The Munich Security Conference has confirmed the West's rupture. The United States, which is willing to negotiate with Vladimir Putin but is instead declaring ideological war on the European Union, has deployed its full arguments in the Bavarian capital.new sheriff Washington, which has given itself the role of savior of its country while pretending to decide the fate of the Old Continent without taking into account the will of those who govern it.
Donald Trump's foreign policy is built on the idea that peace is achieved through force, through the deterrent or coercive capacity of the United States. And so, after years of having turned Ukraine into a war laboratory for the big tech From Silicon Valley – with companies like Palantir, Microsoft, Amazon, Starlink, Google or Clearview collaborating with the Ukrainian army – Donald Trump's offer of "peace for territory" to Vladimir Putin is now completely changing the fragile balance on the ground.
The transatlantic abyss left by the visit to Europe of the Vice President of the United States, JD Vance, and the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, is accelerating the pressure on a threatened EU.
European democracy is in danger, according to Vance, because it is trying to put limits on the power of technological oligopolies that are rewriting global governance and international relations. It is not Moscow or Beijing. It is the new technological-patriotic elite that governs Washington that is attacking the model of shared sovereignties and regulatory limits that defines the EU.
But the humiliation of the European Union as a geopolitical strategy can have unexpected effects. The European Council on Foreign Relations researcher Camille Grand said ironically after the Munich Security Conference that Vance's speech had been a great boost for European integration, "the most important thing since Jean Monnet" - he said sarcastically - because it confirms how different the Europeans are from the new US administration.
The reality is that the geopolitical acceleration of Trumpism has not left much room to calmly evaluate the impact that this aggressive unilateralism can have on the European project. But there are already some readings to be made. For the moment, Keir Starmer's United Kingdom is, at this moment, closer to the reality of the continent than to its battered special relationship with the US - the British are a key player in the negotiations on European security -; we have also seen how the withdrawal and aggressiveness of Trumpism can end up fostering new points of cooperation between the EU and China - as was staged in the final agreement of the AI Summit in Paris, ratified by the Chinese but not by the United States or the United Kingdom -; Furthermore, the ideological understanding of the new American administration with the European extreme right could come into contradiction if protectionism and economic coercion begin to endanger the growth of the Union. Sources in the EU Council explain that even Hungary or Italy remain silent when Brussels claims to have a plan of measures ready to respond to the imposition of tariffs by the United States. Budapest and Rome know that once in the community economy it would affect the Twenty-Seven.
The EU is a heavy animal that advances out of necessity. The great leaps forward in integration in recent years have been marked by urgency. The greater the challenge, the greater the pressure to build consensus. The Finnish Prime Minister, Alexander Stubb, warned Munich against the hot reactions of a frightened and cacophonous EU. "We must talk less and do more," he claimed. And for weeks, in informal and restricted conversations between European leaders, they have been debating what guarantees of peace the EU can offer Ukraine after the ceasefire. Faced with the United States, which despises the Europeans by denying them a place at the negotiating table that must decide the immediate balance of continental security, while demanding more investment in defence, military presence on the ground and assuming the cost of rebuilding Ukraine, the rearmament of the European Union must be political. Because, with the pressure of military spending on the rise, the EU is forced to accept its own limitations and internal contradictions, as was made clear by the mini-summit held at the Elysée on Monday, with the reluctance of Germany, Poland and Spain to consider sending troops.
The United States has already verbalised, in the most defiant way possible, the death of the consensus that had built transatlantic understanding since the end of the Second World War and up to the present day. And Europe has been trapped, seeking its own answers, both because of the ideological war that comes from the West and because of the military aggression that may be consolidated on its eastern border.
