By FLAVIO AGUIAR*
Donald Trump's attacks could lead Europe to geopolitical shipwreck
Let's start at the beginning. Europe has been seen and read as the cradle of so-called Western culture and civilization since the times of ancient Greece and Rome.
One of the contemporary derivatives of these concepts was the Western Bloc, created after the end of the Second World War, led by the United States and made up of its allies in Western Europe, Canada, and, on its distant fringe, countries such as Australia, New Zealand, nationalist China (Taiwan) and, to a certain extent, even former enemy Japan.
The Western bloc confronted the communist world, formed by the now-defunct Soviet Union (USSR) and its satellites in Eastern Europe, the People's Republic of China, North Vietnam, which ended up incorporating its southern brother in 1975, Cuba from 1959 onwards, and a number of other communist countries, such as the now-defunct Yugoslavia, Romania and Albania, which were not satellites of the USSR. The other countries, in Latin America, Africa, Asia and Oceania, were "disputed areas", with political forces leaning towards one side or the other.
This Western bloc had and still has an armed wing, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which confronted the Warsaw Pact, led by the USSR. With the dissolution of the latter in 1991, the Western bloc expanded its influence to Eastern Europe.
NATO expanded the scope of its operations, becoming a sort of police force operating in conflicts such as the European Balkans, North Africa and even the Middle East. Finally, it began to target the Russian Federation, which inherited the world's largest nuclear arsenal from the USSR.
European Union Emergency
Economically, the Bloc also began to face the growing power of Communist China and its influence on a global scale. At the same time, Europe saw the emergence and expansion of the European Union, under the leadership of Western European countries such as Germany, France and Italy, a promise of peace and prosperity on a continent martyred and destroyed by two world wars in the 20th century.
The Western bloc's calling card included the capitalist regime, electoral democracy, cultural freedom and social customs, and often the economic protection of European social democracy. It is true that this card did not always correspond to reality, given that the United States and its allies often sponsored, supported or comfortably coexisted with bloodthirsty dictatorships in Latin America, Africa, Asia and Oceania.
More recently, the United States and its allies have stepped up to support the Ukrainian government against the Russian invasion.
But the Friday's meeting in the Oval Office This was a demonstration of how the Bloc is changing its nature, to say the least. It no longer has a leader; it has a boss, Donald Trump, advised by a foreman, JD Vance. With his finger pointed, the boss dictates what his former allies, now his subjects, should or should not think, feel and do. It is up to them to keep their ears to the ground and obey his orders.
Surprise? Not so much. After all, that boss has been behaving like the ancient European kings at the time of the great navigations. He wants to annex territories, buying them or occupying them, naming and renaming geographical features, create luxury resorts in wastelands by its auxiliaries, as in Gaza, and now obtain commercial and economic concessions by exploiting Ukraine's rare earths as payment for military services rendered to it.
As for Volodymyr Zelensky, he has been left hanging in the brush of the war that is destroying his country, with promises of support from a weakened European Union, besieged by its far right wing, fueled by one of the big techs, Elon Musk, who support the new absolute monarch of Washington. A Union that is threatened with drowning in the whirlpool of geopolitical irrelevance.
This is the new “design” projected by the absolute monarch of the White House for the old Western bloc, which could turn into something similar to the playpen where a now ex-president who is also authoritarian used to preach to his fans and believers.
* Flavio Aguiar, journalist and writer, is a retired professor of Brazilian literature at USP. Author, among other books, of Chronicles of the World Upside Down (boitempo). [https://amzn.to/48UDikx]
Originally published in the section “The World Now”, Radio France International (Brazil).
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