It’s been ages since the elephant was in the room and the ostriches were looking the other way. On November 6, 2024, Europeans suddenly took out their heads that they had kept immersed in the good warm sand and they exclaimed: “Oh! But we are all alone!” Around them, the desert. Democracies have declined across the planet. The West has lost its hegemony and its monopolies to the global South. The Brics represent 45% of the world’s population and their share of global GDP is higher than that of the G7 countries. The architecture of the world built after 1945 is dissolving, international law is disappearing. The disastrous war in Iraq in 2003 without a green light from the UN discredited the United States on the world stage, provided the arguments for Vladimir Putin to seize part of Georgia and invade Ukraine, and traumatized the Americans who, since then, have gradually retreated into isolationism.
Whether his name is Barack Obama, Donald Trump number 1 or even Joe Biden, the elephant that Europeans did not want to see has been barring for a long time to warn them: despite the very last burst of an old democratic president forged in the Cold War school, Biden, faced with the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine, Europe is no longer the priority of the United States. Obama had already announced the “pivot to Asia.” With the re-election of Donald Trump, the global guru of nationalist-populists who declares that “the European Union is an enemy”, who intends to negotiate with Putin at the expense of Ukraine and who threatens to devitalize the Atlantic Alliance, the The elephant has tripled in size and the ostrich no longer even has enough sand to hide its eyes.
A circus show in Budapest
On “deadly Europe” as on a “brain dead” NATO, Emmanuel Macron had seen it all. His speeches at the Sorbonne in 2017 and 2024 or that of Bratislava in 2023, among others, emphasizing the urgency for the EU to establish strategic sovereignty, had a ripple effect. The Union has certainly made giant strides in the face of the Covid crisis or through its support for Ukraine. But stewardship does not follow. Starting with the two pillars of Europe. France, undermined by its budgetary fragility and its ungovernable Parliament, does not have the means of its words nor its president the authority to make himself heard. Germany, the leading economic power, places its commercial interests before geopolitics and its chancellor, Olaf Scholz, paralyzed by his government coalition which has now officially collapsed, is walking backwards to spare Moscow. And the dependence of European defense on the United States remains total, despite warnings.
The 27 EU states, divided by nature and corrupted by the national-populist wave, have proven their tragic immaturity, incapable of agreeing on major issues and preparing for the re-election of Trump, however predictable, who world maps. At a time when the EU finds itself challenged like never before in its history, surrounded to the east by the war in Ukraine, to the south by the war in the Middle East, to the north by the melting of the ice floes and to the west by a ally which is no longer one, it engaged in a circus spectacle the day after the American election: that of its leaders gathered in Budapest around the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, the only leader of the EU and NATO to promote itself as the best ally of the declared enemies of the EU and NATO, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
In Budapest, where the leaders of the European Political Community, an organization supposed to strengthen links between the EU and those who share its values, were also gathered, Emmanuel Macron repeated: “We, Europeans, do not have to delegate for ‘eternity our security to the Americans.” Even the Pole Donald Tusk, the first of the Atlanticists, admits that “the era of geopolitical subcontracting is over.”
Is it too late? Europeans have only one choice: either wake up in supercharged mode, or dislocation. If they do not set up a European pillar of NATO, if they do not become sovereign in matters of defense, including nuclear, around France – and the United Kingdom -, the great nations of the European continent will no longer be anything but little toys in the hands of the powerful: Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China or Trump’s United States.
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