Americanism and Europeanism in the Crisis in the World Order
What can be said about the show diplomacy which has become the hallmark of the American presidency, and was spectacularly demonstrated in Donald Trump's performances at the Israeli Knesset and at the Peace 2025 ceremony in Sharm El Sheikh?
The terrain is treacherous, given how it combines the new forms of television and social media democracy and the historical characteristics of Americanism, with the structural changes of Atlantic decline and the resulting dynamics of the global contention.
Although it is tinged with a certain despondency, it is worth revisiting the description given in July in L’Opinion by Frédéric Charillon, former head of the Strategic Research Institute at the Military School and lecturer at ESSEC, a French grande école of economic sciences with Jesuit roots. In his view, the days of classical diplomacy are over
, which is bad news for Europeans, who largely invented it and, most importantly, consecrated it after the Congress of Vienna in 1814-1815
. Faced with the permanent uncertainty
pursued by Trump, Europe is naked
and its strategic role does not exist or does not exist enough
without Washington, which is now blowing up the diplomatic practices that Europe considered to be its main strengths
.
The new posture is the antithesis of European DNA
. First, there is the habit of announcing even the most serious decisions on social media, or of posting one’s moods there, regardless of the effects they may have on the ground
. This is a far cry from John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who during the fateful thirteen days of the Cuban crisis managed to gather dozens of advisers to take time
and decide collectively
on the best response to Nikita Khrushchev. Now, a practice of permanent belching
is being improvised in front of journalists.
For the old, polite Europe, which takes the time necessary to agree on a common position, convinced that this makes it more legitimate because it is consensual, this development is terrible. It presents bravado as more effective than diplomatic professionalism, outbursts rather than negotiation, blunt remarks on X rather than compromise. For Trump, the dramatic gesture is a preliminary step towards reaching an agreement. But public opinion sees it as proof of the weakness of reasonable people
.
A second trait is unilateralism
, to the point of unhesitating interference in the political or judicial affairs of other powers. Washington has always practised unilateral action — think of the Nixon shock in 1971 — but, for Charillon, with Trump the goal is not only to ignore or circumvent partners, but to unsettle them in order to assert his leadership, through deliberately unpredictable and publicly staged intimidation
.
Thirdly, Trump takes the subordination of foreign policy to domestic constraints and objectives to the extreme
. While this element is always present in foreign policy, Trump goes further
:
He determines his international orientation based on an electorate that is distrustful of foreign countries, advisers with little experience in international affairs, and ideological affinities with foreign leaders who are part of the inner circle that gravitates around the White House. To negotiate with America, one can no longer reason in terms of interests; one must know whom to flatter in Washington
. That being the case, Europeans could become the last countries to practise diplomacy of the classic type: Legal-rational, incremental, based on negotiation and compromise
.
This diagnosis is echoed in an interview in Le Monde with Christoph Heusgen, former adviser to Angela Merkel. He highlights the ostentatiously transactional nature of Trump’s politics, which can no longer be relied on to guarantee alliance ties. When he introduced himself to Jared Kushner as an old-school diplomat — recalling Kennedy during the Berlin crisis and George Bush, a co-architect of German reunification — the response from Trump’s son-in-law, one of the authors of the Abraham Accords, was direct and disarming:
Stop, Christoph. We are not diplomats, we are businessmen. And in business, one day you are a friend, the next day you are an enemy. That’s how we conduct our foreign policy
.
Walter Russell Mead, a regular voice in the columns of The Wall Street Journal who is often useful for deciphering the new course in Washington, has the advantage of a certain distance from European bewilderment. It is true that rationality is not the dominant principle in Trump’s decisions
, he acknowledges in an interview by Michel Duclos of the Institut Montaigne. Trump acts on intuition
, but his intuitions bear the mark of a collective culture
. They are almost archetypes
which, once recognized, allow us to better understand his decisions, even if they remain far removed from the rationality that inspired Richard Nixon’s strategic analyses. Anchoring oneself to US political history and its schools of thought — Mead advises — makes it possible to find, even in the Trump doctrine
, the American constants
that underpin his foreign policy.
Mead refers to his own well-known dissection of the American political tradition into the economistic realism of the Hamiltonians, the internationalist idealism of the Wilsonians, the assertive nationalism of the Jacksonians, and the realistic caution of the Jeffersonians, who were wary of foreign commitments and federal spending. Over the past 30 years, American foreign policy has been dominated by the globalist coalition
between Hamiltonians and Wilsonians: the old world of the liberal order
. Trump appears to have ridden the revolt against that consensus, combining the nationalism of the Jacksonians with the stay-at-home prudence of the Jeffersonians.
The unprecedented feature of the new course is that everything depends on domestic politics
. According to Mead, Trump has navigated that coalition with managerial skill
, adjusting according to fluctuations in electoral support, with policy towards Israel reflecting Jacksonian nationalism and policy on Ukraine based on reluctant Jeffersonian realism.
Mead skims the surface of ideologies and social psychologies and offers limited insight on their linkage to the dynamics of large groups and factions of capital in the United States, confining his analysis to the differentiation of interests between the new high-tech players in Silicon Valley and traditional capitalism
. But his attempt to bring Trump back to the constants of Americanism is at least a step towards escaping the prevailing trend — the one that is replacing political analysis with daily commentary on the latest episode of show diplomacy.
Raja Mohan, writing in The Indian Express, provides perhaps the best summary of the situation regarding the Trump plan for Gaza, as well as the turbulent events in Ukraine. The strength of a great power
such as the US, combined with boundless egotism
and a willingness to engage in high-stakes manoeuvres
, can set great things in motion, but it is unlikely to be enough; pacification requires persistence, compromise, and a deep understanding of the dynamics of a conflict
, qualities that Trump does not possess.
For Fyodor Lukyanov, writing in Rossiyskaya Gazeta, Trump, albeit in an exaggerated form
, perfectly embodies American political culture: Targeted pragmatism, the ability to express specific interests, assertiveness and ruthlessness in achieving goals, and a pomposity that borders on (or even exceeds) bad taste
.
Lukyanov doubts the disproportionate boasts about eternal peace
made by Trump in Sharm El Sheikh, typical of this style
, but he must admit that everyone’s willingness to admire and cooperate reflects the desire to seize the moment to stabilise the situation, at least in part
.
This sums up well the attitude of the major powers, which, with varying degrees of intensity and emphasis, all support the US twenty-point plan — Europe, India, Japan, Brazil, Russia, and China, the latter two without very much enthusiasm. A joint document by five Arab powers (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, and Egypt) and three powers of the OIC, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (Turkey, Indonesia, and Pakistan), declares adherence to the plan, but on condition of the recognition of a Palestinian State in which Gaza and the West Bank are fully integrated. A similar position, centred on the Palestinian National Authority, is behind a Franco-Saudi initiative, which has also resulted in a request from the main European players for a UN mandate to provide multilateral political backing for an international military peacekeeping force.
The Abraham Accords were initiated five years ago by Trump at the end of his first term and were never abandoned by Joe Biden. The typically American idea was that the oil rent from the Gulf petro-monarchies, combined with Israel’s industrial and technological potential, could trigger a cycle of development so impressive that it would overcome the historic ethnic and religious rivalries that batter the region. The take-off of this market was supposed to converge with the IMEC corridor, the future Cotton Road supposed to connect the Indo-Pacific with the Mediterranean, as an alternative — or direct competitor — to the Silk Road promoted by China.
Two years ago, Saudi Arabia was on the verge of joining the Abraham Accords, following the example of the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco (which obtained US recognition of its sovereignty over Western Sahara) and Sudan, which is halfway there as it has not yet ratified its agreement. In that context, it was argued that Bin Salman, in recognising Israel, would be satisfied with a generic future commitment to a Palestinian State, where external security would, in any case, be the responsibility of Israel.
The pogrom of October 7th interrupted that process. Whether or not it was agreed with Tehran, the attack on the kibbutzim, with its 1,200 victims and 251 hostages, embodied the opposition to the Abraham Accords by Iran and its proxies, i.e., the ring of fire that brought together Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Assad’s Syria, some of the Shiite components in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen — all forces that shielded Iran’s nuclear programme. Since then, Israel has destroyed Gaza and struck all of Iran’s proxies; in Syria, the Assad regime has fallen and, with the help of US B2 bombers, has at least degraded Tehran’s nuclear programme. Finally, Israel has struck Hamas’s channels of funding and support in Qatar, which in any case it had used for years to keep Gaza and the West Bank divided. However, the attack on Doha proved to be one gamble too many, with two consequences. It prompted Saudi Arabia to counter-insure itself with Pakistan, introducing Islamabad’s atomic deterrent into the regional power equation. It also prompted Washington to break the deadlock, forcing Benjamin Netanyahu to accept the truce in Gaza.
Two years later, with more than 65,000 victims in Gaza, a toll that will forever mark Israel’s reputation and yet has not provoked much reaction from the Arab world, we are back to the original process of the Abraham Accords. Iran is the big loser and will be the only regional power to be excluded, with all the risks that this entails. However, there is no shortage of overtures to bring the mullahs to the negotiating table.
The risks of failure are obvious and widely debated, and this may be one of the ulterior motives of Moscow’s, and especially Beijing’s, lukewarm endorsement, which would leave Washington to shoulder the burden of any setback for Trump’s triumphalism. But if the process takes root, it would be worth reflecting on the hypotheses explored in 1977 by our Marxist analysis. With the failure of Prussian-like military unification in the region, the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt could then have led to a Zollverein solution, i.e., the large regional free trade area that has often been mooted as a complement to a confederal solution for the West Bank, and which today is echoed in the economistic logic of the Abraham Accords. If this were the case, we would have a combination of the two processes, military and economic-regional, within the framework of an inter-imperialist agreement. It goes without saying that the bloody legacy of tens of thousands of victims in Gaza adds up to a new colossal and perhaps unbridgeable divide, fuelling and reproducing deep-rooted hatred and fanaticism in the new generations.
Could the arrangement become an international guarantee for the area or for part of it, via a cartel of the major powers? These were the solutions often dreamed about (but never realised) by Henry Kissinger, when the doyen of American realism hypothesised Belgium-like solutions inspired by the 19th century Concert of Europe, which could be applied to intractable hotspots such as Iraq or Afghanistan. This would have obvious implications for the assessment of the crisis in the world order, assuming a temporary phase of stabilisation and some recognition of China’s role in such arrangements.
We shall see: the Middle East is the promised land of unintended consequences; the processes of rearmament in every area and nerve centre of the contention seem to be moving things in the complete opposite direction, while Atlantic decline and the rise of China are objective tectonic shifts that entail disruptive tensions over which diplomacy has little control. Mead tells Duclos that events are in the saddle, and they are riding humanity
; between the US and China, as during the Cold War, there will be moments of détente
and agreements
, followed by surges of tension
and brutal hostility
.
For the moment, it can be noted that beneath the surface of American triumphalism, the Trump plan appears open to other contributions, or at least to European contributions. This applies to the Franco-Saudi initiative, which is considered complementary
to the plan. This also applies to the very genesis of the twenty points of the plan, with key roles played by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Jonathan Powell, adviser to Keir Starmer and long-time diplomat — he was a key player in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that ended the civil war in Northern Ireland. And it also applies to the European proposal for a UN mandate. Not only has Secretary of State Marco Rubio hinted at American endorsement, but invoking the United Nations carries with it the crucial subtext of the involvement of Russia and China, both permanent members of the Security Council.
Here, the particular role of Europe calls for reflection. As early as 1987, in Menschen und Mächte (People and Powers
), the historian and former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt lamented the inconsistency and unpredictability of American foreign policy with the advent of television democracy, together with Washington’s lack of knowledge about the tangle of unresolved and unsolvable problems
in the Greater Middle East. The scope for European action was a sort of defensive game around a US policy in the area that was unstable
and largely based on hopes
.
Forty years on, much has changed in global power relations, with the collapse of the USSR, German and European reunification with the euro federation, the emergence of China, and the relative Atlantic decline. In a series of uninterrupted conflicts and massacres, in which George W. Bush’s war by choice in Iraq and its unintended consequences stand out, much has also changed in the Middle East. Among the great powers, Russia has been downsized, China and India have emerged, and America oscillates between the push for disengagement and a presence that remains substantial and unrivalled in terms of manpower, bases, and resources. Among the medium powers, some are in decline or have been defeated, such as Iran, Iraq, and Syria; others have gained weight or initiative thanks to the crisis in the world order, such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt to some extent, and, of course, Israel. Even small and very small powers have a role to play, such as Qatar and the Emirates. Outside the area, Pakistan and Indonesia too are emerging, as we have seen.
What does not seem to have changed, and if anything has been weakened by Turkey’s role in Libya or by the French crisis in its pré carré in sub-Saharan Africa, is Europe’s defensive game, which remains constrained by the EU’s political and military limitations. Romano Prodi, in an interview with Wang Wen of the Chongyang Institute hosted by the Guancha website, gives an accurate assessment of the current state of the European process:
Europe is indeed accelerating its progress towards self-determination, but centuries-old traditions, national identities, and especially defence systems cannot be changed overnight. We have made progress in military-industrial coordination, but substantial breakthroughs are unlikely in the short term. The future may swing back and forth like a pendulum
.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, interviewed by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, touches on the crucial point of the current movement of Europeanism: The method of integration has temporarily reached its limits with 27 States. Now, cooperation between governments is much more important
. Merz cites France, Poland, Italy, and Northern Europe in the initiatives of the coalition of the willing triggered by the war in Ukraine: A lot is happening in this intergovernmental way
. The same can be said for the agreement between Thales, Airbus, and Leonardo on satellite development, which is modelled on MBDA in missile technology, where the British company BAE Systems is also involved.
Mario Draghi introduced the notion of pragmatic federalism
, which he believes is the only viable path and a tool capable of acting outside the slowest mechanisms of the EU decision-making
, bringing together coalitions of the willing around shared strategic interests
. We note that it is along this path that Europe rearmament has accelerated, and that London has found it to be the pragmatic way to reverse Brexit and reconnect with the dynamics of the EU. Giorgia Meloni’s balancing of Euro-national and Euro-Atlantic positions can also find its place in this approach, particularly in alignment with Berlin’s Euro-Atlanticism — a fact which relativises Rome’s reservations about majority voting in the European Council on foreign and defence policy.
In the interconnected movement of federal, confederal, and national powers that has always characterised the dynamics of Europeanism, we must now investigate the paradoxical dialectic whereby what formally appeared to be a limitation, i.e., the weight of the States and their reserve of sovereignty, may today prove to be a factor of acceleration and executive centralisation. Europe’s strategic dependence on the United States has been dramatically exposed, by both the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza. But rearmament and the events surrounding the willing show how the unknowns of erratic Americanism may, in new ways, help to forge the strategic consensus of Europeanism.
Lotta Comunista, October 2025