The challenge for the European Union is always aligning its words with its actions. One day it adopts a firm rhetorical stance, asserting that "the time for a strong Europe" has arrived, as Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz grandiloquently proclaimed last Friday at the Munich Security Conference, and then immediately rises to applaud US Secretary of State Marco Rubio's speech and his mention of the European Union.
Transatlantic rifts are also tearing the European Union apart from within. Trump's United States has become a deeply divisive factor in European politics. The 27 member states haven't even been able to agree on how to interpret Rubio's 22-minute speech, in which he declared himself a "son of Europe" amidst the dismantling of the post-World War II order. Some want to believe that Trump's chief diplomat came to offer a transatlantic truce of reconciliation, while for others it was merely a change of tone, but not of policies. The absence of insults—like those JD Vance hurled at the European Union a year ago—and of contempt—like those he uses to attack Donald Trump's fragile unity—allowed Rubio to offer a measured version of the same hostile vision of a world with an imperialist undertone and direct criticism. Rubio reiterated the idea of a threatened "European civilization," just 24 hours after Trump declared that "Europe is finished." And yet, the European Union leaders present in the room, more out of discomfort than desire, ended up joining in the standing ovation that acknowledged the condescension of the head of US diplomacy.
After the moment of community pride experienced in Davos, with Trump's halt to the annexation of Greenland, Munich has served to reaffirm that there is no alternative to the transatlantic relationship. Resistance is complicated. Painful. Too expensive, and distant, because European dependence on the United States has only grown since the Russian invasion of Ukraine four years ago.
From Giorgia Meloni in Ursula von der Leyen, and from Friedrich Merz in Keir Starmer, the temptation to tone down the rhetoric towards Washington has ultimately prevailed. Fear dictates any European reaction. Transatlantic trust is broken, but the realism of a European Union aware of its vulnerability sets the tone of any response. That is why, in Munich, we have witnessed the collision between the Franco-German discourse on a future European security architecture and the inertia of thanking Rubio for sparing the insults hurled from the White House.
But the European Union is also, increasingly, a compendium of contradictory agendas. A shifting geometry that tears at the seams of a Union weakened from within.
The fact that Marco Rubio has continued his European tour in Viktor Orbán's Hungary, which is campaigning for re-election, and in Robert Fico's Slovakia demonstrates that Trumpism has found a place to take root on this side of the Atlantic.
While the Tony Blair Institute is pressuring the European Commission for the EU to join Donald Trump's "Peace Board," Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has already acknowledged that her country is considering participating as an "observer." The same is being considered in Romania and Cyprus, the current rotating president of the EU.
European unity is tearing itself apart. A game of multiple alliances based on interests. Meloni allies with Merz when it comes to lowering the EU's regulatory ambitions, and with Macron to defend the need to reopen dialogue with Vladimir Putin. At last week's informal summit at the Belgian castle of Alden Biesen, European leaders opened the door to making progress through smaller coalitions of countries with common interests, allowing them to circumvent the gridlock caused by the constant search for consensus among twenty-seven governments increasingly estranged by geopolitical urgencies. The Europe of "enhanced cooperation" and intergovernmental coalitions is being imposed at breakneck speed, to the detriment of EU institutions and joint decision-making. Integration in the Charter is being reinforced.
