The EU has a choice between war and peace and between the US and China (2)

The distinction between the « Hard » (warrior) powers and the « soft » (pacifist) powers has been made for some time. The EU was once proud of being a soft power and was not losing any opportunity so that, more rites or more allusively, to highlight the difference between this type of power, which he assumed as his own identity, of which he was proud and who predicted a great future in the order of the world, and the US or Russia, defined as « hard » powers. The strengths of the « soft » power allowed the EU to design themselves as a great global emerging player, along with the other global emerging soft superpowers, China. When the decadent hard power superpowers would have reached the recoil, at balance and would have managed to stop the decline, they could have entered a world multipolar system, as elements of adjusting the global balance having at its center the Euro-Chinese tandem. The « hard » powers would have defended the global order with the instruments of war; The « soft » ones would have done it with those of peace. This was the model of the order he wanted and at the building of which he was willing to put the Romania’s shoulder, in the 1990s, when he had started, in an atmosphere of national enthusiasm (let’s not forget this), on the path of association at NATO and accession to the EU. Today all this conception is overturned, without leaving the place of a new coherent and realistic vision.

US or China: a false European dilemma

With these details, the main idea can be returned, according to which the only option valid for the EU is peace, respectively that consisting of assuming the identity of « soft power ».

The US withdrawal from Europe is not an act of betrayal, but one of liberation. The EU war with Russia is not a gesture of strategic autonomy, but one of strategic stupidity, associated with the strategic obedience to the US. (In this regard, President Biden said that, in the Ukraine war, the US resumed its leading role in the Euro-Atlantic Alliance.) The insistence of Europeans to remain in the war, while the US negotiates peace, is not an act of strategic emancipation in transatlantic relations, but one that wants to cover the American and the American military.

Occupation, protection or alliance, the presence of the American army or the American military commitment in Europe can not continue as long as Russia is no longer the US strategic rival and is no longer the ideological and military threat to the Euro-Atlantic world that was once the USSR, no matter how long Macron, Meloni, Merz, Tusk, Von Kalas, convince the opposite. In contrast, « American peace » is challenged in a completely different parts of the world, and the natural resources of power are not found in Western Europe (otherwise, the poorest region of the world, whose material and spiritual well -being is the result of the centuries of prey of other continents), but in other places where the competition for their control will be consumed. Why would the US Army remain in Europe, where Europeans have learned that the American occupant to bear, for fear of Russia (Soviet), the bulk of their defense expenses?! In a similar situation, Mihail Gorbachev did not make mistakes when he decided to leave the Americans without enemy and the Eastern Eastern European Satellites to pay the Lord … American.

NATO has created, first of all, to keep Germany, defeated in World War II, putting it unable to cause a new global conflagration, and at the same time to leave Russia (Soviet) at the gates of Europe. For this, America had to stay in Europe and turn into a European actor. The years have passed. Germany has become the first economic power of Europe, which also offered the political influence by rank in the EU, encouraging it to abandon the status of European Germany to return to its old project (elaborated even under the Nazi regime) of German Europe; a kind of reconstruction of the Holy Roman Empire of German Nation. The war in Ukraine also offered Alibi to resume the arming, with the consent of its former rivals. From the perspective of his vital interests, the US would make the biggest mistake if they had to arbitrate this process.

Russia has no objective interests, no material resources to successfully attack NATO (as such or through its members). Neither does the US have to fight Russia for Germany, France, Italy, etc.; All the more so as the war with Russia, which has no potential objective and subjective to approach the total manner, pushes it to the Alliance with China, stimulating Turkey’s dissident, as well as the aspirations for strategic emancipation of the old Asians of America. With a huge public debt, with a huge budget deficit, with a level of dangerous deindustrialization, with chronic internal social problems, without the geography offering its old security guarantees, how long could the US take a war on all the imaginable fronts on the world map, just for the sake of the universal gendarm?

Democrat or oligarch, with presidential or monarchic behavior, coherent or incoherent, reasonable or unreasonable, consistent or hesitant, President Trump feels these realities perfectly and tries to give them a response starting from shaking the ossified system that, ignoring them and, therefore, behaving with the sin. Decader superpower, still capable of negotiating with emerging superpowers a convenient new post-American post-American order, in a failed superpower. It is not clear what will put in place, but it is good that the demolition of what no longer corresponds to the times or seeking to keep the time in place.

As soon as the US will cease to be a European actor, to return to the doctrine Monroe and to claim his supremacy exclusively in the western hemisphere, then entering with the new global powers and rehabilitated for influencing in Asia and Africa, the gates of Europe (political) will remain unlocked. How can this Europe react?

It will have a choice between war and peace; between the instruments of war and the weapons of peace. As Marx said, when history is repeated, what was first tragedy a second time is comedy. In this case, if in the past the wars between the European powers have brought the tragedy of a world conflagration, now such a war would be, from a universal perspective, by the laughter of the world. Von der Leyen, Macron, Starmer, Meloni or Merz can cause war, but they can only be war leaders in their hero

However, Russia will probably have the interest in engaging an EU, tempted to become, in the absence of the US, « hard power », as it urges incessantly, with the nostalgia of Napoleonic Europe, Macronian France, in a race that will drain it from the only powerful power to the global actor: the economic power. Without such an EU power will remain, after the expression of Henry Kissinger, only a history museum. As a military power, the EU, even without the support of the US, does not have to be afraid of any aggression of Russia, but it has no way to play the role of global power only under the leadership of Russia.

This is why, the EU has only the opportunity to choose peace. Currently, this means peace with Russia, negotiated not necessarily with the US, but in parallel with peace negotiations with … USA. As « soft power » par excellence, essence and vocation, the EU has nothing to do in the Ukraine war, which is in reality a war between the collective Euro-Atlantic West, desired and provoked by the first, as it is well seen today. This is why the military support for Ukraine, which, in fact, means, putting the Ukrainian state by mass depopulation, economic disaster and territorial amputation, must cease, European leaders being obliged to admit that, in the current stage of the confrontation, the option is not between victory and capitulation, but between its surrender. The prospects offered to Russia, as « hard power », by the EU, as « soft power », relying on their complementarity, would be precisely the argument for obtaining reasonable peace conditions from the point of view of the future Ukrainian state self -determininated on the national criterion, as a neutral state with firm and efficient international security guarantees.

Otherwise, from a geostrategic point of view, the EU will be either a country of nobody caught between the Anglo-American and Russian-Asian front, or a dry walnut trapped in the Russian-American pliers (in the process of assembly through the Trump-Putin dialogue); If not Europe will turn from American protectorate into Russian protectorate.

On the same line of reasoning, as « soft power with teeth » (that is, having a common defense policy, common arming capacities and consolidated member states from the point of view of military power), but also as a neighbor of Russia, the EU has as its only realistic option the strategic partnership with China. Such a partnership would also encourage China to remain a « soft power », thus making a tandem of the software with global relevance, in balance with the old « hard » powers, the USA and Russia, included in a new World Order based on the principle of ensuring peace through economic-social development, in its turn achievable through the strategy of the projects and the strategy of the projects and the strategy of the strategy of the strategy of the strategy of the strategy. critical resources.

Of course, any transatlantic economic partnership is welcome. As well as a certain strategic coordination between Europe and the US would be required, under the conditions of the strategic autonomy of the parties. This, however, within the limits of the comprehensive partnership with China. A partnership in which Beijing is also objectively interested in ensuring their power balance with both allies (thus strengthening their peaceful cooperation) and opponents (thus guaranteeing their peaceful coexistence). After all, Europe is a peninsula of Asia.

Under the assault of the new American protectionism, brought to the rank of a true world trade war (in which Russia, significantly, enjoys a more favorable treatment than the EU and China), the mutual opening of European and Chinese markets, the mutual lifting of the legal, political and ideological obstacles from the free circulation of capital, the goods, Infrastructural which under the name « road and corridor initiative », aims to update the « silk road », all regulated by long -term validity treaties, would create a true concentration of economic power impossible to ignore by any global or regional actor. The geopolitical vision of this tandem would depend, if not totally, at least to a great extent, the global security model and the configuration of the future world order.

« When China rises, the world will tremble, » said Emperor Napoleon, the forerunner of President Macron. If they will make China shrug with the EU shoulder, and not against the Euro-Atlantic West, and not just shoulder to shoulder with Russia, Europeans will not have to tremble-neither for fear of war. Only in this way will the EU be fulfilled its purpose and only in this way will it be able to defend its values; That is, he will be able to preserve his specific way of living, thinking and producing universal values.

PS in 2009-2011, as vice-president for the European External, Security and Defense Policy, of the S&D group in the European Parliament, we have developed two position documents regarding the EU and Russia and China relations strategy respectively. The documents were discussed and adopted at the level of the parliamentary group mentioned and submitted to the High Representative of the EU / first vice -president of the European Commission for Foreign and Security Policy. The current EU policy, both towards Russia and China, which brought us to the threshold of World War, is in total contradiction with the strategy proposed by me and supported by an important number of my colleagues. The return to that strategy is today not only recommended, but also indispensable.

The EU has a choice between war and peace and between the US and China (1)