We have often reflected on the memorandum that Charles de Gaulle submitted to American President Dwight Eisenhower in September 1958, at the beginning of the Fifth Republic. Referring to the recent events
of the Suez crisis of 1956 and the ongoing confrontation in the Taiwan Strait with Beijing’s bombardment of the Quemoy Islands, De Gaulle considered NATO’s organisation and area of responsibility limited to the North Atlantic to be insufficient. This strategic horizon was too narrow, as if what was happening in the Middle East or Africa did not immediately and directly concern Europe, and as if France’s indivisible responsibilities did not extend to Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific
. The proposal was for a three-member directorate comprising France, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The directorate would have discussed and taken joint decisions
on political issues concerning global security
, and the corresponding strategic action plans
would also have been implemented within it, especially those concerning the use of nuclear weapons.
The proposed directorate was rejected by Eisenhower. Henry Kissinger tends to see this as a sign of a fundamental disconnect between the pragmatic American political culture and General De Gaulle’s depth of strategic thinking. It goes without saying that this rejection was, in fact, the result of the true partition of Europe between the US and the USSR, as established at Yalta. Washington had no intention of recognising Europe’s strategic parity, and this is still the case today. All the reflections in the following decades on the transformation of Atlantic relations, the European demand for transatlantic reciprocity, the definition of a European pillar of NATO, and, today, the Europeanisation of NATO have essentially revolved around the question posed in 1958.
Today, however, we are interested in the list and hierarchy of potential theatres of operations
that were to be dependent on the directorate:
a) Arctic,
.
b) Atlantic (Europe, North Africa, Middle East, Eastern America),
c) Pacific,
d) Indian Ocean (India, Madagascar, Central and Southern Africa)
The Arctic’s position at the top of the list of theatres for Euro-American strategic sharing can be explained by the role that the bases in Greenland had played in guarding the transatlantic routes during the Second World War, and above all by the new importance that the area was assuming in the confrontation with the USSR over nuclear deterrence.
In October 1957, a year before the memorandum, Moscow had surprised Washington with the launch of Sputnik, demonstrating its potential in the field of ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles). In August 1958, the American response was the crossing of the North Pole by the nuclear submarine Nautilus, submerged beneath the ice of the Arctic basin. It was a spectacular demonstration of a deterrence system based on submarine stealth. It would become part of the nuclear triad as the weapon of choice for a second strike. The first crossing of the Pole was therefore under-way, the only one possible, and with it came the threat of nuclear submarines equipped with ballistic missiles and capable of moving, unseen, to within range of the enemy’s vital targets. In January 1961, as the George Washington, armed with sixteen Polaris A-1 missiles, it conducted its first deterrence patrol from November 1960 to January 1961.
Today, one of the reasons cited for the crisis between the United States and the EU over Greenland is the new role that transpolar trade routes would assume as Arctic ice melts due to global warming. The route may be important for China and Russia along the Northern Sea Route (NSR), which runs along the Siberian coast, where Beijing could avoid dependence on the Straits of Malacca and the Suez Canal to reach Europe. Whether the alternative really has strategic value remains controversial, given that the route is unviable in winter; it requires icebreakers, as well as specialised vessels and crews; and in any case Beijing would be dependent on Russian sovereignty.
The strategic importance of the bases in Greenland is fundamentally different in the context of nuclear deterrence, both for early warning systems in the surveillance of ICBM polar trajectories and for anti-missile systems. This is true today for Russia but, in the future, it will be true for China, since a Chinese deterrent of around 1,500 warheads is expected by 2035, on par with the current Russian and American deployments.
While the strategic importance of transpolar trade routes is uncertain, it is certain that Greenland will become crucial in the tripolar confrontation over strategic deterrence that is unfolding in this decade. There would therefore be grounds to reach agreement on the Arctic regarding the sharing of strategic interests between the US and the EU that le Général was thinking about in 1958. Donald Trump has a point when he claims the importance of the Arctic island for the United States and for the installations linked to the Golden Dome. The new, futuristic missile defence-shield project, which requires multi-billion-dollar investments, seems to revive the suggestions of the SDI, the threat of a space shield that Ronald Reagan used to force Mikhail Gorbachev to negotiate, and which ultimately drove the USSR to crash in the rearmament race. The Europeans have their own counter-argument, arguing that the new missile context, through transpolar trajectories, concerns NATO as a whole, since the potential threat also weighs on Europe.
It may be that the pragmatic compromise that seems to have been agreed between Trump and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte of the Netherlands will prevail, but all the political steps staged in the American president’s show diplomacy are moving in the opposite direction. The claim to ownership of Greenland fades from a once rational argument into a demand of the White House occupant’s problematic psychology. Even if inadvertently, the claim of American exclusivity over deterrence to be exercised from the Greenlandic ice cap evokes the spectre of decoupling, the issue of separating US strategic defence from that of Europe which has marked transatlantic relations for decades.
Timofei Bordachev, programme director at Valdai, writes in Vzglyad that American claims on Greenland are a symbolic blow
to Europe that is much more serious than the implications for Russia and China, which he considers irrelevant because Washington already has a military presence in the north of the island. European States have built their internal legitimacy on a sense of exceptionalism and normative superiority
, but the possibility that the US could take territory away from them deeply undermines this. For Bordachev, European politicians are missing the point. The US wants more than direct physical control of Greenland; above all, it aims to reaffirm its freedom of action above international constraints and norms
, a central issue in Trump’s internal legitimacy, which has historical roots in American political culture.
Talking about freedom from constraints
, we note, means calling into question the bonds of alliance. Is the Atlantic crisis on the verge of a fatal and catastrophic outcome? The question is at the heart of the European debate. The Board of Peace
inaugurated in Davos—a distinctly American chimera of a privatised UN, halfway between a corporate boardroom and a reserved table at a casino, with a minimum stake of $1 billion—is striking in its transformation from the previous episode of show diplomacy staged for the eternal peace
plan in Gaza. In Sharm El Sheikh, the European allies were involved, and the Franco-Saudi request to include the UN in the peace process had also been accepted. In Davos, not only did the new international board present itself as an alternative to the UN, shifting the initiative from mediation in the Middle East to the claim of world pacification, but it is also significant that none of the United States’ historical allies were present, neither the Europeans nor Japan. Taken at face value, the Board of Peace coalition amounts to a challenge that calls into question the Atlantic Alliance and the Japan-US Security Treaty.
However, we stress again that this is true only if we take the American initiative at face value, which with Trump is by no means certain. In any case, a decisive factor in the European debate is the distinction between those who prophecy the end of the Atlantic Alliance and those who, in the majority, at least out of necessity, want to preserve it, albeit transformed by European strategic sovereignty. That is to say, guaranteed by conventional and nuclear rearmament, on which both orientations converge.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, former governor of the Bank of England, was the hero of the day at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Returning from Beijing, where he re-established the strategic partnership
between Canada and China, Carney argued that middle powers
must organise themselves to diversify their relations with America—an appeal addressed to the EU, Japan, India, and South Korea—but added that what is underway is not just a transition
but a break
with the old order. Christine Lagarde, head of monetary power at the ECB, disagrees: I am not convinced that we should talk about a break
.
For Heinrich Wefing, writing in Die Zeit, the issue is the window of vulnerability that is opening for the Old Continent. It is clear that Europe must free itself from its strategic dependence on America, but it would take up to ten years
to achieve separation. The solution is a two-pronged strategy, a mix of alignment and distancing from the United States
. In the Italian debate, this is roughly in line with the arguments put forward by Giampiero Massolo, former secretary general of the Foreign Ministry, and carefully calibrated, word by word, for the Corriere della Sera. Rebalancing and transforming the Atlantic relationship, rather than breaking it, is also the basis of the agreement between Rome and Berlin ratified by Friedrich Merz and Giorgia Meloni.
The political weakness of Europe, including the United Kingdom, is an undeniable fact, especially when measured in the internal political cycles of its capitals. On the other hand, it is precisely the ad hoc initiatives of individual States, such as the so-called coalition of the willing on Ukraine or the coordination currently being defined on European deterrence, that are circumventing the slowness of the decision-making process among the 27 member States.
A joint Italian-German document on competitiveness echoes the 1981 Genscher-Colombo pact, named after the two foreign ministers of the time, which helped to relaunch the European process. Merz recalled the 1980s in Davos, when Eurosclerosis
was countered by Jacques Delors’ White Paper and the single market project
with a deadline of 1992. Parts of the Draghi report and the Letta report are expected to be incorporated into a European Council plan, according to a practical approach that seems to follow the suggestions of Riccardo Perissich, director-general of the EU Commission at the time of the Delors plan.
At the same time, the free trade agreements with Mercosur, despite the deadlock in the European Parliament, and especially the one with India show a confident strategic initiative by the Commission and the Council in responding to Trump’s protectionism.
The pragmatic federalism proposed by Mario Draghi seems to be gaining ground; in the prevailing consensus, it will have to contribute to rebalancing relations with the United States—provided that the turmoil in Washington does not precipitate the Atlantic crisis into catastrophe.
Lotta Comunista, January 2026