The Trump Agenda, the new bonding agent of the European Union

In short, it took Donald Trump to shake from the foundations a numb European Union, committed at best to the U-turn of its over-ambitious environmental policies and a crackdown on its migration policies. A U-turn done to address two of the major concerns expressed by the electorate, with growing support for “sovereignist” parties and movements across Europe in the last European Parliament elections.

After having acquired, lauded, but essentially ignored Draghi and Letta reports—perhaps just changing a few acronyms and embellishing facades—before the Trump cyclone we clashed more over the nomination of Teresa Ribera and Raffaele Fitto as vice presidents of the European Commission respectively than over our common future.

Just think of the first policy document adopted by the new Commission after taking office and the pneumonia that struck Ursula von der Leyen in January: the Competitiveness Compact that probably no one remembers anymore.

Indeed, in the meantime, everything has changed, but not in the sense indicated by Tancredi Falconeri in The Leopard. Rather, by Alberto Sordi in Everybody Go Home! When faced with the first German strikes against Italian troops on September 8, the young lieutenant calls the colonel, saying “The Germans have allied themselves with the Americans.”

With his moves on multiple tables, with his “imperial” statements, with his winking at the Kremlin’s motives, the new U.S. president is imparting an unprecedented phasing out of the United States from its geostrategic, as well as political, economic, and trade ties with the European Union first and foremost, but generally with Europe as a whole.

His handling of the Ukrainian crisis is a revealing example of this: Trump wasn’t needed to cede land conquered by an invading state and neutralise Ukraine by making it a country of limited sovereignty in homage to the law of the strongest and not to the most basic principles of international law. To make it on our own, it would have been enough to abdicate the founding values of our democracies, first recognised in the Atlantic Charter and then in the United Nations, which are the very basis of European construction. But Europe—and the United States—have chosen since March 2022 another path, pursuing it with determination even if, in the short term, more uncertain, complex, and dense with economic and social consequences.

A path fundamentally reiterated in the latest resolution adopted this week by the European Parliament, albeit with growing distinctiveness, notably on the Italian side, on the prospects of an involvement on the ground of European peacekeeping troops. A path at the centre of a diplomatic activism: Macron, Starmer, Donald Tusk, and German Chancellor in pectore Friedrich Merz, seek to oppose a “European way” to the one that, over our heads, is developing on the Washington-Moscow axis—with the complicity of Saudi Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, well pleased with his promotion to honest broker. Volodymyr Zelensky, despite himself, is involved as well,  being aware that without U.S. intelligence and military help, Ukrainian resistance can do little.

In the division of tasks between Europe and the United States, this does not mean that so far European countries have been on the sidelines, as some have tried to imply: it is simply that the US military superiority is not only unquestioned, but was also the prerequisite, now failing, for support for the Ukrainian resistance.

The willingness to negotiate with Russia without European participation—as in the good old days of Yalta, where, however, the third wheel made its voice heard as much as it could—and the threat to abandon the Atlantic Alliance to its fate were two alarm bells received loud and clear by European leaders—including the British, forced to roll up their sleeves and grappling with choices unthinkable just a few months ago.

In this respect, next week’s European Council represents a crucial step in putting down on paper the precise contours of the strategy that has emerged in recent weeks as the European response, on this front, to the Trump Administration’s change of pace, starting with proposals that translate into operational decisions the elements of consensus that have already emerged.

A responsibility, which will not be preceded by national parliamentary debates for nothing, that falls to each and every one of the European leaders.