The Internationalism

Americanism and Europeanism in the Crisis in the World Order Internationalism No. 81, November 2025 Page 1 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 o...

From the series News from the Silk Road According to The Washington Post , through the federal budget the White House has opened negotiations with the Senate that include long-term competition with China. The figures — $6 trillion, including infrastructure and family welfare plans — will vary in the negotiations, and will be centred on three directives. One demand is common to various proposals of expenditure: they must have a positive impact on the American productivity vis-à-vis China on the open fronts of industrial, energy and technological restructuring, or on the efficiency of welfare systems. In the case of welfare, the competition is also vis-à-vis Europe. Another calculation, attributed to Biden’s administration and the Democrats, is the enlargement of the electoral coalition in view of the next mid-term elections. Finally, there is a need to direct military expenditure, within the framework of a greater increase in the other items of discretionary expenditure, not absorb...

The dialectic between economic weapons and weapons of war in the crisis in the world order requires specific reflection where concerns European imperialism. Dealing with monetary weapons in their book War by Other Means , Jennifer Harris and Robert Blackwill place great emphasis on the strategic success of the European monetary federation: Through forging the eurozone, Germany has also realized its century-long quest for a pliant European market for German manufacturing. Both of these were things it had previously tried (and failed) to accomplish by force. The long quotation below is from the speech Helmut Schmidt made to the Bundesbank Council in 1978 in favour of the EMS, the European Monetary System that would lead to the euro. Classified as confidential for 30 years, the text was declassified in 2008. There emerges from it a highly political vision of the German use of the monetary weapon and of the strategic weight of a single continental market: What now concerns German pol...