Cnn
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The American century of Europe is over.
On Wednesday, two geopolitical thunderclaps transform transatlantic relations.
- Donald Trump call With Vladimir Putin brought the Russian cold chief while they were flooding the plans To end the war in Ukraine And agreed to exchange presidential visits.
- The American Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, during this time, went to Brussels and said to European allies “Appropriate conventional security on the continent.”
The watershed highlights Trump’s “America First” ideology and its tendency to see each problem or alliance as a value proposal in dollars and hundred. This also underlines his freedom of advisers of the establishment impregnated with the mythology of foreign policy of the West, which, according to him, thwarted his first mandate.
Although Hegseth went to NATO, something fundamental has changed.
American interventions won two world wars that started in Europe and then guaranteed the freedom of the continent in the face of the Soviet threat. But Trump said on the campaign track that he might not defend the members of the Alliance who had not invested enough for the defense. He thus relaunched a lasting point posed in a most eloquent way by Winston Churchill in 1940 on the moment when “the new world, with all its power and its power” goes “towards the rescue and the liberation of the old”.
Trump returns to the justification used by many suspicious presidents of foreign tangles from the start of the Republic, saying on Wednesday: “We have a little thing called an ocean between the two.”
It has long been clear that the second Trump administration would impose new requests on American European partners, which will now lead to dying choices for governments that have chosen social expenses for defense. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte told the European Parliament last month that Europeans had to find more money for their soldiers. “If you don’t, get your Russian language lessons or go to New Zealand,” he said.
But Hegseth was still shocking. He formalized Trump’s demand for the members of the Alliance to spend 5% of the GDP for the defense and declared that the United States would prioritize its growing confrontation with China and the security of its borders compared to that of the ‘Europe. “The United States will no longer tolerate an unbalanced relationship that encourages dependence,” said the new Pentagon chief, who wore a stars and stripe pocket square.
The new difficult approach is not like Trump’s fantasy to move the Palestinians from Gaza to build the “Riviera of the Middle East”. It is a rational response to modified political realities. The largest generation that fought the Second World War and produced presidents who understood the dangers of a power vacuum in Europe has disappeared. Any American who has an adult memory of the Cold War against the Soviet Union is at least in the fifties. And the most powerful competitor in the United States is in Asia and not in Europe. It is therefore just that Trump wonders why the continent has still not resumed his own self -defense 80 years after the defeat of the Nazis.
Successive American presidents and European leaders failed to rethink NATO for the 21st century. Retrospectively, the Transatlantic Alliance has been poorly exposed to the most transactional and nationalist American president since the 19th century.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested in a recent interview on “The Megyn Kelly Show” on Sirius XM that the United States should not be the “front-end” of European security but rather “rear stop” . And he reprimanded the major European powers. “When you ask these guys, why can’t you spend more on national security, their argument is because it would force us to make reductions in social protection programs, to unemployment benefits, to be able to take His retirement at 59 and all these other things, “said Rubio. “It is a choice they made. But do we subsidize that?
The treatment of allies by Trump like Canada and Mexico, as well as its calls to Denmark to put Greenland, shows its disdain for the United States foreign policy. He still congratulates Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping on their intelligence and strength. It is obvious that he thinks the only worthy interlocutors for the hard leader of another great power, the United States.
“Trump’s agenda does not concern European security: it is that it thinks that the United States should not pay for European security,” said Nicholas Dungan, founder and CEO of Cogitopraxis, council strategic in The Hague. “It is not a new era of transatlantic relations, it is a new era of global relations in great power replacing the deliberately institutional structures of the liberal international order.”
The first test of this new American reality-Europe will go to Ukraine.
Trump said negotiations to end the Ukraine war will start “immediately” after his appeal with Putin, who has been frozen by the West since her illegal invasion of Ukraine, a sovereign democracy, there is Three years.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was not included, in an alarming sign for the kyiv government. Zelensky was at the center of all that the Biden administration did during the war. Trump called Zelensky later Wednesday, but the American president already feeds fears to see a resolution that promotes Russia. Questioned by a journalist if Ukraine would be an equal partner in peace talks, Trump replied: “It’s an interesting question” and seemed to think carefully, before answering: “I said it was not A good war to enter, ”apparently bought the Putin line that the conflict was the fault of a nation suddenly invaded by an authoritarian neighbor.
Hegseth was just as frank. He presented the American starting points for negotiation: that Ukraine could not return to his borders before 2014 before the invasion of Crimea, that he could not join NATO and that the American troops would not play any part of a security force to guarantee any possible peace. Any peacekeeping force should be made up of European and non -European troops and is not covered by the NATO mutual defense clause – which means that the United States does not follow it in the event of a conflict with Forces of Moscow.
Former President Joe Biden was also reluctant about Ukraine, obtaining a path to adherence to NATO, fearing a confrontation with Nuclear Russia which could turn into a Second World War. And Trump’s insistence that European peacekeepers will not carry NATO uniforms will be considered an equally prudent decision of many observers to avoid dragging the United States in a conflict with Russia.
But Wednesday was also the best day for Putin since the invasion, because he swept away many aspirations from Ukraine. Hegseth argued that he simply gave realism. And he has a point. No one in the United States or Europe thought that the chronometer could be delivered in 2014. And Ukraine could not reconquer its land on the battlefield despite billions of dollars in Western aid.
However, by withdrawing such problems from the table, Trump, the supposed supreme offer, deprived the Ukrainians of a negotiation currency that could have been used to win concessions from his old friend Putin. In the current state of things, Trump seems to have no objection to Russia retaining the loot of his uninsured invasion. This is not surprising – because like Russia, America now has a president who believes that great powers are entitled to expansionism in their areas of regional influence. But rewarding Russia with a favorable regulation would establish a disastrous precedent.
The American call and a future summit with Putin in Saudi Arabia, which, according to Trump, would occur soon, could be a clue that he is not only cutting Zelensky from the agreement – but also Europe.
In a press release, France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Spain, the European Union, the European Commission, as well as the United Kingdom and Ukraine, warned “Ukraine and the ‘Europe must be part of any negotiation ”. And they warned Trump, who seems to want a peace agreement at all costs, that “a just and lasting peace in Ukraine is a necessary condition for strong transatlantic security”.
Former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt is worried by the comfortable call between Trump and Putin. “What is worrying is of course that we have the two big guys, the two big Egos … Believing that they can maneuver all the problems,” he told Richard Quest on CNN International. Bildt evoked the most overwhelming historical analogy possible – the appeasement of Adolf Hitler by Great Britain which allowed the Nazis to annex the Sudetenland. “For European ears, it looks like Munich. It looks like two great leaders who want to have peace in our time, (on) a distant country which they do not know. They are preparing to conclude an agreement on the head of this country in particular. Many Europeans know how this particular film ended. »»
Trump’s detailed strategy remains opaque. The return of many Zelensky aspirations means that the kyiv agreement at any Putin-Trump agreement cannot be held for granted. And after his regular gains on the battlefield, there is no certainty that the Russian chief is as desperate for a quick colony as Trump, who has long wanted a Nobel Peace Prize.
But the framework of a possible regulation is a subject of private conversations in Washington and European capitals for months, even during the Biden administration. As Hegseth clarified, Ukraine’s hopes to find all its lost lands are unrealistic. What can emerge is a solution in the direction of the partition of Germany after the Second World War, with a territory occupied by Russia frozen under its control with the rest of Ukraine – on the other side of a hard border – remaining a democracy. Perhaps the western edge would be authorized to join the European Union, such as old West Germany. But this time, American troops will not be sure for freedom.
“The American position on Ukraine, as presented today, should not surprise anyone in Europe: this is exactly what European initiates have told me out of the backrest, in the rear canals, behind the scenes for two years : western Ukraine and eastern Ukraine, such as West Germany and East Germany but in this case – UE, NO NO, “said Dungan.
Such a solution would evoke cruel historical irony. Putin, who looked in the despair of his post as an Officer of the KGB in Dresden while the Soviet Union has dissolved, could be about to create a new Eastern Germany in 21st century Europe with the help of America.