I am going too fast, I know. With two weeks to go before the election, there is no guarantee that you will win, but if I say “Mr. President,” it is not just because I strongly wish for your victory.
It is especially because the challenges we face together, as American and European democrats, are so immense that we must begin preparing for them now so that our ideas will mature by the end of January and can already permeate your inaugural address.
Time is running out, Mr. President, because respect for human rights and the rule of law, individual liberties and international cooperation, all the values on which the great democracies had rebuilt the international order in the aftermath of the Nazi defeat, are today openly challenged by ever-increasing powers and ever-more active intellectual circles and political currents.
This change is not only a Chinese, Indian, Russian or Filipino one.
The European Union and the United States are also aware of it. You have the rise the conspiracy movements which influence many of Donald Trump’s voters. We have the appearance of apostles of “illiberal democracy”, and new, europhobic right-wing extremes, seduced and supported by Mr Putin.
Democracy is under attack everywhere.
If we do not know how to join forces to defend it, democracy may lose the battle, but, noting this fact, which you certainly do yourself as well, a European cannot forget the day when the United States had given up on nailing Bashar el-Assad’s air force to the ground.
I am certainly not the first telling you this, because everything was ready: the engines of French and American bombers were running. As Barack Obama had committed himself to it by speaking of a “red line”, we were going to sanction together the first massive use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime and then nothing… The President of the United States changed his mind, reopened the door of the Middle East to Vladimir Putin and allowed his regime to embolden itself on all fronts, at the very borders of the Union.
Many of us told ourselves then that freedom could definitely no longer count on the United States, which projected its strength when it was not necessary and abstained when it should have and then…
And then, it became more serious than just a disappointment.
Far from this being just a mood swing, Barack Obama had confirmed there the evolution started by George Bush when he had gone AWOL while Russia was entering Georgia. European affairs were no longer an American priority as Donald Trump was going to indicate in his turn by describing NATO as “obsolete” and we have no illusions that you could go back on this turning point.
No more in the Middle East than in Europe does the United States want to be the world’s policeman any more. There is no need to criticize you for this, as it has never been very successful for you, as you no longer have to contain a rival bloc in Europe, which is no longer there, and as you can now do without Saudi oil.
You only have to face one opponent: China. It is on China that you are concentrating all your means because Taiwan and the South China Sea are and will always be the stakes of the moment, but should we then renounce our alliance?
For you as well as for us, this would be the mistake to avoid making.
You need us, so that you are not alone, facing China and the allies it is buying for itself.
We need you because if the Common European Defence is no longer a taboo in any of the Union’s capitals, it will take, at best, about twenty years to become a reality. In the meantime, we are naked because the French armies and strike force are not enough to defend the 27.
We still need your “umbrella”, whose existence you must reaffirm so that you do not have to deploy it, but that does not mean that one should dream of returning to the Cold War Alliance.
Those times are over. The American taxpayer no longer has any reason to fund Europe’s military protection, and in order to be saved, the Atlantic Alliance must be redefined.
Today, you are entitled to demand that each of the countries of the Union devote a minimum of 2% of its expenditure to its military budget. Better still, the most European among us are begging you to do so, because only in this way will we achieve the strategic independence to which we aspire, but we will then be entitled to develop a European arms industry, which you should no longer hinder.
You cannot ask us to increase our military spending and at the same time telling us that it should be spent on orders from your arms industries.
The Atlantic Alliance must become the alliance of two democratic powers with comparable and complementary military means and not the alliance of an all-mighty giant and a political dwarf at its command.
Since you no longer want to be the world’s policeman, you must draw the consequences, but are you ready to do it?
Are you ready to recognize in the European Union not only an ally but an equal?
Forgive me for saying so directly, Mr. President, but it is still far from obvious to us, because it is definitely not easy to give up an exceptional status even when you no longer want it.
More than words, we are waiting for gestures; more than gestures, we are waiting for actions. Look for a moment at this world map at the heart of which your cartographers place your continent, Pacific on one side, Atlantic on the other.
You can no longer be on both sides at the same time because the time of the only two superpowers is no more.
You must choose. Your choice is made. You have “pivoted” (the word is yours) your power towards Asia and it is up to us Europeans to face the chaos of the former Soviet area, Africa and the Mediterranean.
If you do not want to do it anymore, allow us doing it, but, Mr. President, but please add coherence to the U.S. policy.
Unlike your predecessors, do not dream of dividing Europe in order to reign supreme, when you no longer want to get involved.
Leave it to us and, more importantly, help us to help you by declaring, once and for all, that you expect the European Union, as ally of the United States, to assert itself as a sovereign power, both politically and militarily.
Bernard Guetta
Journalist and MEP (Renew Europe Group)
(text written at the request of the Terra nova Foundation)
