That’s it, the United States of Donald Trump has left us. “We” is the West, in its political-cultural and non-geographic definition: attachment to liberal democracy, the primacy of law on force and multilateralism, this international order created in 1945 to organize relations between states according to common rules. Part of the planet is delighted that the cards of this post -war system are rebatted. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, because the “new world order” is the common objective they have always worked for.
A majority of countries in the “global south” because they want to end the hegemony of postcolonial empires. The nationalists from here and elsewhere, by natural proximity to the virile and carnivorous leaders who use their large muscles and their jaws. What remains of the West Herbivore is worried and paralyzed. We, the allies of America, of these United States which shared with us the same type of political values, the same economic regime and ensured our security within NATO, have the most to lose.
With Canada, Japan, South Korea or Australia and of course the United Kingdom, which bites its fingers to have left on its side of the Channel, the EU feels unpleasant feeling of solitude head of a narrowed West. It is in fact the first power of the West by its demography (450 million inhabitants) and by its GDP (17,000 billion euros, far ahead of the $ 4.2 billion in Japan and the 2.4 billions of dollars of Canada) and by its defense expenses (326 billion euros in 2024). Its single market, which is the largest free trade area in the world and the first commercial outlet in the United States, is an invaluable lever. It remains to recognize it and assume it, faced with these hegemonic and imperialist powers which are now three and no longer only two: Putin’s Russia, Xi China and Trump America. Will we be able?
Appease the ogre
It’s bad. Ursula von der Leyen and Christine Lagarde, who chaired the European Commission and Central Bank respectively, made concessions to Trump even before he was invested, in the hope of making him renounce the drastic increase in customs duties that he decided to impose on European products. On November 8, the first indicated that she had proposed to him that the EU replaced its Russian gas purchases with US liquefied natural gas (LNG). On November 26, 2024, the second suggested to Financial Times that the member states adopt a “strategy of the checkbook [et] Buy more LNG in the United States “as well as defense equipment. We know what ogres like Trump and Putin, who only understand force, make weak people who show sweet. At the Davos World Economic Forum, Ursula Von der Leyen recalled the enormity of the volumes of exchanges between Europe and the United States and advocated pragmatism, not deviating a “close collaboration” with the American president in the face of global challenges.
On the day of his swearing in, Trump was clear: the word “ally” is absent from his vocabulary. Like China, America has only adversaries. Everything about her is her, everything that is not is negotiable and at her service, such as Canadians or Greenland Europeans, which he intends to swallow. Unless they become aware of their loneliness and the commercial force they have, investing massively in defense and organizing it together, in short, to constitute political power, Europeans will vassize themselves.
“Do not ask for what America can do for Europe and its security, ask yourself what we can do for it. Europe has been, is and will always be tidn,” tweeted Polish Prime Minister , Donald Tusk. His voluntarism weighs all the more since he ensures the rotating presidency of the EU and that Poland is one of the most attached European countries to the Atlantic Alliance. In new spearhead of the West and last guarantor of the world order invented by the United States in 1945, is it not time for the EU to expand his club, not only in the east but Also in the west, and to found a group capable of defending the political, economic and cultural values of the West?
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