternative for Germany or AFD, which includes members who openly support the Nazis resemble an unforgivable betrayal. AFD is now the second largest party in Germany.
According to the words of British historian Simon Schama, interviewed this week by Australian Broadcasting Corporation, this combined with the reduction of military aid and American intelligence in Ukraine, at least for the moment, constituted a “horrible infamy”.
The arrival of the conservative Chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz, reacted with words that looked like the death of the death of the old order. “My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really reach the independence of the United States,” he said. The Trump administration, he suggested, was “largely indifferent to the fate of Europe”.
In a few moments, a German triple taboo fell. Mr. Merz’s Germany would leave American supervision, would examine the extension in Berlin of French nuclear deterrence and allowed increasing debt to finance a rapid accumulation of the defense industry.
Even in an era of economic difficulty, Germany is a bell for Europe. If Franco-German military cooperation increases rapidly and is supplemented by British military participation, as probably seems under Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Europe can lose its reputation as an economic giant and a strategic pygmy. But that will not happen overnight.
It seems that the main powers of Europe have concluded that Mr. Trump is not an aberrant value. It has a lot of support between the growth of the extreme right of Europe which are anti-immigrant nationalists. It is the American embodiment of an era of assembly self-dowel for which the institutions and post-war wedding rings are obstacles to a new world order built around areas of high power influence.
If Trump wants to seize the Greenland of a member of the European Union, Denmark, what other European conclusion is credible? The aberrant value of the last decade now resembles President Biden with his passionate defense of democracy and an order based on rules.
Of course, the links between Europe and the United States are not unimportant. They will not be easily detailed; They are much more than a military alliance. According to the Latest EU figuresThe trade in goods and services between the European Union of 27 countries and the United States reached $ 1.7 billion in 2023. Each day, a value of $ 4.8 billion in goods and services crosses the Atlantic Ocean.
Trump said since his entry into office a second time that the European Union has been “formed to screw the United States”. It was a declaration typical of his a-historical vision and a zero sum of the world. In fact, by any reasonable assessment of the last 80 years, the Euro-American obligation has been an engine of prosperity and a multiplier of peace.
“The alliance is at a very painful point of stretching, but I would not call it a breakdown, at least not yet,” said Xenia Wickett, a London -based consultant who worked for the National American Security Council. She differentiated Mr. Trump’s demand that Europe is more for his defense, an unreasonable demand and his adoption of Mr. Putin.
Where this embrace leads, if it is maintained, is not clear. But as Mr. Schama said: “When you reward the assault, this guarantees another cycle of aggression.” Ukraine, for Mr. Putin, is part of a much wider campaign to cancel NATO and the European Union. With China in a “limitless” partnership, he wants his Russian resurrection to end what he considers the Western domination of the world.
While Pierre Lévy, former French ambassador of Moscow, wrote it last month in the world: “It is up to the American people to understand that they are in the Putin fire line: de-westernize of the world, put an end to American hegemony, put an end to the dominant place of the dollar in the world economy and act with the support of Iran, North Korea and China.”
For the moment, and for unclear reasons, Mr. Trump does not seem to care. He is not about to vacillate his zero criticism sensitivity to Mr. Putin. Europe, it seems, will only have to overcome its amazement.
“We all have a broken heart when we wake up,” said Bacharan.
