Europe is strengthening

Berlin, Brussels, Kiev, Washington and Riyadh are the scene of key talks this week on the immediate future of European security. With the verdict of the German ballot box already decided, a European Union determined to avoid a collective failure in Ukraine is seeking to gain its own place as a decisive player in a peace that is still entirely abstract. Three years after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and only a month after Donald Trump's return to the White House, the awareness of vulnerability that the EU now feels is forcing it to rethink the balances and alliances built up over more than half a century of community project. The speech by the Vice President of the United States, JD Vance, at the Munich Security Conference has already become the symbol of this existential rupture of the transatlantic axis. A challenge witnessed live by the soon-to-be new Chancellor of Germany, the Christian Democrat Friedrich Merz, who took advantage of his first appearance after the CDU's victory in Sunday's elections was confirmed to declare that Europe must become "independent of the United States." Merz is in a hurry to start leading. “My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible,” said the man who has pledged to send long-range Taurus cruise missiles to Kiev – a red line that then-Chancellor Olaf Scholz never wanted to cross – and who talks of accelerating “an autonomous European defence capability.”

In 1998, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright described the United States as “the indispensable nation” in a global order still governed by the institutions and strength of those who designed the world after World War II. Likewise, Germany has long held that indispensable power in the European Union: the leading economy and export power, the most populous country and the political engine that, for decades, advanced European political integration. But if the institutional architecture of that American peace, which Donald Trump himself has already declared liquidated, is today an outdated building, and the German leadership of the Union is also a jammed model that needs to overcome some internal existential and constitutional brakes to adapt to the new European reality. Brussels awaits the arrival of a Germany eager to lead. But it will not be easy. Today's EU – with a growing extreme right and the ability to challenge majorities – is not the frightened Europe that Angela Merkel harnessed. The world has accelerated. The Russian military aggression in Ukraine has radically transformed the defence policy of the Union and of many of its member states. The rhetoric of hard power is now imposed by Washington and Moscow.

Forced by urgency, the EU demands to be taken into account in this transactional order Trump, loaded with expansionist rhetoric and inclined to the law of the strongest, who also challenges the American security guarantees on which Volodymyr Zelensky's Ukraine resists and under which a European Union has lived peacefully that today is forced to cut the umbilical cord with a world that no longer exists.

With a Trump who assumes the Kremlin's argument, who calls Zelensky a dictator, who demands control of Ukrainian resources and infrastructure, and who seems willing to embrace the right of conquest, the EU has understood that it must also accelerate its own diplomatic path, because it also has to accelerate its own diplomatic path. On the one hand, aligned physically and symbolically with Ukraine, the European Union participated on Monday in Kiev in the act of homage to the fallen soldiers. On the other hand, France and the United Kingdom are currently leading the offensive against Donald Trump to explain their plan for security guarantees for Ukraine, which provides for the deployment of European soldiers on Ukrainian soil to ensure compliance with a possible ceasefire.

The war is entering its fourth year with more than 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers dead and 370,000 wounded, according to figures acknowledged by the Ukrainian government, which puts the number of Russian army victims at 868,000.

In front of the world leaders who accompanied Zelensky on this third anniversary of the invasion, the Ukrainian president expressed his hope that this will be the year of "a just and lasting peace" for his country. The diplomatic dance has accelerated.