Europe Needs Emergency Political Approach – OpEd
You don’t have to be a Trumpist to say that there is something right in what Trump says
For the past few days we are living in a world in which a trade war is underway. It could easily worsen. Since it is obvious that there will be from Europe responses to Trump’s initiatives, it is appropriate to try to reflect on the factors that lie at the basis of this trade war.
Orphaned, the left of their father, the USSR, and the right of their mother, America, European citizens suddenly discover that with Trump the Cold War had its benefits. Apart from the partisan economic ones – truly remarkable – obtained in different ways, but above all with different philosophies: developing Western market wealth to build a wall to the utopias of the East by mother America, increasing the Eastern party bureaucracies to wall the Western propaganda of father, or rather stepfather, USSR. On the chessboard of growing nuclear weapons, this was the game in progress. A game that for Europe, first of seven countries (thanks to Ventotene) then of nine, nineteen and finally twenty-eight minus one, the greatest benefits have been in order of importance: peace, the wealth of the middle classes (a discovery for Western Europe accustomed to the imperatives of the political-religious elites) and the neo-colonialist vision that moderately returns to make its way among small and medium-sized entrepreneurs (aggregated to the large state-owned enterprises, evident).
All these privileges collapse one after the other when the Cold War between enemies (USSR and America) is replaced by the cold war between friends (Putin and Trump). So that there are no misunderstandings, we are not talking about brothers, but about a cold war between friends.
The peace that Europe enjoyed was evidently a balance between nuclear arsenals. Unable to procure peace on its own for centuries, more or less sixteen, from the fall of Rome empire always wars in Europe, it has taken advantage of the balance of terror. For 80 years without wars of major nations (Nuclear War, copiously considered impossible during the conflict Russia, NATO emissary, Ucaina).
The wealth of the European middle classes was just as evidently the result of privileged access to the American market, but also of the single world currency, a dollar more dependent on US deficits than on the domestic economic fortunes of mother America, which was clearly in decline. But would the lordship of the dollar last forever?
The neo-colonialist vision also evidently made its way back in the wake of the great colonial transition from Great Britain to the USA of entire African regions, taking advantage of their small diplomatic cracks. The principle of Cash (spot) and Carry (weapons) had been changed following Pearl Harbor to Pay Later (financial obligations) and Carry Now (weapons), but debts must be paid, especially if the creditor has won the war. And with whose money? And so the colonialist move took place massively with an intermediate step, freedom and democracy more tribal than of nations. But it was a move, and European neo-colonialism timidly began to make its way again, again with evidence, not as a fact of its own but as a derivative.
These three pieces of evidence, which in a forward-looking view should have fueled the birth of a new European political-military class, have been culpably neglected. The dizzying growth of European well-being, which spread to the East in the binge of Eastern European countries of the Prodian period, was taken for granted as an independent fact, and not as a mediated reflection of the Cold War. It is easy to overlook the evidence when material well-being increases, and that is why now the peoples and politicians of 27 European nations are proceeding in random order to build a new political-military order of which the alternative seems to be: victims or participants with new diplomacies. And here it is on the new evidence that we need to reason.
Trump, evidently, does not make peace with Putin. Trump – in the name of the diplomatic imperative of all time: discussion and debate – talks thanks be to God (for the secularists to be written with a small d), with Putin, America’s direct adversary in the Cold War, and by proxy NATO in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
But the collapse of the three neglected evidences does not leave the balls still. On the contrary. It brings within it tearing forces that are difficult to manage, also because these are the cases in which subversive forces resume playing their game. Whether certain right-wingers dream of Adolf mon amour or certain left-wingers, Stalin you are always the North Star, is undeniable. But with their emergence, war is near. And the scale is unknown. And no longer the war is a cold one. But hot, and how! Almost 80 years of European peace are quickly set aside. But this time not between Russia and NATO, Ukraine, by proxy. But for uncontrolled internal factionalism. And the collapse is simpler than you think. Think of the rapid (and bloody) fragmentation of Yugoslavia, balkanized in no time at all.
The collapse of the three evidences clearly requires new political leadership, and also emergency political strategies. Which are not those of the right or the left. but involve Europe in a total emergency. And in my opinion, Italy is the place where, strangely, a new European philosophy can be projected. But it requires a courageous remaking of philosophies and certainties, both from the right and the left. One reality is absolutely certain. The world is in a trade war. And countering blow for blow does not work. Emergency political strategies are indispensable. Italy deserves to be put under observation.
Let’s look carefully at the adaptation exercises of Meloni, leader of the right-wing coalition, very close to Trump, and Schlein, leader of the left-wing coalition. But it must be clear that you don’t have to be Trumpist to understand that Europe enjoyed a mch favorable climate to grow. And that could not last forever. Neither the right nor the left are able to face the tariff war alone. This is a war. Europe needs emergency solutions.
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