After a year of humiliations, Europe is discovering that appeasing Donald Trump buys neither respect nor security. The choice is now simple but dizzying: submit, or reinvent itself as a fully fledged geopolitical actor.

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Europe faces an adversary that is plainly seeking to dominate a chosen sphere of influence, scorns the rule of law and international institutions, resorts to raw violence to impose its agenda, and pursues oligarchic and nationalist interests everywhere.

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Oh yes, and then there is Russia too… Under Donald Trump, the United States no longer seems to differ from it except that the Russian ogre’s appetite collides, geographically, with European sovereignty. America’s drive for domination over the Western Hemisphere, by contrast, does not collide with Europe — except in Greenland. That is where the Putin slumbering inside Trump reveals himself… but in an even more aggressive and openly threatening way, and, what is more, against a group of countries with which the United States still shares the most important mutual security pact in history.

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The end of the transatlantic illusion

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For a Europe that, throughout the past year, chose pathetic humiliation in order to keep President Trump on the European side on the Ukraine file, the reality now confronting it is brutal: the United States has become not only unreliable, but now also hostile.

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The game of catching up with Washington diplomatically and then trying to bring it back to reason, as its positions harden, has reached its limits. In this regard, yielding to the brutal demands concerning Greenland, including in the deal now taking shape, could be the price to pay to secure lasting American support for Ukraine.

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At the same time, the American intervention in Venezuela and the reckless dismantling of the international rules-based order will only reinforce the Kremlin’s conviction that Russian domination over Ukraine is essential to its own national security. For Europe, Venezuela and Greenland represent a serious deterioration of the triangular relationship supposed to make it possible to settle the Ukrainian conflict.

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Blue pill or red pill

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Europe actually finds itself collectively facing a binary choice. It can either swallow the blue pill, ignore reality and carry on down the path of humiliation, becoming a playground for the great powers while managing its own geopolitical decline. Or it can choose to take the red pill, face reality and take back control of its destiny.

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As in the science-fiction classic The Matrix, choosing truth over illusion opens a rabbit hole, because geopolitical Europe must simultaneously meet three strategic challenges: it can no longer count on America, it does not want to depend on China either, and it is, in fact, at war with Russia.

Good news, however: these challenges can be tackled jointly, because each of them calls for a similar set of measures: geographic security combined with economic and technological autonomy, thereby creating a European sphere of influence.

 

Reclaiming European sovereignty

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The recipes have already been described in these columns. A European circle that strengthens the European Union from within and from without through regional security alliances; a consolidated European internal market serving industrial and technological geopolitical autonomy; and selective strategic protectionism, aimed at combating unfair trade practices while serving European sovereignty.

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The plans have already been prepared and the instruments designed under the first von der Leyen Commission. The change of mindset now consists in understanding that these tools must be mobilised not only against Russia but also against China — and even against the United States — quickly and on a large scale.

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At bottom, the European choice boils down to one question: is a critical mass of European countries ready to share its sovereignty in order to better win it back? A core of EU Member States, acting under a European umbrella and associated with third countries such as the United Kingdom and Ukraine, can solve the equation of European integration by deepening the Union, making it more flexible and completing it without going through a formal enlargement. The leaders who prove capable of turning Europe’s difficult situation into a decisive step forward for our continent will thus answer populism and fear with their political sense and courage.