In June 1997, then-United States Senator Joe Biden, returning from a trip to Moscow where he had gone to reassure the Kremlin about the expansion of the Atlantic Alliance, told reporters that the Russians did not want “to even hear about this NATO expansion”, and admitted that Moscow had warned him that, if it happened, Russia's response would be to “turn to China”. Biden, taking for granted that a Sino-Russian rapprochement was unthinkable, boasted of having replied: “You know what? Good luck with that! And then, if it doesn't work out, you try Iran!” Biden's words made an audience laugh, unable to imagine, from Washington, a world in which Beijing would become a global pole of attraction. Three decades later, the world is being reconfigured around China and Donald Trump is caught in a war in Iran, with military impact throughout the region and the capacity for global economic disruption.

Caught in the Iran war, Donald Trump has chosen to toughen reprisals against the European Union. The threat of a trade war has once again surfaced to punish, precisely, allied reluctance to be involved in the battle to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The more Trump pressures, the further the EU moves away. The transatlantic distance is becoming insurmountable because no one hides a mutual disillusionment that threatens to collapse more than seventy years of understanding and a shared vision of the world. Even old Europe, which still tried to maintain appearances with the President of the United States – like Giorgia Meloni or Friedrich Merz – has fallen out of favor by not submitting to the White House's erratic agenda.

Entangled with the banner of “patriotic technology”, a series of companies are redefining strategic order, conventional warfare, and even the sovereignty of states. The line between civilian and military, and between the public and private power of these technological oligarchies, is becoming increasingly blurred. The controversial manifesto from Palantir – Peter Thiel’s company turned data management giant for military use –, published on X, announces a new era of AI-based deterrence. In reality, what it is building is an empire of new technological vulnerabilities and rights in favor of the power and software of Silicon Valley giants.

Bulgaria has punished corruption. The victory of Rumen Radev and his progressive coalition in Sunday's elections in the poorest country in the European Union is the result of general weariness with a regime of rampant corruption, state capture, influence peddling, and embezzlement. A mafia rooted for years and fueled by European funds that have arrived since Bulgaria's entry into the EU in 2007.

The defeat of Viktor Orbán at the ballot box has a few losers. The end of the hitherto all-powerful Hungarian prime minister and the European Union's longest-serving leader is the result of a series of miscalculations and a widespread weariness with the excesses of clientelistic patronage in a country plagued by inflation, wage erosion, and chronic underinvestment in healthcare, education, and public services. Orbán got his message, his friends, and his enemies wrong. Economic discontent has prevailed over the discourse of fear and external threats.

Every new geopolitical threat has served to bring the United Kingdom and the European Union a little closer. For a year now, London and Brussels have been in a process of accelerated and silent reconnection. The Russian invasion of Ukraine opened the doors to defense cooperation, and the Trump disruption, now magnified by the horizon of economic and energy crisis generated by the war in Iran, has increased the need for economic and commercial understanding.

Long before the coordinated bombings on Iran by Israel and the United States, the Tehran regime had been warning for weeks that any attack would trigger a war escalation of the utmost consequences. A month later, the confrontation is already being played out on the battlefield of the economy and threatens to cause a new global recession.

Chaos on the stock markets is always a red line for Donald Trump. The war in Iran has been spiraling out of control for days now, with the objectives of Washington and Tel Aviv beginning to diverge on the ground, while the internal political and economic toll in the United States, in a midterm election year, accelerates the decline of the Republicans. Trump has gotten himself into a war he can neither explain nor end. The president, who returned to the White House with fiery rhetoric against inflation and the cost of foreign wars that have burdened the United States, has seen his energy strategy and geopolitical influence falter in a matter of days. But the response to all these fears has been as erratic as his doctrine: from the ultimatum in Tehran to the announcement of a pause in negotiations within hours, while the Iranian regime denies that any open dialogue exists.

Giant images of Volodymyr Zelensky fill billboards during the election campaign in Hungary. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has decided to turn the general elections on April 12 into a referendum on the war in Ukraine and, in doing so, fuel the war psychosis that already guaranteed him a strong majority in 2022. The Fidesz leader has been in power for sixteen uninterrupted years, built on assumptions about the future. Since 2010, Orbán and his party—which has become a benchmark for the transatlantic far right—have managed to construct a vast partisan media ecosystem, at the heart of which is the National Communications Office, under the prime minister's watchful eye. Billions of euros invested in communication campaigns and a coordinated social media strategy are complemented by the creation of grassroots activist movements that amplify the arguments, theories, and accusations dictated by Fidesz.

European strategic disorientation has cloaked itself in the language of force as it flirts with the risk of its own disintegration. "We need to be prepared to project our power," said Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at the EU ambassadors' conference held this Monday in Brussels. Faced with a precarious world, an increasingly vulnerable Union is struggling to adapt to the speed of the deconstruction of the international order. The EU has long felt overwhelmed by its irrelevance and the contempt of its traditional ally, but the Iran war has amplified the erratic "every man for himself" mentality of European leaders, each serving their own interests. Friedrich Merz and Emmanuel Macron have rolled up their sleeves in a bilateral power struggle to lead European defense. Paris has opened discussions with some EU capitals on how to extend the French nuclear umbrella to a large part of the continent. And Cyprus has received troop and weaponry support from some EU partners following the attack it suffered in the early days of the war.

Operation Epic Fury has engulfed Europe. Iran's strategy of maximizing chaos in response to Israeli and US bombings has culminated in Hezbollah's drone attack on a British military base in Cyprus and Iranian missiles striking a French base in the United Arab Emirates. But above all, the war has trapped the European Union in its own contradictions. From the initial cacophony, which laid bare the divisions among the EU's major countries, to the tepid statements from Brussels. From the initial ambiguity of France, the United Kingdom, and Germany—the three countries that participated in the negotiations to curb Iran's nuclear program—to the unconditional alignment subsequently demonstrated by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

The warlightningVladimir Putin's occupation of Ukraine has now dragged on for more than 1,460 days. Four years of fighting have irrevocably changed the European continent and the very nature of war. Nearly two million soldiers killed, wounded, or missing on both sides, and millions of displaced civilians are the direct victims of the largest land war on the European continent since World War II. And yet, Ukraine is entering its fifth year of military occupation, with Russia occupying only 12% more territory than it controlled before February 24, 2022.

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.

The booing of JD Vance at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Milan has become the audible representation of a growing sentiment within the European Union. The arrogance of Trumpism has awakened a imperceptible, wounded European pride that is beginning to surface. The "rupture" that the Canadian Prime Minister Mark CarneyThe debate that began in Davos has also started on this side of the Atlantic. It is still embryonic, more declarative than real. But the EU has already defined the playing field for the confrontation with the United States that it is prepared to fight: the digital space.

Donald Trump's world is, in fact, a world rapidly accelerating its decoupling from the United States. The most direct consequence of the economic, technological, and military coercion that the US president has decided to impose on partners and rivals is a global hyperactivity in the search for alternative alliances and a move away from Trump's unpredictability. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, speaking in Davos, summarized this moment of "rupture" with the old, rules-based, post-World War II system and called for a union of "middle powers" to establish a new world order. Faced with Trump's aggressiveness and competition from China, the rest of the world has embarked on a quest for alternative trade relationships. This is not just about diversification; a veritable global race has been unleashed to secure stable and lasting agreements.

In less than two weeks, federal agents, wearing balaclavas and equipped with paramilitary gear, have unjustifiably murdered two American citizens in broad daylight for peacefully opposing the arbitrary detention of immigrants. The deaths of activist Renee Good and nurse Alex Pretti, labeled "local terrorists" by the Trump administration's propaganda machine, have shocked the state of Minnesota and mobilized protests across the United States.

Donald Trump's voracious appetite could end up devouring the European Union as we know it. Former French Commissioner Thierry Breton, one of those who most fiercely confronted the Silicon Valley tech giants during Ursula von der Leyen's first term, railed this weekend against the idea of a fearful Europe subservient to the United States. Breton shared, on his social media platform X, a photograph of the tariff agreement signed between Trump and the EU last summer in Scotland and quoted one of the many sayings attributed to Winston Churchill: "You were given the choice between war and dishonor. He chose dishonor, and now he shall have war." For the moment, Trump's repertoire for the EU already includes trade war, political warfare, and territorial threats. On Sunday, Trump threatened tariffs of up to 25% on the eight European and NATO-allied countries that sent a small exploratory military contingent to Greenland as a sign of commitment to the mineral-rich Arctic island, which the United States wants to annex. In response, French President Emmanuel Macron, with the support of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, called on the European Union to activate its most powerful trade weapon, the so-called anti-coercion instrument, which can restrict US companies' access to the European single market. But the 27 member states were unable to reach an agreement on the measure on Sunday night due to the reluctance of Italy, Poland, and many Eastern European countries, which fear that Washington might retaliate by withdrawing military support for Ukraine—support that is already largely based on the Union's economic commitment.

Iran is facing its most serious challenge to the ayatollahs' regime since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Protests are not new to the country. For years, there has been a growing and successive discontent that always finds a way to resurface in the streets. From the June 2009 election protests with the so-called "Green Movement," accusing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government of electoral fraud, to the repression of demonstrations against rising food prices in 2017 and fuel prices in 2019. In the latest wave of protests, which lasted six months, human rights organizations recorded up to 500 deaths and more than 20,000 arrests in connection with the "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement, sparked by the death of young Mahsa Amini. Increasingly, the regime's paranoia about threats to national security risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Trump's order is a return to the past. He sheds the cumbersome constraints of international law to unabashedly embrace the colonization of territories and the appropriation of their natural resources. The Monroe Doctrine, in its Trumpian version, is an imperialist reinterpretation of the US right to control its sphere of influence. The triumphalism at Mar-a-Lago during the announcement of Nicolás Maduro's capture and the takeover of Venezuela through a military intervention without authorization from the US Congress exemplifies this new reality.

Trumpism has forced the world to reposition itself. As can be read in thereport The world in 2026: ten issues that will shape the international agenda, from CIDOBThe return of Donald Trump to the White House marked the beginning of a new era in the instrumentalization of economic and technological coercion, the intensification of competition for resources, and the need to seek alternative trade relationships in the United States, which has accelerated a global race to diversify the friends and rebuild bridges with allies of convenience.