For decades, a fundamental objective of the Soviet Union was “disacing” the United States from Europe. The misfortune, as it was called, would have broken the western alliance that prevented the Soviet tanks from rolling through the Prussian plains.
Now, in weeks, President Trump has delivered the gift that circumvented him during the Cold War has been in Moscow and since then.
Europe, slender, is in shock. The United States, a nation whose fundamental idea is freedom and whose basic call was the defense of democracy against tyranny, have lit its ally and instead embraced a brutal autocrates, the president Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Facted by a sense of abandonment, alarmed for the colossal task of rearmament before, amazed by the reversal of American ideology, Europe is drifting.
“The United States were the pillar around which peace was managed, but it changed the alliance,” said Valérie Hayer, president of the Renewa Europe Group centrist in the European Parliament. “Trump Bocconcia Putin’s propaganda. We have inserted a new era. “
The emotional impact on Europe is profound. In the long journey from the ruins of 1945 to a prosperous whole and free continent, America was central. The speech of “Ich bin ein Berliner” of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 framed the fortress of West Berlin as a source of inspiration for freedom seekers everywhere. President Ronald Reagan issued his challenge – “Mr. Gorbachev, break down this wall! ” – At the Brandenburg gate in 1987. European history was also American history as European power.
But the meaning of “The West” in this Dawing era is already unclear. For many years, despite the sometimes acute Euro-American tensions, he indicated a single strategic actor united in his commitment for the values of liberal democracy.
Now there is Europe, there is Russia, there is China and there are the United States. The West as an idea was emptied. It is not clear the way that void will be filled, but an obvious candidate is violence since the great powers bring it out.
Of course, as has clarified the almost daily blow on the new rates, Mr. Trump is impulsive, even if his nationalist and autoocratic tendencies are constant. It is transactional; It could change course. In 2017, during a visit to Poland during his first term, he said: “I declare today for the world to hear that the West will never be broken. Our values will prevail. “
Since then the president has stripped of the chains of this traditional thought and the republican hidden of the establishment that strengthened it. It seems to be an unlimited leader.
The challenge for Europe is to judge what constitutes the maneuver by Mr. Trump and what is a final authoritarian American reorientation.
A week after the ugly oval office with the president Volodymyr Zelensky from Ukraine, accused of not having said “thanks” for the American military assistance that has since been “stopped”, Trump has accepted a meeting next week of high Ukrainian and American officials. He also threatened to impose further penalties for Russia if he does not enter peace interviews. This can alleviate some of the damage, even if few or no basis seem to end the war with Russian instigation.
“Whatever the adaptations of Trump, the greatest danger would be to deny his abandonment of liberal democracies,” said Nicole Bacharan, a political scientist at the University of Sciences Po di Paris. “Trump knows where he is going. The only realistic position for Europe is to ask: what do we have as military force and how can we integrate and grow that power urgently? “
President Emmanuel Macron in France said this week that the continent faced “irreversible changes” from America. He urged “huge shared funding” for the rapid European military reinforcement, announced a meeting next week of European staff garments and said that “peace cannot be the capitulation of Ukraine”. He also offered to extend the French nuclear umbrella to the allies in Europe.
These were indications of great strategic shifts. But nowhere in Europe the impact of American realignment has been more destabilizing than in Germany, whose post -war republic was largely an American creation and whose collective memory contains the generosity of the American soldiers who offered first aid to a devastated nation.
Christoph Heusgen, the German president of the Monaco security conference, torn last month while contemplating the end of his three years of work. It was easy, he said, destroying an order based on rules and a commitment to human rights, but it is difficult to reconstruct them. He spoke after Vice President JD Vance accused Europe of having denied democracy trying to block the advance of far -right parties, including a German party that used the Nazi language.
“It was a terrible show, the booked boy and the crying boy,” said Jacques Rupnik, a French politician who wrote widely on Central Europe. “Europe must intensify now to fight for democracy”.
For many Germans, the idea that America, whose forces made so much to defeat Hitler, should choose to make a party, the alternative for Germany, or Afd, which includes members openly to support the Nazis seems an unforgivable betrayal. The AFD is now the second largest part in Germany.
In the words of the British historian Simon Schama, interviewed this week by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, this combined with the cut of military aid and American intelligence in Ukraine, at least for now, was “horrible infamy”.
The German conservative chancellor, Friedrich Merz, reacted with words that seemed the bell 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 independence from the United States,” he said. The Trump administration, he suggested, was “largely indifferent to the fate of Europe”.
At times, a triple German taboo fell. Merz’s Germany would have come out of American protection, would have examined the extension to Berlin of French nuclear deterrence and allowed a growing debt to finance a rapid accumulation of defense industry.
Even in a moment of economic difficulty, Germany is a bell for Europe. If the French-German military cooperation grows rapidly and is completed by British military involvement, as probably it seems under Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Europe can lose its reputation as an economic giant and a strategic pygmies. But it will not happen from today.
The major European powers, apparently, concluded that Mr. Trump is not an outlier. It has a lot of support between the growing right of Europe which are anti-immigrant nationalists. It is the American incarnation of an age of self -conscious for which post -war institutions and alliances are obstacles to a new world order built around areas of influence of great power.
If Mr. Trump wants to take Greenland from a member of the European Union, in Denmark, what other European conclusion is credible? The anomalous value of the last decade now looks like President Biden with his passionate defense of democracy and an order based on the rules.
Of course, the ties between Europe and the United States are not subjects. They will not be easily revealed; They are much more than a military alliance. According to the latest figures of the EU, the exchanges of goods and services between the European Union of 27 nations and the United States reached $ 1.7 trillion in 2023. Every day, about 4.8 billion dollars of goods and services cross the Atlantic Ocean.
Trump has said since he took a second time that the European Union was “formed to cheat the United States”. It was a typical affirmation of his historical vision to zero sum of the world. In fact, from any reasonable evaluation of the last 80 years, the Euro-American link has been a prosperity engine and a peace multiplier.
“The alliance is in a very painful elongation point, but I would not call it a breakage, at least not yet,” said Xenia Wickett, a consultant with headquarters in London who worked for the United States National Security Council. She differentiated between the request of Mr. Trump that Europe paid more for its defense, a non -unreasonable request and its embrace of Mr. Putin.
Where that embrace leads, if maintained, it is not clear. But as Mr. Schama said, “when aggression rewards, it guarantees another tour of aggression”. Ukraine, for Mr. Putin, is part of a much wider campaign to cancel NATO and the European Union. Together with China in a “no limits” partnership, it wants its Russian resurrection to put an end to what she sees as western domain of the world.
While Pierre Lévy, a former French ambassador to Moscow, wrote last month to Le Monde: “It is up to the American people to understand that they are in Putin’s line of fire: de-watching the world, ending the American hegemony, put an end to the dominant place of the dollar in the global economy and act with the support of Iran, North Korea and China.”
For now, and for unclear reasons, Mr. Trump does not seem to worry. He intends to falter from his susceptibility to zero criticism to Mr. Putin. Europe, apparently, will only have to overcome its drug.
“We are all with a broken heart when we wake up,” Bacaran said.