-Analyis-
PARIS – New American faces have been appearing in Paris recently: They describe themselves as political refugees. I met one, who arrived in France a few weeks ago after receiving death threats in the United States for his anti-Trump activism. His profession allows him to work remotely, and he felt safer seeking shelter on this side of the Atlantic.
A pair of New York intellectuals, for their part, has come to look for an apartment to buy in Paris, a fallback position if need be… A young writer is waiting in a European capital for papers for France, because she didn’t want to “stay another day in the United States”…
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In just one month in the White House, Donald Trump has sown enough terror or boosted the aggressiveness of his supporters that some Americans, rather well-established in society, have decided to or are considering exile. They speak of the birth of a new “McCarthyism” — the Cold War era communist witch-hunt launched by Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy.
In universities, in Hollywood, in the press, the McCarthyism of the 1950s shattered careers and lives, in the name of a virulent anti-communist ideology. Replace communism with wokism, diversity or gender, and you have the targets of the new “Trumpian” inquisitors.
Promoter of chaos
Those who imagined that Trump 2.0 would be an updated version of Trump 1.0 were sadly mistaken. The second version of “Trumpism” is far more ideological, more systematic, more determined, more imperial. We first understood this with the arrival on the scene of Elon Musk and his DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency).
The American ally and protector is turning into a promoter of chaos.
We discovered it even more sinisterly with Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference, which was that of a far-right ideologue. His call for Germans to open the doors to the AfD, the far-right party Musk had already promoted in previous weeks, shocked a majority of Germans whose democracy was shaped by Americans on the ruins of Nazism.
On the eve of early parliamentary elections, the American ally and protector is turning into a promoter of chaos. The geopolitical website Le Grand Continent was right to translate and publish this speech in full, and to recommend that every European read it.
Values and vassalization
The political West, that sometimes hazardous concept born out of the Cold War, has often accommodated differences of opinion by brandishing common “values” opposed to those of the opposite “camp.” Those values have always been malleable, and many crimes have been committed in their name. But what remains of them today?
The United States’ return to an imperial policy leaves its European allies with a dizzying choice: become vassals or getting ready for a fight. It was Italian President Sergio Matarella who warned against “happy vassalization,” a permanent temptation for many Europeans.
We can condemn America’s evolution and mourn the mythical glory days of the alliance. But we can also ask ourselves what Europe has lacked to truly become a “pole” in this multipolar world we’ve talked so much about. And above all, we can find the means to escape the vassalization, “happy” or otherwise, between those who still share the same values. This should be our top priority, because the threat is existential.
