In the past we used to say that anything that is exaggerated is irrelevant, and this was especially true for the hard facts of international politics. Now, with the rise of television and social media democracy and their misdeeds, one must accept that they inherently favour provocation and exaggeration as a communication style. This combines with the technical capability of the world wide web to give an immediate and universal audience to every narcissistic impulse to draw attention to oneself through provocative theatrical shows.
If “the medium is the message” — as Marshall McLuhan argued about television, which transformed communication into the town square of a “global village” then we must consider how the combination of television with social media transforms interventions, impromptu or not, into global political facts. These interventions are carried out through a process of disintermediation — bypassing the filters and the time for analysis which are characteristic of diplomacy, parties, study centres, or even just the conceptual exposition intended for the mainstream press — and in the psychological and expressive style of a mass individualism in adolescent regression. Thus, we learn from a series of compulsive messages from President Donald Trump on X, formerly Twitter, about the reversal of alliances regarding Ukraine, a brutal and divisive extortion of its mineral resources, and even the start of a new Yalta partition between Washington and Moscow behind Europe’s back. Or we learn from Vice-President J.D. Vance’s speech at the Wehrkunde in Munich, crafted with soundbites for television highlights, that, for the new power in Washington, Europe is a greater threat than Russia and China.
Vance, the deputy bully, once said that his future bully-in-chief, Donald Trump, was “the Hitler of America” and that his outbursts were “cultural heroin”. Rather than getting annoyed by his bragging, the EU should have taken more seriously the words of Walter Russell Mead when he wrote in The Wall Street Journal that Europeans “now know that De Gaulle was right”: they cannot rely “on American blank cheques forever”. Provided, that is, we remember what le Général actually said in May 1962, justifying the French nuclear force de frappe and recalling the “incredible reversals” of which history is capable. According to him, Europeans had to be able to count on themselves because America could “explode due to terrorism or racism”, and because France and Europe would be doomed, both if Washington and Moscow clashed, and if they came to an agreement.
The difficulty of restoring proportion to the intrinsic disproportion of television and social media democracy is not only a problem for Marxist political science. Emily Haber, who until two years ago was Germany’s ambassador to Washington, argues in an interview with the DGAP magazine that the German strategic interest must be rethought as the European interest, regardless of who holds the presidency in Washington. This assumes, however, that Trump’s attitude of considering everything negotiable is rational, which “often it is not”. Clearly many questions remain unanswered.
First, how substantial is the Atlantic crisis? The crisis is undeniable and severe. For the Financial Times, “allies and erstwhile friends must banish [...] self-soothing thoughts” that “Trump does not mean what he says”. “America has turned” and the abandonment of its allies “is real and will endure”. The headline of The Economist is “Europe’s worst nightmare”: we can no longer count on the US to come to our aid “in wartime”. Friedrich Merz’s last words during the election campaign echoed the dramatic editorial in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung about the “schism of the West”: it is possible that Trump “no longer unconditionally maintains NATO’s commitment to mutual defence”; we must at least prepare to “defend the European continent on our own”. “Nuclear sharing”, or at least the extension of their nuclear umbrella to Germany, must be discussed with London and Paris.
Second, how definitive and irreparable is the Atlantic crisis? Here, more than ever, nuance and proportion in our judgement is important, because emphasis and dramatisation are themselves weapons of political combat, both in the US and in Europe. The prospect of a catastrophic future for NATO is wielded in the US to attack Trump, and in Europe to support the strategic autonomy of the Old Continent. Equally, the argument of the EU’s fatal weakness serves Trumpian rhetoric, but can also act as a spur, on this side of the Atlantic, to the European revival.
In Le Point, Bruno Tertrais of the FRS (Foundation for Strategic Research) writes that to proclaim the end of the Alliance is to “lack historical perspective” since the US and the EU have always been economic and commercial adversaries. The Europeans should progressively increase their military budgets to 3%, give priority to European or non-American companies in defence spending, make economic power relations count, and, together with London, give substance to a “European deterrent” framework.
In the Sunday edition of the FAZ, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, Jochen Buchsteiner is less certain about European deterrence. Europe lacks the strength for a Sonderweg — its own autonomous and special path since a nuclear sharing with London and Paris is not in sight; and an Alleingang, “going it alone” as they say in Germany, is not possible. Therefore, the least bad option is a “revitalisation” of NATO. The US will need a division of labour to tackle the Indo-Pacific, with NATO becoming a global alliance where the “community of values” gives way to a “community of strategic interests”. As a second concession, Washington will expect the liberalisation of the European market for its tech companies in social media and artificial intelligence. This was the real meaning of Vance’s rebuke to the Wehrkunde on “freedom of speech” in the Old Continent.
The mention of a Sonderweg, we note, suggests a reflection. The German question resided in the fatal danger of a free Germany swinging to the centre of the Continent, so it had to be divided or constrained within Europe and the Atlantic Alliance.
For this reason, it was said that NATO’s function, to quote the first Secretary General Lord Ismay, was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”. Today the Atlantic crisis, marked by unilateralism, that is, the new American nationalism, is a US Sonderweg and an unprecedented American question. Of course, there is the possibility that the Europeans will let themselves be divided once again, as happened in 2003, when the war in Iraq froze the ambitions for a European defence that had emerged from the experience of the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo. But the arguments in favour of a Europeanisation of NATO, which are the real subtext of the British lines echoed in the Financial Times and The Economist, are betting on an Alliance with a European centre of gravity that can hold back the American oscillation. Whether the bet is too bold remains to be seen; it is certain that the narrow path towards a pro-European transformation is going to be very long for the exponents of German and Polish structural Atlanticism, as well as for the British and Giorgia Meloni and her tightrope-walking Euro-Atlantic ambivalence.
Third, what is the strategic perspective of the new relationship that is emerging between Washington and Moscow? The emphatic phrase “new Yalta” sounds disproportionate from a historical point of view. The Yalta and Potsdam agreements after World War II sanctioned a division of Europe that cut through the very heart of Germany, bisecting Berlin; for us they symbolised a “true partition”, with the US supporting a weak USSR in order to keep European imperialism in check. After the USSR’s implosion, which had the effect of a third world war, there was a “new partition”, with Eastern Europe co-opted into the EU and, partially, into its inner core, the eurozone. Some grey areas persisted, first and foremost Ukraine, whose status remained undefined and subject to opposing manoeuvres for influence and intrusive American operations. If, as it seems, the emerging agreement follows the position of the current front-line, the dividing line will leave the Donbass and Crimea to Russia and confirm Ukraine as a border-land, probably neutralised, and perhaps co-opted into the EU. The partition, unlike Yalta, will run through Russian not German — territory, through the lands of Novorossiya, which were under tsarist sovereignty from the time of Catherine the Great. If anything, it confirms a brutal share-out, involving Russian and European imperialism, with American imperialism, through Trump, now asking for its pound of flesh under the guise of mining concessions for rare earths.
Another issue is the blow inflicted by the crisis on the energy Rapallo, i.e., the arrangement that saw the exchange of Russian gas for German and European capital and machinery.
However, here the defeat is mutual, both Euro-German and Russian: it is revealing that the reactivation of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, sabotaged by a Ukrainian-Polish-American act of intra-allied asymmetric warfare, is now back on the table.
Fourth, what will be the global strategic consequences? We will leave the analysis of the “unintended consequences” anticipated in Asia and Europe to the article on international politics. Since the new Yalta is also seen as a partitioning agreement with China, we will simply add the thesis published in Le Monde by the French Jesuit Benoît Vermander, director of the Matteo Ricci Academy at Fudan University in Shanghai, who goes by the Chinese name Wei Mingde. Vermander-Wei argues that two possible coalitions are emerging, a “dual” one between the US and Russia, and a “triple alliance” between Washington, Moscow, and Beijing. Both coalitions would see Europe as a victim, treated as the “sick man of the global system”, while for Beijing the real threat would be if the “triple alliance” were to turn out to be a “dual” one, once the US-Russia agreement was finalised.
Warning: for the Euro-Chinese Jesuit, the EU countries, together with Great Britain, “must isolate those among them who hinder their determination; they must arm themselves economically, militarily and psychologically in order to ensure their survival [...]; any complacency in the face of divisions fomented by Moscow and now by Washington is tantamount to a form of collaboration; it is on the model of a war economy that the fundamentals, both productive and strategic, must be re-established”.
China has regularly attempted to divide the European front, but has refrained from courting its far right, “in contrast to Russian and American interference”. For the EU, Beijing has shown itself to be “a more reliable player”, and there is “room for negotiation” on common interests. On the Chinese side, this requires making the EU the sole interlocutor, instead of addressing individual countries: “It is necessary to be able to prioritise dangers, and the first of these now lies in the constitution of the Washington-Moscow axis”. A “strategy of circumvention” is needed, together with a re-founding of “European strategies with India, Africa, Latin America, and South-East Asia”. As for Europe, forced onto the defensive, “in the face of a triple alliance in accelerated gestation”, a “new understanding” must be forged to counter a US-Russia-China coalition, “whose possible consolidation threatens our interests, our values and even our political structure”.
The Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun ran the headline of a “united front” in defence of multilateralism, a strategic concept that will not go unnoticed in Beijing. Here we could have a united front S.J. (Society of Jesus), counselled by the Jesuit order.
Fifth and finally, beyond the heated debate, have there been any concrete moves on the part of Europe? Currently, there are three, or four if we include Merz’s election victory. The first is that in the three years since the start of the war in Ukraine, military spending by EU countries has risen from €214 billion to €326 billion — an increase of 52%, or €112 billion — amounting to 2% of the Union’s GDP. Raising this to 3%, as Tertrais and also German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius suggest, would bring EU military expenditure closer to €500 billion. The second is that a “5+1” grouping is emerging, envisioned first by the German DGAP and made up of France, Germany, Poland, Italy, and Spain, with Great Britain in addition, within which the terms of European rearmament are being discussed. The third move is the fact that London is involved in this process. The Times writes that Trump, a supporter of Brexit, “has done more to bring Britain and Europe together than Starmer could possibly have achieved on his own”.
For those wondering about the political meaning of our strategic opposition to European imperialism, there is a lot of food for thought.
Lotta Comunista, February 2025