Edouard Philippe is a French politician who served as Prime Minister of France from 2017 to 2020 under President Emmanuel Macron. He is currently the mayor of Le Havre and the president of Horizons, the political party he founded in 2021.
In November 1940, Charles A. Lindbergh, who had flown from New York to Paris on a thirty-three-and-a-half-hour direct flight, won the presidential election against Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The sky stuntman had become President of the United States of America. Throughout his campaign, Lindbergh had chanted a few simple ideas, summarized in his motto: “America First”. His categorical refusal to restore peace in Europe had earned him strong electoral support. As soon as he got into office in January 1941, President Lindbergh signed a bilateral non-aggression pact with Hitler. An institutional purge of those deemed “the Others” triggered a wave of discrimination and pogroms, spanning from New Jersey to Nevada. This is, in outline, the counterfactual history of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. It is well known that Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the November 1940 presidential election, but had Lindbergh been elected, American democracy and European history would undoubtedly have taken a different, far more tragic course.
President Trump is not Charles A. Lindbergh, and Europe today is nothing like it was in the 1940s. Yet when we read The Plot Against America, it is hard not to be struck by the similarities with history as we are currently experiencing it.
Donald Trump’s return to power is far from insignificant for the transatlantic relationship. For his second term as President, he has stopped calling for “America First”. It is now “America only”. Helped by a handful of Big Tech libertarian oligarchs, he reactivates the myth of the new border, which is no longer located in the West or on the Moon but on Mars and in the minds of some citizens who are easily identifiable and manipulable by keeping track of their digital footprint. Some even mention an “algorithmic Lebensraum” which would target all alleged internal foes, from environmentalists and feminists to woke and degrowth activists.
President Trump has just initiated a new imperial era that muddies the waters and accelerates the disintegration of the international order – the very order built largely by the United States between 1945 and 1989. To some extent, President Trump’s statements reflect a revived isolationist stance. He has explicitly stated that he will no longer prioritize Europe’s security, urging us to invest 5% (rather than 2%) of our GDP for our own defense. He challenges the rules of world trade and multilateralism by setting unprecedented tariffs and withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and the WHO. At the same time, he proudly celebrates an uninhibited neo-imperialism from Panama to Greenland. Trumpian diplomacy could be captured by a few simple principles: what is mine is mine, what is yours is negotiable; what is my interest is legitimate, what is your interest is a problem; if you want to be a good ally, start by being a good client. In the discussions between Trump and Putin on Ukraine, Europe has not been invited to the negotiating table, notwithstanding that the European Union has spent significantly more than the United States to support Kyiv.
Thus comes the question: at the outset of the year 2025, are we facing a new Munich? 1
The security conference, in which the Vice-President of the United States has adopted some damning stances woven with inaccuracies, has placed us against the wall. Will we choose the path of a blissful vassalization, docilely consenting to the American and Chinese superpowers? Do we want to continue feigning indifference to the various interferences that undermine our elections, whether in Romania or Germany? J.D. Vance is not entirely wrong when he suggests that if our democracies can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising, they are not in good shape. What is at stake now is not only the future of the transatlantic relationship, but the survival of our liberal democracies. In Europe, for example, our conception of freedom of expression and our determination to combat all forms of hate speech and manipulation no longer coincide with those expressed by the U.S. presidency.
Since January 20, however, I have been stunned by the silence of a Europe that seems paralyzed by Trump’s election, despite its predictability. This stunned silence speaks volumes about the three comforts that have offered us, for years, a form of illusory protection.
The first of these European comforts has been to delegate our security to the United States, or more precisely to purchase our security from them. With respect to defense expenses, the United States spends three to four times more than the European Union and buys almost exclusively from American firms. Meanwhile, the European Union buys 80% of its material and equipment outside Europe, two-thirds of which come from the United States. I am particularly dismayed by the Franco-German divergence which is glaring on this point. Our common innovation projects, such as the Franco-German future tank or the future combat aircraft, are dragging on due to industrial rivalries between our countries. Germany has chosen to prioritize the implementation of the “Sky Shield” missile defense project which relies mainly on American and Israeli technologies, while France would have preferred a more European approach to test Exoguard, a system developed by the French company Astrium. I am convinced that the European Union should stop separating its commercial policy from its foreign and security policy. Using European taxpayers’ money to finance non-European military equipment is historically nonsensical. In this regard, France, which since General de Gaulle has had an autonomous nuclear deterrent force and has engaged its armies in multiple peacekeeping operations on various theaters of operation, is more alert than its European partners. But it is at best an illusion to think that it could guarantee European security alone.
The second European comfort is to favor the language of legal rules and norms instead of adopting another language – that of strength and power. The foundations of our European decline dwell in an unworldly belief that norm could replace action and in a naïve hope that law could make up for our lack of collective will. Although since the Roman Empire, Europe has championed law, which is something to be proud of, law cannot remain an alibi for slowness, weakness or paralysis. Europeans need to acknowledge it: our passion for norms undermines and incapacitates us when faced with situations that call for action. If the European Union wants to stand up to the American and Chinese superpowers, speaking to them as equals, it should engage with power dynamics without any apprehension or preventive concessions, by ceasing to divide where it should stand united.
The last European comfort, which seems, to me, unsustainable, is linked to our habit of favoring consumption over production. For forty years, European people have preferred consuming at lower costs rather than fighting to keep their factories up and running. They now pay the heavy price both economically and politically. Economically, the dismantling of our European industries creates some favorable scale effects for China and the United States. Politically, the European middle class is increasingly turning to extremist or populist parties, thus expressing their anger against their economic and cultural downgrading. It therefore seems urgent for Europeans to rethink their competition policy so as to promote the rise of European champions. European citizens don’t only have an interest in consuming at the lowest prices at the risk of losing jobs and falling behind in the most innovative sectors. Their vital interest also lies in the fight for the creation of large global companies, especially in sectors that require long-term investment, such as AI, telecommunications, defense technologies, and so on. The Draghi report is quite enlightening in this respect.
Trump’s presidency has finally, but not without pain, forced us to abandon these three comforts. Nonetheless, the United States must remain, as much as possible, our allies, as we should not equate them with China. When I was Prime Minister, I met President Xi twice. I still remember his words to this day: “For decades, the celestial vault was carried on the shoulders of two giants: the United States and Russia. Then it was carried on the shoulders of Americans only, but they now seem to be in trouble bearing it on their own. Do not worry: we will soon be the ones to carry it.”
History has taught us that peace and prosperity on the European continent were only grounded on a resistance to forces that threaten it from within and without. Today, the European Union is facing existential threats. It is up to us to confront them with all the strength that we have always been able to unleash in the great moments of our history. As the Mayor of Le Havre, a major industrial and port city located on the Normandy coast, I do not forget the American soldiers who perished on our beaches to help liberate Europe in June 1944. Le Havre is the city from which the Verrazano brothers’ ships set sail, discovering New York in 1524. It was from Le Havre that General Lafayette departed to fight for the independence of the United States of America. It was in Le Havre that thousands of passengers embarked or disembarked, crossing the ocean aboard legendary liners like the Normandie, to forge unbreakable bonds between our peoples. In Le Havre, we thus know the strength of the transatlantic link, which is threatened today. And we also know, like all seafarers, that we must not fear crossing or circumventing storms to chart our course.
A great French author, Marguerite Yourcenar, magnificently formulates it in the notebooks she wrote during World War II, as she was exiled in the United States. While Anne Lindbergh, the wife of the famous aviator, published a book entitled Wave of the Future, which opposed the so-called “forces of the future” – i.e the totalitarian fascist forces – to the forces of the past – epitomized by old England – Marguerite Yourcenar answered that: “Those who depict the imminent political catastrophe as a September tide, and civilization as an overflooded seaside beach, forget that the main two characteristics of the tide are that it moves forward and backward. Any engineer would say that […] the danger of flooding is countered by repairing the dikes, and the slightest sailor from the most threatened coasts knows that, even on equinox nights, the waves go only so far, and no further”. By taking the example of the barbarian invasions, Marguerite Yourcenar reminds us that, at the time of the fall of Rome, many discouraged clerics believed that these hordes represented the future, for they were imposing themselves by force. A few generations later, Yourcenar writes, these barbarians had nevertheless returned to their forests or steppes while Latin and Roman law continued to govern civil life. The same clerics were then announcing, much more surely than Attila, the blooming future to come with the Renaissance. As such, “against the future that presents itself to us vociferous and self-assured, we must always reckon with another future still in its germinal stage and whose growth we must protect. Collective violence crises are nothing more than a turbulent chapter in history. […] After each storm, humanity humbly resumes its interrupted task, which consists precisely in preserving the still living forces of the past, and in directing their slow evolution towards the future.” We may be on the verge of some rough moments of history. Let us fight unwaveringly to build a rebalanced transatlantic relationship through the assertion of our European power, the only guarantor of our values and freedoms.
- Editor’s note: Signed on September 30, 1938, by Nazi Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Italy, the Munich Agreement was meant to prevent war by allowing Germany to annex the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. Though framed as a policy of appeasement, it ultimately encouraged German expansionism and accelerated the onset of World War II. ↩︎