Europe is not dead. It still has a great deal of catching up to do. It needs to assert itself as a political power as quickly as possible, but Donald Trump’s new imperialism is hastening the movement rather than slowing it down, while the invasion of Ukraine had already convinced the 27 of the need for a common defence.

The Defence Commissioner’s task, which the EU has now taken on, is to lay the foundations for pan-European arms industries. The Union could resort to borrowing here, as the Christian Democrats, who are due to return to power in Berlin in February, want to increase German support for Ukraine and will need to widen their financial room for manoeuvre. Poland, which holds the rotating presidency of the EU, the same Poland which has longtime rejected the idea of a common defence because it believed only in the Atlantic Alliance, is calling on the United States to admit that Europe cannot increase its military spending if it continues to buy American rather than buying European.

Like Germany and the Baltic States, Poland now speaks French on defence issues, and the Weimar Triangle, the Franco-German-Polish triangle, is increasingly imposing itself on the Union’s political and military leadership.

‘Perhaps, all right, but it is too late’, object those who think we are too far away from forming a real bloc capable of meeting the simultaneous challenges of the United States, China and Russia. ‘Europe has missed the boat’, the army of the resigned keeps proclaiming, and the fact is that our technological lag behind the United States is all too real, that China is now competing severely with our automotive industries and that Russia is engaged in restoring its lost empire, while we Europeans…

Well, yes, it is true, we are the world champions of regulation, free trade and the fight against monopolies, whereas we should be encouraging innovation, defending our products and having world-class giants in every field. Our economic reflexes and cultures date back to the 1980s, if not the 1950s. We are only just beginning to realise that American, Russian and Chinese leaders now think in terms of zones of influence to be consolidated, reconstituted or extended, and that multilateralism and international law have faded with the generations marked by war.

Worse still, at a time when battles are being fought on our borders and Donald Trump does not consider it his duty to defend us, the European Union’s only real army is that of France. In the eyes of the resigned, there is every reason to bury Europe and pledge allegiance to the Kremlin, to the White House or to both.

Many of them even say that ‘Europe has been written out of history’, but why would Europe be past its expiry date? Could it be that we can no longer invent anything, even though we have so much talent? That we would be too poor to arm ourselves when we are so rich? Could it be that we are already running out of time, with Donald Trump taking office on 20 January, Vladimir Putin scoring points in Ukraine and us caught in a vice between men who think it is only natural to lay claim to Ukraine and Greenland?

Come on! We have got no time to lose, but the world will not change the moment Donald Trump sits back down in the Oval Office. Vladimir Putin will not win control of Ukraine in three months, and these two will not reach an agreement in twenty-four hours that they can impose on the Ukrainians and the EU.

The declinists and other resigners of yesterday and the day before, those who torpedoed the European Defence Community in 1954, who never stopped putting the brakes on the political unification of Europe and who rejected the draft Constitutional Treaty in 2005, have wasted a lot of time but, no, all is not lost because of two things.

First, Vladimir Putin is setting the bar so high that he is making it impossible for the US and Russia to compromise on Ukraine. On pain of losing all credibility on the international stage, Donald Trump is then obliged to give the Ukrainians the military and financial resources to go into negotiations from a position of strength. The Atlantic Alliance is consolidating rather than fading away. The EU is gradually giving it a European pillar, and the American elections – parliamentary in two years’ time and presidential in four – will soon reshuffle the cards, because this President will not have been a resounding success.

The second hypothesis is that Vladimir Putin is becoming realistic enough to see that Russia is not in a position to continue this war, that it needs to declare victory and accept that the Europeans deploy troops on the demarcation line that would then be drawn. Under a mandate from the Union, several of the large and small Member States, perhaps together with Great Britain, would form what would become the first European army responsible for guarding and protecting what would in effect be the Union’s eastern border.

In either of these two hypotheses, the Union would assert itself as a political power, equipped with a common defence, organising its steps and taking its place, alongside the United States and China, on the podium of this century.

Of course, nothing is written in stone. From the extreme right coming to power in France to a global economic crisis provoked by a brutal return to protectionism, many things could seriously thwart this European awakening, but there would be only one thing to stop it: our giving up.