Utopian American unity and Europe | In the commem …

PageI12 in France
From Paris
The emotion and authenticity emanated from the immense sea of ​​history and caressed the faces of the soldiers who survived the Allied landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944. The rest was that one more blow in the disastrous reconfiguration of international relations The American President Donald Trump established on his arrival at the White House in 2016. The commemoration of this "supreme battle" which mobilized the landing of 150,000 allied soldiers (31 countries) and who has always been defined as "good versus bad" did not dilute the persistent asperities between Trump and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and between the head of the North American state and 'Europe. The unity of the celebrations was a utopia born at the seaside, at the North American cemetery of Colleville-sur-mer. The speeches of the two leaders suffice as a meta-narrative of a truth that stifles the throat. Patriotera, militarist, incarnated in the splendor of the United States "today bigger than ever", the trumpet rhetoric undone all the armor that patiently began to arm itself with the defeat of Nazism. Macron, however, stressed what he himself defined as "the promise of Normandy", namely the birth of multilateralism, the possibility of a comprehensive agreement among liberated democracies that can not be forgotten: "We must never stop perpetuating the alliance of free peoples," said Macron.

Trump has dedicated a compliment to "our indestructible bond", but nothing more. The wind carried off his words and the flag of the dispute was lifted. The current story slides through the pores and refers to the episode of a dead tree: in April 2018, during the visit of Emmanuel Macron to the White House, he and Trump planted an oak that Macron had brought from a World War I (1914-1918) battlefield. The tree meant the "tenacity" of the friendship between Washington and Paris, but it did not support the phytosanitary treatments imposed by the North American administration. The oak tells the whole story of irreconcilable positions: NATO (Atlantic Alliance), the Middle East, the Iranian nuclear crisis, the influence of the European Union or world trade. The French essayist Benjamin Haddad, director of the "Europe" program at the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington, says it impeccably in the essay "The lost paradise: the United States of Trump and the end of European illusions "(The Lost Paradise: Trump's America and the End of European Illusions, Publisher Grbadet). In 2018, just before landing in France, where he came to participate in the celebrations of the centenary of the armistice, Trump, via Twitter, had attacked Macron and the Old Continent. Among his grudges, he wrote: "The European Union is an enemy".

It is and it is always. His arrival in France had been preceded by his visit to Britain, where he had promised all the gold of the world in exchange for Brexit. Trump hates Europe and is working on its destruction. Some time ago, the illusion and the "diplomacy of the kiss" were disenchanted. We can measure the diplomatic sorrow that settled in Europe in the light of history: the United States, together with the Soviet Union, was the decisive factor in the victory of the United States. Allies against Nazism. Next, Washington supported the reconstruction of post-war Europe, positioned between Moscow and the Old Continent as a protective shield during the Cold War, and then, in 1989, with the United States. collapse of the Berlin Wall and, with it, institutional communism it was a pillar of the reintegration of the countries of Eastern Europe. The Trumpista message is another. From allies, Europeans have become annoying opponents who still refuse to move on to adulthood and admit that their common destiny is no longer in transatlanticism. The diplomatic theater offers this June an imponderable summary of the world. Just as Trump flew over and crossed the territories of a historic commemoration, in Russia, Vladimir Putin stayed in Moscow to receive Chinese President Xi Jinping. Both commemorated 70 years of diplomatic relations between the two countries of the Russian capital and St. Petersburg. Putin and Jinping have already met about 30 times in the last 6 years. In half the cases, Trump and the Europeans disputed 300.

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