The reality show of the humiliation of Zelenski promoted by Trump, in the Oval Hall, concluded the rupture between US and Ukraine and the alignment of the White House with Putin Russia. The event, sprinkled by threats, insults and accusations, follows the US/Russia bilateral negotiations on Ukraine’s future, Trump’s statements by attributing to Europeans responsibility for security guarantees to the invaded country and the UN’s pro-prussive vote. The whole work marks the virtual collapse of NATO.
The Atlantic Alliance still exists on paper, but has lost its soul, expressed in Article 5 of the founding treaty that classifies a military attack against any of its members as aggression to all. The article annulled, in the geopolitical level, the geographical separation between US and Europe for the vastness of the Atlantic. From now on, there is again, in Trump’s words, “a wonderful ocean” dissociating the American superpower of the European nations.
Trump realizes an old “anti-imperialist” left dream that describes NATO as a US hegemony tool. History, however, teaches that NATO was responsible for the geopolitical stabilization of Western Europe in the postwar-or is, by the democratic Renaissance of the nations that escaped the sphere of Soviet influence.
In those countries, political plurality flourished, unions, civil freedoms, individual rights. In them, the social democratic left had the opportunity to govern and expand social protection networks. Under the cloak of security guaranteed by NATO, the European Union was born.
Later, paradoxically, the Atlantic Alliance became the only viable frame for the exercise of national sovereignty in Eastern Europe, the positive proof of this is in the insistence of the released nations of the Soviet yoke in 1989 to join NATA. The negative proof is in the two Russian imperial invasions of Ukraine, violating the memo of Budapest (1994) by which Ukrainians gave their nuclear arsenal to Russia in exchange for the recognition of their borders.
Putin (and Lula too, by the way) accuses NATO of being the cause of his war – still that, in texts and speeches, cry out for the incorporation of the neighbor into the “Great Russia”. In fact, the Atlantic Alliance has worked since the implosion of the USSR as a guarantee of peace in the arch that extends from Estonia to Romania.
After 1990, Europeans were packed by the idyll of eternal peace assured by article 5 and drastically reduced their investments in defense. Today, under the impact of Trump’s abjuration, Europe navigates unknown waters – and it needs to erect an independent security building.
Jean Monnet, the “founding father” of the European Union, designed the outline of a European Defense Community (EDC), which would be an autonomous pillar within NATO. EDC gained shape in the Treaty of Paris (1952), signed by France, RFA (Western Germany), Italy and Benelux but rejected by the French National Assembly. In these days of fury, European leaders run Washington in search of a benevolent nod of Trump. How much will it take to run to Brussels files for inspiration in the treated treaty seven decades ago?
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