It is disturbing to remember the moving ceremony on the Normandy beaches that marked the 80th anniversary of the D 11 months ago, a celebration of the Ironclad alliance between the United States and Europe, and its participation in Ukraine. And defend.
That phrase of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., standing with President Emmanuel Macron de France, was part of an address in which the proclaimed NAT Willer Willer Willer Willer Willer Willer Willer Willer Willer Willer Willer Willer Willer Willer Willer Willer Willer Willer Willer Willer Willer Willer Willer Willer Willer Willer Willer Willer Will. there. “
I stopped in the sun’s light from Normandy, Musa on the youth of Kansas City and St. Paul and in other places that rose to the ground on June 6, 1944, in a large number of Nazi shots of the Nazi shots of Normandy Bluffs, and list Line line line line line line line line and between the direct line and between the direct line and between the direct line. Fight to defeat another “bent tyrant in domination.”
That “Tyrant,” For Mr. Biden, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, since absolute of responsibility for the War He started in ukraine by President Trump, The America-Firs Leader Who has bone a perennial Coddler of Autocrats, denigrator of nate HONNT, AND HONNT OR HONNT, AND HONNT, AND HONNT, HONNT ,, and HONNT, AND HONNT ,, AND HONNT, AND HONNT, AND HONNT, AND HONNT, AND HONNT, AND HONNT, AND HONNT, AND HONNT, AND HONNT, AND HONNT, AND HONNT, AND HONNTE, AND HONNTE. States. “
I never imagined, less than a year ago, that so dear for so many could unravel so fast; Not that the 80th anniversary on Thursday of VE Day, or the victory in Europe, would come with so many Europeans who no longer sure whether to consider Mr. Trump’s America as an ally or 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 looks alarmingly different.”
Anything else that has been under an avalanche of executive orders, the tumultuous beginning to the second presidency of Trump has seen a great unraveling of a transatlantic bond that brought peace and prosperity of scale and unusual duration, according to historical standards. He has tasks of a demolition ball in the post -war order; What a new dispensation will arise from the ravages is not clear.
Or by the course, abrupt revolutions or counterprints are a recurring theme of history. Only four years before the heroic landings allied in Normandy, contemplating the debacle of the almost nocturnal defeat of France against Wehrmacht of Hitler in June 1940, Paul Valéry wrote, a French poet and author,
“We are on a terrifying and irresistible slope. Nothing we can fear is impossible; we can fear and imagine almost anything.”
The same could be said today, only in a globalized world. The certainties have dissolved, the spectra increased. Fear has spread, in Europe as in the United States. Europe acquires burning phones, devoid of content, for visits to the United States, as if they were going to Iran.
The orientation of Mr. Trump of the main universities, the discourse protected by the first amendment, international students, immigrants, judicial independence and truth in search of the seemingly unbridled search or executive bra Washington “.
“This is going to be a great television,” Trump said after his public humiliation of Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, in the White House on February 28. If your America installs autocracy, it will be made for television. The world, or much of that, was properly Riveto when he saw Trump accusing Mr. Zensky or Ingratitude and the increase in World War Lll fighting an aggressor, at a time when he did not “have the letters.”
This presidential performance seemed to mark a breakdown for Europe, where many leaders saw it as a moral abdication.
Days later, on March 5, Mr. Macron declared: “Peace can no longer be guaranteed in our continent.”
Mr. Trump, as is his habit of janitor, since then has tried to repair the fences with Mr. Zensky while declare his disgust for him. A mineral agreement, whose details remain murky, has been signed between the United States and Ukraine. Apparently, America in Ukraine for some time, even if Trump’s impatient search or a peace agreement has stagnated.
Europe, meanwhile, is not waiting for the next deviation from Mr. Trump. He has seen enough to determine what Vice President JD Vance called his “vassal” state, one in a waterfall of insults aimed at NATO allies. One of those allies, says Trump, should give him Greenland, and another should welcome absorption to the United States.
Taking office as the new Chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz went directly to Paris on Wednesday to meet with Mr. Macron. The two leaders are united in the search for what Mr. Merz has called “independence” and what Mr. Macron calls “strategic autonomy” of Washington, a dramatic change. Writing in the French newspaper Le Figaro said that “they will never accept an imposed peace and will continue to support Ukraine against Russian aggression.”
An idea that is discussed, the Daily Le Monde reported, is a return to the beaches of the day D 80 years after the surrender of the third Reich for a joint photograph echoing that of François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl, the old Germet I Worlding and Germt.
That image of 1984, together with the photograph of Chancellor Willy Brandt of Germany on 1970 before the Warsaw Ghetto monument, is one of the most powerful symbols of a unifying Europe Renaissance.
The Franco-German Alliance has always been the engine of the European Union. If it begins in the Overdive, the rearme of Europe, as a military power but also as a guardian of the values for whom the United States fought in World War II, seems plausible in the medium term.
“Audacy, Audacy Again, always Audacy!” Georges Jacques Danton said, a main figure of the French Revolution. At least, Mr. Trump has demonstrated that. People are hypnotized, reduced to amnesic stupor, by the torrent or its outbursts.
“He is Pavlov and we are the dogs,” David Axelrod recently told me, the main strategist of the victorious presidential campaigns of Barack Obama.
Europe will have to respond with a different child of boldness if it is a question of strategic to coincide with its long time as an economic giant. Germany, forced by history to demilitarize, but aware that this position has followed its course, it is almost certain that it has the key to such transformation. It faces the immense challenge of internalizing the consequences of a new world of raw power where rules and law seem destined, at least for the moment, counting less.
But Europe is barely united, whatever the resolution in Paris and Berlin. The nationalist, anti-immigrant, anti-climatic, anti-transgender wave that led Mr. Trump in charge last year is also powerful in a continent where he has empowered Viktor Orban in Hungary and Giorgia Meloni in Italy, among others.
The parties on the rise of the extreme right, including the alternative for Germany, or AFD, and the national demonstration in France, reflect the anger of Europeans who feel invisible, isolated, poorer and ignored by urban elites, as well as their counterparts.
However, there is a fundamental difference. Much of Europe knows how fragile freedom is, how is the dictation and mass murder possible together with it, with a collective memory of the horrors of the twentieth century.
It was precisely to overcome this collapse in brutity, racism and genocide that the United States, far from Europe, but aware that its destiny involved all humanity, sent its young people to fight against their cemety in 1944. 944. Tombs are an sobering measure of their devotion.
In the days, weeks and years after Paul Valéry’s reflection in 1940, France did it to the unthinkable. I now write from Vichy, the small town in the center of France, of which the authoritarian regime of Marshal Henri-philippe Pétain ruled a France of Rump, collaborated with its Nazis lords by gentlemen and deported more than 70,000 Jews to the daths of their daths to their daths to their Daths.
Such was the French shame in Vichy, and the crushing that represents the values and ideals of the Republic, which touched decades to face the truth in its entirety. The name of this pleasant city of Spa, far from the beaches of Normandy, will be associated forever with ignominy.
At the end of “Vichy France”, his master book that led France to a deeper understanding of his darkest hour, Robert Paxton, the American historian, writes: “The facts of occupants and occupied equally suggest that the most valuable dependent of the state.
Those words seem worthy of undivilar reflection today, eight decades after peace returned, with decisive American help, to a broken European continent.
