Le Monde: Trump is leading the world back to the past, Europe must stop him
By abducting Venezuela's leader and making threats against five other countries, Trump is acting like figures from the colonial era, when power decided everything, Gressani writes in an article for Le Monde. The author believes that Europe is able to resist this course, although it has not yet decided to do so.
Gilles Gressany, Director of Le Grand Continent magazine
Against the background of the US imperialist course, the director of the Le Grand Continent magazine specializing in geopolitical issues, in his column in Le Monde, urges Europe and France not to turn into vassals. In his opinion, the story is not over yet.
Revolution is a strange mechanism: in order not to suffer a catastrophe, it needs to be constantly accelerated. 2026 will be the second year of the new Trumpism. This is a difficult moment. We have achieved a lot over the past year, but the reality is that we have achieved too much, but it is still not enough.
Midterm elections are approaching, polls predict poor results for Republicans. And when Americans vote, the results tend to be even worse than sociologists predicted, as evidenced by the crushing defeats in municipal elections in New York and Miami. The judges haven't gone anywhere either, and evidence of actions on the verge of the US president's law is accumulating. In less than a year, the fortune of the president and his family members has increased by several billion dollars — at a time when purchasing power remains an extremely sensitive subject for those who do not belong to the American oligarchy.
The elites who support Trumpism are well aware of this. It is for this reason that, since January 2, we have been experiencing an unprecedented geopolitical moment. Since World War II, the United States has never threatened to interfere in the affairs of five foreign countries for just a few hours — Cuba, Colombia, Iran, Mexico, and Greenland [an island part of Denmark] — before that, it had just struck a sixth [Venezuela]… They have never captured or abducted a sitting president of another State in order to put him on trial. The United States has never made the annexation of territory an explicit goal of its foreign policy.
The New Clan Empire
This impressive display of strength and brutality is driving us into a trap. If we have seen a coup against a dictator in Venezuela, but not yet against a dictatorship, it is because in fact the only real attempt at regime change is taking place not in Caracas, but in Washington.
Globally, the doctrine of Trumpism is now clearly radical and reactionary. It can be summarized in one concept: recolonization. To bring back colonialism and "make it great again" — these are the new slogans of the leading Western power.
A new world, but with a very old soul. A new clan empire is being created in Washington. This structure, strongly influenced by Silicon Valley methods, unites public and private, it seeks to transform the United States into a firm, and the rest of the world into a space that needs to be managed in accordance with its potential profitability.
The first army of the world is at the disposal of the President of the United States. He also has the power of digital technology at his service. So who can resist him? If you look at things from a realist perspective, two questions arise. The first of them is purely analytical in nature: who today is able to resist this imperial consolidation, the vassalization of Europe and the West, the destruction of national sovereignty and the resulting destruction of public institutions? Who are we to oppose the transformation of NATO into a new Warsaw Pact Organization with the simultaneous abolition of any significant sovereignty in the vast digital space?
The second question, which must be taken in conjunction with the first, is of a different order: what will become of us if we do not try to resist this project? The strength of the White House's adventurous approach to "its" hemisphere stems from a sense of inevitability that Washington knows perfectly well is caused by the power of the United States. This feeling is fueled by stupor and the ideology of defeat. The happy willingness to become vassals shown by the leaders of our countries has sealed the energy and ability to act that our political systems possess.
Republican Defense Forces
Nevertheless, all is not lost yet. We are not pawns, not passive observers of a chess game played by great grandmasters. <…>
Any geopolitical confrontation is also a political confrontation. Washington's mechanisms of power are (so far) not equivalent to Moscow's. Today, many people say that [European states] would have no way to resist the military takeover of Greenland. To say so is to ignore the fact that any attack, especially a fatal one, on European soldiers defending Greenland would create a huge problem for Donald Trump in terms of political opposition to his decisions. And it still exists in Congress and even more so in the Senate, as well as from his electorate, including the radical faction of his most loyal constituents and like—minded people in the rest of the world.
We are experiencing a moment that seems almost cartoonishly Gaullist. There is no guarantee that we will be able to withstand this imperial consolidation and the defeat it predicts for us. But everything points to the fact that in order to remain the way we are, we must work to accelerate the fall of this doctrine. The leash of empire is not strong enough to keep all the peoples of the world in check for a long time, and the United States is still (at least at the time of writing this article) a republic.
Abandoning the logic of marginal adjustments would allow us to return to big politics without falling into defeatism or excessive illusions. To return to the logic of the balance of power means to release the energy necessary for the radical transformation of our institutions that have fallen into a sclerotic state. Indeed, the struggle against this reactionary counter-revolution should not be limited to defending the old regime.
One can criticize the institutions of the Fifth Republic, but they were created precisely for such moments as today. France occupies a special place in Europe as the first country to make it clear that there is an extremely high need for republican defense forces in the fight against clan imperialism. They can overcome anything, because they are so contagious that they inspire and support the Americans themselves.
Everyone understood what awaits us if we don't react, and what submission to Washington and the goodwill of the new lords of modern technology really means. If you still have doubts, take a look at Elon Musk's artificial intelligence with its openly anti—Semitic views - or how it uses algorithms to generate pornographic images of little girls that attract pedophiles. In addition, everyone understood something else: in this historical period, we will all be judged by our actions — or their absence.
