It is worrying to remember the moving ceremony on the beaches of Normandy which marked the 80th anniversary of the D-Day 11 months ago, a celebration of the Alliance to do everything between the United States and Europe, and their shared resolution to respond to “the age test” and to defend Ukrain.
This sentence from former president Joseph R. Biden Jr., shoulder in the shoulder with President Emmanuel Macron of France, was part of a speech in which he proclaimed NATO “more united than ever” and judged that “we will not end, because if we do, Ukraine will be captivated and that will not end.”
I stood in the Normandy sun, reflecting on the young men of Kansas City and Saint-Paul and elsewhere who climbed on the ground on June 6, 1944, in a hail of Nazi shots of the Norman cliffs and listening to words which attracted a direct line between their singular courage in the defense of freedom and the struggle to defeat another “tyrant bent on domination”. “”
This “tyrant”, for Mr. Biden, was President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, since absolved the responsibility of the war he launched in Ukraine by President Trump, the first leader of America who was a sustainable coddler of autocrats, the denial of the United States “and the opomy of a European Union formed, in his words, to” screw the United States “.
I never imagined, less than a year ago, that so dear to so many people could be so fast; Nor that the 80th anniversary of Thursday by Ve Day, or victory in Europe, would come with so many Europeans who no longer know if we had to consider the America of Mr. Trump as an ally or an adversary.
“It’s night and day,” said Rima Abdul-Malak, former Minister of French Culture, in an interview. “Trump has occupied all the space in our heads and the world is alarming different.”
Be that as it may under an avalanche of decrees, the tumultuous beginning of the second presidency of Mr. Trump saw a great detangling of a transatlantic link which brought the peace and prosperity of an unusual scale and duration, according to historical standards. He took a post-war demolition ball; The new exemption will be wreaking havoc is not clear.
Of course, steep revolutions or counter-reolutions are a recurring theme in history. Only four years before the heroic allied landings in Normandy, considering the debacle of the defeat almost overnight in France against Wehrmacht of Hitler in June 1940, Paul Valéry, poet and French author, wrote:
“We are on a terrifying and irresistible slope. Nothing we could fear is impossible; We can fear and imagine almost anything. ”
The same could probably be said today, even in a globalized world. Certitudes have dissolved, the spectra have increased. Fear has spread, in Europe as in the United States. Europeans acquire burners, without content, for visits to the United States, as if they were heading to Iran.
The Trump targeting by Mr. Trump of the best universities, the speech protected by the first amendment, international students, immigrants, judicial independence and the truth itself in search of an apparently frantic executive power led to speaking of “a police state taking shape”, in the words of Bruno Fuchs, the president of the Foreign Affairs of the French National Assembly, after a recent visit to Washington.
“It will be excellent television,” Trump said after his public humiliation of Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, at the White House on February 28. If her America has to install autocracy, it will be made for television. The world, or a large part, was duly riveted at the sight of Mr. Trump accusing Mr. Zelensky of ingratitude and of risking the world war by fighting an attacker, at a time when he did not “have the cards”.
This presidential performance seemed to mark a point of rupture for Europe, where many leaders saw it as moral abdication.
A few days later, on March 5, Macron said: “Peace can no longer be guaranteed on our continent.”
Trump, as is his level habit, has since tried to repair the fences with Mr. Zelensky while declaring his aversion to him. An agreement of minerals, whose details remain troubled, has been signed between the United States and Ukraine. He apparently entangled America in Ukraine for a certain time, even if Mr. Trump’s impatient pursuit of a peace agreement blocked.
Europe, for its part, does not wait for Mr. Trump’s next swerve. He saw enough to become determined to eliminate what vice-president JD Vance called his “vassal” status, one in a cascade of insults intended for NATO allies. One of these allies, said Mr. Trump, is expected to give in Greenland to him, and another should accommodate absorption in the United States.
Taking office as a new German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz headed directly to Paris on Wednesday to meet Mr. Macron. The two leaders are united to seek what Mr. Merz called “independence” and what Mr. Macron calls “the strategic autonomy” of Washington, a dramatic change. Writing in the French daily newspaper Le Figaro, they declared that they “would never accept imposed peace and will continue to support Ukraine against Russian aggression”.
One idea discussed, reported the Daily Le Monde, is a return to the beaches of D -Day 80 years after the surrender of the third Reich for a joint photograph echoing that of François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl, the former French and German leaders, holding hands on the battlefield of the Verdun World War.
This image of 1984, as well as the photography of Chancellor Willy Brandt of Germany on his knees in 1970 before the ghetto of Warsaw ghetto, is one of the most powerful symbols of a unifying renaissance of Europe.
The Franco-German alliance has always been the engine of the European Union. If he embarks on Overdrive, the rearmament of Europe, as a military power but also as a guardian of the values for which America fought during the Second World War, seems plausible in the medium term.
“Audacity, daring still, always daring!” said Georges Jacques Danton, a main figure in the French Revolution. If nothing else, Mr. Trump showed it. People are fascinated, reduced to amnesiac stupor, by the torrent of his explosions.
“He is Pavlov and we are the dogs,” said David Axelrod recently, the chief strategist of the victorious presidential campaigns of Barack Obama.
Europe will have to respond with another type of audacity if it wants to develop a strategic power to correspond to its long -standing status as an economic giant. Germany, obliged by the story of demilitarizing, but aware that this posture has followed its course, almost certainly holds the key to such a transformation. It faces the immense challenge to internalize the consequences of a new world of gross power where the rules and the law seem intended, at least for the moment, to count less.
But Europe is barely united, whatever the determination in Paris and Berlin. The anti-immigrant nationalist, anti-immigrant, anti-climate and anti-transgender wave that swept through Mr. Trump last year is also powerful through a continent where he allowed Viktor Orban in Hungary and Giorgia Meloni in Italy, among others.
The rising parts of the extreme right, including the alternative for Germany, or AFD, and the national rally in France, reflect the anger of Europeans who feel invisible, isolated, poorer and ignored by the urban elites, just like their counterparts in America.
There is however a fundamental difference. Much of Europe knows how fragile freedom is, how dictatorship is possible and the murder of mass with it, with a collective memory of the 20th century horrors.
It was precisely a question of overcoming this collapse in brutality, racism and genocide that the United States, far from Europe, but aware that its fate involved all humanity, sent its young men to fight on the ground in France in 1944. In the American cemetery in Normandy, the 9,389 tombs are a previous measure of their devotion.
In the days, weeks and years after Paul Valéry’s reflection in 1940, France indeed gave in to the unthinkable. I am now writing in Vichy, the small town of the center of France, from which the authoritarian regime of Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain judged a rump of France, collaborated with his Nazi suzerains and expelled more than 70,000 Jews on their death in the Hitler camps.
This was the French shame of Vichy, and the shredding that he represented values and ideals of the Republic, that it took decades to deal with the truth in its entirety. The name of this pleasant city of Spa, far from the beaches of Normandy, will be forever associated with ignominy.
At the end of “Vichy France”, his masterful book which brought France to a deeper understanding of its darkest hour, Robert Paxton, the American historian, writes: “The acts of the occupier and occupied as there are cruel moments in which will be saved.
These words seem worthy of a particular reflection today, eight decades after the return of peace, with decisive American aid, to a broken European continent.
