For decades, one of the main objectives of the Soviet Union was “decoupling” to the United States of Europe. The decoupling, as it was called, would break the West Alliance that prevented Soviet tanks from rolling through the Prussian plains.
Now, in a matter of weeks, President Trump has made Moscow the gift that was elusive during the Cold War and since then.
Europe, abandoned, is shocked. The United States, a nation whose central idea is freedom and whose main vocation has been the defense of democracy against tyranny, has turned its back on its ally and, instead, has embraced a brutal autocrat, the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin. Gripped by a feeling of helplessness, alarmed by the colossal task of rearming before him, amazed by the overturning of American ideology, Europe is drifting.
“The United States was the Pilar around which peace was managed, but has changed alliance,” said Valérie Hayer, president of the centrist group to renew Europe in the European Parliament. “Trump echoes Putin’s propaganda. We have entered a new era. ”
The emotional impact on Europe is deep. On the long trip from the ruins of 1945 to a prosperous, complete and free continent, the United States was fundamental. The “Ich Bin Ein Berliner” speech by President John F. Kennedy in 1963 framed the strength of Western Berlin as an inspiration for freedom seekers around the world. President Ronald Reagan released his challenge – “Mr. Gorbachev, demolishes this wall!” – In the door of Brandembourg in 1987. European history has also been the history of the United States as European power.
But the meaning of “West” in this nascent era is no longer clear. For many years, despite the sometimes acute euro -American tensions, the word denoted a single strategic actor attached in its commitment to the values of liberal democracy.
There is now Europe, there is Russia, there is China and there are the United States. West as an idea has emptied. It is not clear how that void will be filled, but an obvious candidate is violence while the great powers fight.
Of course, as the almost daily swing of new tariffs has made clear, Donald Trump is impulsive, although his nationalist and autocratic tendencies are a constant. It is transactional; You can change course. In 2017, on a visit to Poland during his first term, he said: “I declare today, so that the world hears it, that the West will never be broken. Our values will prevail. ”
Since then, the president has stripped of the shackles of that traditional thought and of the established republican environment that supported him. It seems to be a leader without ties.
The challenge for Europe is to judge what constitutes a maneuver by Trump and what a final authoritarian reorientation of the United States.
A week after the unpleasant quarrel in the Oval Office with the president of Ukraine, Volodimir Zelenski, accused of not giving the “thanks” for US military aid, which has since been “put in pause”, Trump has agreed a meeting next week of Ukrainian and American high -rank officials. He has also threatened to impose more sanctions on Russia if it does not file peace conversations. This can mitigate some of the damages, although there seems to be little or no basis to end the war instigated by Russia.
“Whatever Trump’s adjustments, the greatest danger would be to deny his abandonment of liberal democracies,” said Nicole Bacharan, a political scientist at Science Po de Paris. “Trump knows where he goes. The only realistic position for Europe is to ask: What do we have as a military force and how we integrate and make that power urgently grow? ”
The president of France, Emmanuel Macron, declared this week that the continent faced “irreversible changes” by the United States. He urged a “shared mass financing” for rapid European military reinforcement, announced a meeting next week of European chiefs 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 changes. But nowhere in Europe the impact of American realignment has been more destabilizing than in Germany, whose postwar republic was largely an American creation and whose collective memory maintains the generosity of American soldiers who offered the first relief to a devastated nation.
Christoph Heusgen, German president of the Munich Security Conference, cried last month at the end of his three years in office. He said it was easy to destroy an order based on norms and a commitment to human rights, but difficult to rebuild them. He spoke after Vice President JD Vance accused Europe of denying democracy by trying to block the advance of extreme right parties, including a German party that has used Nazi language.
“It was a terrible spectacle, the whipped boy and the boy of cries,” said Jacques Rupnik, a French political scientist who has written a lot about central Europe. “Europe must take a step forward to fight for democracy.”
For many Germans, the idea that the United States, whose forces did so much to defeat Hitler, chose to host a party, an alternative for Germany, or AFD, which includes members who openly support Nazis, feel like an unforgivable betrayal. The AFD is now the second largest game in Germany.
In the words of the British historian Simon Schama, interviewed this week by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, this, combined with the interruption of American military and intelligence aid to Ukraine, at least for now, constitutes a “horrible infamy.”
The incoming conservative chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz, reacted with words that looked like the touch of deceased of the old order. “My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as soon as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve being independent of the United States,” he said. The Trump government, suggested, was “largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.”
In a moment, a triple German taboo fell. Merz’s Germany would leave the American guardianship, examine the extension to Berlin of French nuclear deterrence and allow increasing indebtedness to finance a rapid increase in the defense industry.
Even in a moment of economic difficulties, Germany is a barometer for Europe. If Franco-German military cooperation grows rapidly, and is complemented by British military participation, as it seems likely under the mandate of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Europe could detach themselves from its reputation as an economic giant and strategic pigeon. But it will not happen overnight.
The main European powers, apparently, have concluded that Trump is not an atypical case. It has a lot of support among the growing European extreme right, which is nationalist and antimigration. It is the American incarnation of an era of rising autocrats for whom postwar institutions and alliances are obstacles to a new world order built around areas of influence of great powers.
If Trump wants to snatch Greenland from a member of the European Union, Denmark, what other European conclusion is credible? The atypical of the last decade seems now to be President Biden, with his passionate defense of democracy and a norm based on regulations.
Of course, ties between Europe and the United States are not a minor matter. They will not get rid of easily; They are much more than a military alliance. According to the latest EU figures, the trade of goods and services between the European Union of 27 countries and the United States reached 1.7 billion dollars in 2023. Every day they cross the Atlantic Ocean goods and services worth about 48 billion dollars.
Since he assumed the position for the second time, Trump has affirmed, using an improper, that the European Union “formed to annoy the United States.” It was a typical statement of its antihistoric and zero sum vision of the world. In fact, according to any reasonable evaluation of the last 80 years, the Euro -American bond has been an engine of prosperity and a multiplier of peace.
“The alliance is at a very painful point of tension, but I would not call a breakdown, at least not yet,” said Xenia Wicktt, a consultant based in London who has worked for the United States National Security Council. He differentiated between Trump’s demand that Europe pays more for its defense, a request not not very reasonable, and its approach to Putin.
Where this approach leads, if it is maintained, it is not clear. But as Schama said: “When you rewards aggression, you guarantee another round of aggression.” Ukraine, for Putin, is part of a much broader campaign to undo the NATO and the European Union. Together with China, in an association “without limits”, he wants his Russian resurrection to end what he considers the western domination of the world.
Like Pierre Lévy, a French former ambassador to Moscow, he wrote last month in Le Monde: “It is up to the American people to understand that they are in the Putin line of fire: Deocystrealize the world, end American hegemony, put an end to the dominant place of the dollar in the world economy and act with the back of Iran, North Korea and China.”
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For now, and for unclear reasons, Trump does not seem to care. He is not willing to falter in his susceptibility of zero criticism of Putin. Europe, apparently, will simply have to overcome its stupefaction.
“We all break our hearts when we wake up,” Bacharan said.