The agenda of European leaders is filled with summit after summit (the latest in Paris and London, and this Thursday there is a meeting of the European Council), trying to respond to Donald Trump's challenges, which we never quite know to what extent they are mere bravado or real threats. In any case, the shameful scene last Friday, with Trump and Vance (an individual as repulsive in politics as in writing literature) acting as comic-book gangsters at Zelensky's expense, live for the whole world, made a few things clear. One, Trump and his government are really predisposed to break all diplomatic and geopolitical consensus. Two, they are predisposed because they think they are doing it for their own benefit: more than a government, what now rules the US is an association of mega-millionaires, with Musk and Trump himself as visible leaders, who work from the full conviction that there is no limit between the public interest and their personal and/or corporate interests. And three, beyond all this, Trump is a confused, intemperate, ill-tempered and dim-witted character: it was much more convenient for him that on Friday Zelensky signed an agreement that was basically equivalent to a permit for the Americans to enter and plunder Ukraine's natural resources, but he and his vice president did not like the warmth of the Europeans.
And the European response to Trump's insults is to comply with Trump's will, that is, to rearm. To rearm in what way? This will be concretized, or perhaps it will never be very concrete, but in any case it will be a strong rearmament: at the end of the London meeting, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte (who sometimes seems to confuse the defense of Atlanticism with servility to the Trump administration) was exalting, but pretending to cough, the idea of dedicating 5% of its GDP to defense. The truth is that the members most reluctant to rearm, such as Spain, are no longer squealing. The rearmament policy is largely explained by the confusion, already mentioned, between public and private interests.
Where Europe differs from Trump, for the moment, is in blaming Ukraine for the invasion and the war with Russia. It would be Putin's wish that Ukraine should be seen as the culprit in the official narrative, and he is joined by Orbán, by the vast majority of the European extreme right (except Meloni, who is ambiguous on this as on so many other things) and by a part of the left, as obfuscated as its hated Yankee counterpart, nostalgia for the USSR. Perhaps what best explains our times is nothing other than the limitations of human understanding, also called curtor.
