After brutal disagreements, quick disengagement? This is the fear that weighs on the European continent less than a week after the explosive meeting between the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, his American counterpart Donald Trump and his vice-president JD Vance. During the night of Monday, March 3 to Tuesday, March 4, the Washington government announced to suspend its help in Ukraine as long as kyiv refuses to negotiate an agreement with its invader. What if NATO was the next threatened cooperation organization?
One thing is certain: Europe is preparing for it. Tuesday morning, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, announced an exceptional plan of 800 billion euros intended for the defense of the 27 and for help to Ukraine. “The time has come for Europe,” she hammered during a press conference presenting this plan baptized “rearm Europe”. Part of this system should consist of loans to European countries so that they will finance an increase in their strategic capacities without weighing down public expenditure too much. For the moment, the precise contours of this plan are uncertain. An extraordinary meeting of the European Council is to take place in Brussels this Thursday, March 6.
Nuclear upheaval
A withdrawal from the United States would be very worrying for its European allies. Indeed, Moscow and Washington each have a large nuclear arsenal (more than 5,000 heads each) and more than ten times larger than the meeting of British and French arsenals.
For the moment, the protection of the European continent is partly based on the arsenals of these two member countries of the UN Security Council, but also on a certain number of NATO bases which are home to American air bombs. Leaving his allies from the North Atlantic Treaty, Donald Trump could decide to remove them. The nuclear imbalance in Europe would then be more blatant than ever.
After the altercation between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky in the oval office, Emmanuel Macron said he was ready to “open the discussion” on the establishment of European nuclear deterrence.