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The events that unfolded at the White House yesterday certainly lend themselves to football-style conclusions, as evidenced by one of the most trending discussions on “our” social media about who ultimately “humiliated” whom.
However, if we’re looking for serious analysis, what we witnessed has neither winner nor loser but is the clearest imprint of a new era beginning—one that both signifies the end of the post-World War II world as we knew it and introduces entirely new, certainly unfriendly to democracy, terms to the game.
The problem is that we don’t know these new terms. And the question is whether we’ll simply observe them being imposed on us by circumstance or whether we’ll engage in shaping our own realities.
At a political level, Trump seeks to offer Russia an escape from China’s economic and military hegemony, making Russia a US partner rather than a future Chinese subordinate. Beyond this, what both the Russians and Trump see on the horizon is Ukraine’s enormous wealth, which they want to seize by fair means or foul.
Beyond what the fossilised clones of Real Socialism mindlessly swallow about supposed “threats” against Russia from the liberated Baltic states or the “massacre” of Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine, this wealth has always been the second objective of Russian expansionism—essentially of the mafia plutocrats who have controlled it since the annexation of Crimea.
It’s clear that the “old world” is clashing with a new one—still obscure, certainly cynical as we saw yesterday, but primarily an unknown “new world.” And because we’ve grown accustomed to thinking of the “new world” as a natural progression, it’s difficult but necessary to remember that things aren’t always like that. The darkness of fascism followed the 1920s and early 1930s in Europe, which was a period of creative renaissance for the continent, so much so that this renaissance moved far from the cataclysmic political and social consequences of the Crash in America—consequences that had transferred to Europe, strengthening the two main currents of totalitarianism as an “answer” to the gradual impoverishment of the Old Continent, especially Germany, in those days.
Anyone who has even briefly studied the history of that period can discern similar phenomena emerging on the horizon today, with the first and foremost being democracy’s inertia. Back then, there was one mitigating factor: with the exception of very few countries, democracy wasn’t genuinely established anywhere. It became established after 1945 and the devastation. Today, this excuse doesn’t exist.
And herein lies the greatest danger. Today we have a democratic edifice, the European Union, which, although it has achieved remarkable things, has allowed a critical part of itself to sink into a process of decline in the hands of a bureaucracy that often cannot align with reality—at a time when the continent is experiencing its most serious existential threat.
Moreover, a large segment of its societies is not even adequately informed, doesn’t stay updated, and operates on instinct rather than logic and knowledge. The result is that what they produce is, at best, protest—usually as a consequence of suggestions from populists and demagogues or from the extremes of the left and right and the totalitarianism they promote. And at worst, violence.
The first signs of the Trump era may shock us—and they should—but, as we were saying the other day, it’s important not to ignore them and proceed as if nothing is happening, but to view them calmly and face bitter truths that need managing. Yesterday. Trump is here, and unless the system he’s trying to dismantle by changing the US removes him somehow, here he will stay. And if he stays, whether we like it or not, this will be our reality.
Trump, therefore, is an opportunity for us to see our own weaknesses and, if we’re speaking about Europe, to understand that political correctness, Wokeism, formalities, and inaction don’t help us. They’re our condemnation.
Either the European Union will wake up and attempt to transform itself into a new power, far from the once very comfortable defensive guardianship of the US, limiting—even through temporary suspensions of things considered given—whatever causes dissolving phenomena and confronting the leadership of some small (for now only) countries that promote them, or everything will depend on alliances formed according to national interests. With the enormous stakes that this entails.
Yesterday, whatever view one might have on the Ukrainian issue, the President of Ukraine represented our “old” world: a country fighting to survive against a dark regime, an invader who, in order to seize its wealth, denies even its identity—an identity proven by the very origin of Ukrainians.
Trump yesterday was the business partner of this invader and of a “new world.” The partner who blackmailed and insulted the President of that country in front of the entire planet with a “take it or leave it” logic and, this morning, announced that he’s leaving him to his fate, along with his country.
If Europe doesn’t wake up, emerge from its introversion, and understand that it is not only part of but at the epicentre of the arrival of this “new world,” then this world will also be its reality very soon.
And in trying to imagine the chaos that will come, the parallels with the period before World War II multiply nightmarishly. We’re talking about the same continent.
The issue is in our minds—for each of us to wake up, take stock of our world, and after clearing away the thin but solid layer of symptoms of decline and decay that surrounded it, to see how infinitely more remains inside. Comparing it with what we would have with what is coming.
Only then will we understand what we stand to lose.
This article was originally published on 28.02.2025
Source: IN THE END, WHO “HUMILIATED” WHOM AT THE WHITE HOUSE?
