After Putin’s return to the myth of ‘big mother Russia’ and China’s ‘soft’ expansionism, Trump has definitively cleared the way formilitary aggression as an instrument of economic-expansionist policy.

Bringing down a few dictatorial regimes is only a side effect that benefits the narrative of the self-proclaimed ‘liberator’ more than the fate of the liberated peoples. Because if you free a people from the yoke of an autocrat and then fail to recognise the legitimate opposition leaders chosen by the people you have ‘liberated’, saying ‘we will rule’, you are not a liberator. If in the self-exaltation press conference the most uttered word is not freedom but oil, you are not a liberator and the fall of the regime becomes the fig leaf on which to build improbable justifications and ephemeral electoral exaltations.

Trump is the tombstone to humanitarian diplomacy

No one ‘liberates’ anyone anymore out of a mere philanthropic spirit, to save lives or to ensure the freedom of peoples. And yes, Maduro is(ra) a ruthless dictator and fell far too late, but no, Trump (not the US) did not liberate the Venezuelan people the way the allies liberated Europe from Nazi-fascism.

Today it is Venezuela, more easily narrated, tomorrow, by now addicted, it will perhaps be Mexico , and then it could be the turn of the heralded Greenland, European territory, and there will be no friendly nations or governments.

The time has come to take note of what is a hard reality to see: we have lived through an illusion, a parenthesis that lasted eighty years, but now everything is inexorably returning to the way it always was before that pause made up of reason, right and freedom, which came about as a result of the worst representation that the human being could give of himself. Today, having forgotten the atrocities of which it was the author, and also accomplice to the natural death of all living witnesses, the human being is resuming its path towards involution, which is no longer just cultural but anthropological.

The return to the foreign policy of strength and power

Here foreign policy, for a time dominated by unarmed diplomacy, international organisations and universally recognised law, is once again being managed on the basis of military power and the spheres of influence it generates.

Today, only an indomitable idealist can think that organisations such as the UN can handle international disputes as happened – not very well, by the way – during the first Gulf War or the Balkan War.

NATO itself is no longer a guarantee of security the moment Trump’s United States falters, the moment the US national interest (or Trump’s personal interest) prevails even over the very survival of individual allied nations.

No, the problem does not lie in ‘not seeing’ what is happening outside the West that we have defined and known as free (“so what about China?” “So what about Iran?”), because they have always continued to do that over there: the problem lies at home, where a paradigm that has lasted almost a century and on which we have built our idea of the world, is suddenly being overturned by those who, until yesterday, were considered its bulwark.

Defend together or succumb together?

European governments all, right and left, are living a psychodrama: they do not know how to manage the phenomenon, how to deal with an ‘ally’ like Trump, how to organise themselves and how to build a defence before the NATO illusion finally collapses.

So, today, the choice falls between being sovereigns or subjects in our own house; between continuing with the design of European integration, the only one that, even with all the necessary adjustments, can guarantee us to continue living in peace and freedom on our continent or, following the more or less explicit wishes of Trump and Putin,collapsing the European design and handing ourselves over, each with their own little state and satellite government, to one or the other.

One thing is certain, however: in order to continue the design of European integration today, military deterrence as the strongest guarantee of freedom cannot in any way be disregarded, much to the chagrin of those who want to put flowers in our cannons while others fill theirs with bombs and fire at us.

Read also:

A European contingent in Greenland: the only concrete answer to Trump’s appetites; P.Falasca- L’Europeista

Refrain optimists. Trump’s military operation in Venezuela is not a democratic project; C.Palma- L’Europeista