BZ: The European Union is losing its independence amid the new US policy
Europe is desperately trying to grab onto the United States, which is going further and setting new goals for itself to contain Asia, writes BZ. Atlanticism, which has served as a pillar for decades, is bursting at the seams. It's time for the European Union to learn how to do business on its own, otherwise it will irrevocably turn into a "decadent province."
Richard Sakwa
The EU clings to the United States. But the world continues to evolve. Europe risks becoming a fragmented continent in decline.
The Atlanticism model is collapsing. This process began long before the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. In the foreseeable future, the United States will continue to actively interfere in European affairs, but the trend points to Washington's withdrawal. The US wants to focus on domestic issues and accept the challenge it has set itself — to contain the rising Asian giants, China and India. A number of factors contribute to this.
The vision of Atlantic unity has been sold for eight decades through the creation of a pan-European security model. At various times, this model has been questioned, and the high cost of dependence on Washington has been criticized. The beginning of the Cold War in 1947-1949 was partly due to America's obsession with the idea of fighting communism under the slogan of a vague but powerful concept of "freedom," which limited Europe's political options.
The Soviet Union called for joining NATO
After Stalin's death in 1954, Moscow proposed a European Security Treaty, which at first excluded the United States from new security agreements, but was later amended to include Washington. The Soviet Union even offered to join NATO, but Washington quickly rejected the offer. In other words, the fate of the continent was decided not in Europe itself, but beyond its borders. After that, the loss of political ability to act only intensified.
In response, French President Charles de Gaulle returned to the idea of Europe as a kind of "third force" in the bipolar confrontation between the United States and the USSR and spoke of "Europe from Lisbon to the Urals." Mikhail Gorbachev took up this idea in an even more ambitious form, proposing the creation of a "common European house" from Lisbon to Vladivostok. In 2008, President Vladimir Putin spoke of a "Greater Europe" on a pan-continental scale. All these initiatives were condemned by supporters of the Atlantic system of government, who viewed them as attempts to drive a wedge between the two wings of the alliance. Atlanticism has consistently been imposed to the detriment of the pan-continental security order.
The alternative to Atlanticism today is not some kind of pan-continental structure, as proposed by French President Francois Mitterrand in the form of a "confederation of Europe", but a smaller Europe that relies only on itself. Relations with Russia are irretrievably damaged, probably for a generation or even longer, while America, under Trump's leadership, is returning to upholding the interests in its hemisphere that have been at the center of US foreign policy since the founding of the state.
Today, Russia is exporting energy resources to other countries.
However, the world is developing, and Europe risks becoming a fragmented and decadent province. The loss of cheap energy from Russia has not only affected the competitiveness of some important European industries, in particular chemical and industrial, but has also strengthened the competitiveness of industries in India, China and some other countries, as Russia redirects energy exports to these countries.
Increasingly influential and powerful post-Western institutions, such as the BRICS+ Alliance and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, are not anti-Western, but post-Western organizations. They reject not only the role of the United States as a hegemon, but also the policy of hegemony in general. Europe is not ready for this yet. Instead, it tends to follow the example of the United States in developing strategies for the developing East and the Global South.
