“The truth is that the Americans will eventually be hated by everyone. Even by their most unconditional allies,” said General de Gaulle to Alain Peyrefitte (1), in the Elysée Palace.
That day happened, when Donald Trump, helped by his vice-president JD Vance, humiliated live and in Mondovision the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, in the famous oval office. Stupor, anger, emotion … And then a summit mounted in forty-eight hours chrono in London by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, so that Europeans can wash this affront, reaffirm their solidarity towards a president at war, with great reinforcement of handful hand handles, holes and taps on the shoulder. And of course, reiterating new promises of support for kyiv and sketching a peace plan.
“This sequence of the White House acted as a salutary shock, sums up Jérémie Gallon, diplomat and essayist, the Europeans will no longer be able to say: ‘We did not know’.”
American diplomatic outrage
However, it is not for lack of being warned. It is enough to view the countless diplomatic outrage in the new Trump administration in accelerated to see the extent of the dislocation of the transatlantic link. On February 12, Donald Trump created the surprise by making an hour and a half phone call to his new friend, Vladimir Putin, without warning European leaders. Two days later, JD VANCE, sermons Europeans at the Munich security conference. On February 18, Russian and American Foreign Ministers were selling the rapprochement of their countries during a meeting in Ryad. A week later, for the first time since the start of the war in Ukraine, the United States and Russia vote together in the United Nations Security Council in favor of a resolution which forgets to qualify the Russians as an aggressor and does not recognize the territorial integrity of Ukraine. The rupture is then consumed … until the incident-or rather the huntboard tense at Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House, followed, three days later, by the suspension of American aid to Ukraine.
Strongly 2028, and the end of Donald Trump’s mandate, already hope for Europeans. But it is nothing to understand the distance from America, started before Donald Trump’s arrival at the White House. Lulled by the illusion of a perpetual American nuclear umbrella, the Europeans refused to learn from the diplomatic turn negotiated by Barack Obama and prosecuted by his successors, until the radicality implemented by Donald Trump. During the three decades which followed the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe cheerfully benefited from peace dividends. The return of war on the continent, the brutalization of international relations, the Russian threat, the display of Chinese ambitions and today the release of the American ally no longer leaves the choice to Europe than to learn to protect itself. Alone and quickly.
(1) It was de Gaulle – T. II, by Alain Peyrefitte (Fayard, 1997).
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