THREE YEARS OF WAR || At the end of three years of total war in Ukraine, more than 10 since Russia’s annexation of Crimea, we have officially entered a “new and dangerous world order.” More than ever, the EU is under pressure to become autonomous from the US and to clearly define how far it is willing to go to support Kyiv against the Russian threat, which “isn’t going to disappear” once this conflict ends. “It’s already being said, behind closed doors, that it’s unrealistic to insist on recovering all occupied Ukrainian territory and returning to the 2014 borders”
“Europeans still don’t seem to grasp this, leaders are anxious and floundering, but the message Trump and JD Vance have sent is very simple,” notes Julien Hoez, geopolitics specialist and editor of The French Dispatch. “The Americans are no longer here to be our friends, and this is forcing Europe to focus on the equipment it produces, on developing its own capabilities, instead of relying on American weapons and Russian gas — and it’s increasing the pressure for the urgent reforms the EU should have already started long ago.”
Considering the Paris meetings “very important” in the current context, the French specialist is just one of many pointing out how, within a month of Trump’s inauguration, we have officially entered a “dangerous new world order,” one that is increasing the pressure on the EU to, above all, rely on itself. “We have to be autonomous, and we need to do something. It might sound stupid, what Mario Draghi was saying the other day, but that’s really how it is, as he said: we have to do something if we want something to happen.”
In Germany’s case, this applies both to the AfD and to the newly founded Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), a far-left, anti-immigration party that, like the movement at the opposite extreme, maintains a questionable stance toward Putin’s Russia — and opposes German state support for Ukraine.
Some analysts might even consider that the courtship between the self-proclaimed King Trump and his entourage (already crowned as such on the White House’s official accounts) and the European far right has its days numbered. But if other conservative movements join in, what Julien Hoez describes as “the fifth column” of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary or Robert Fico’s Slovakia, “which only blocks things and actively sabotages European efforts,” the short-term outlook isn’t the best.