For 35 years, Valérie Gautier, president of the association Veterans back to Normandy, has welcomed American survivors of the 1944 landing every June 6. This year there will be only five, aged between 99 and 102 years. It is a beautiful example of transatlantic friendship that survives the Trump earthquake, but it is not easy. “I find it hard to talk to them about this topic because most idolize their president,” Valérie explains to La Vanguardia from Normandy. “The context is not very favorable. But I hope the good relationship with their families will continue.”
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For decades, the annual celebrations on the anniversary of the landing were one of the strongest symbols of the United States’ commitment to Europe’s freedom and the defense of its democracies. There are nearly 10,000 graves at the Omaha Beach cemetery. With Trump, that axiom that seemed immutable is rapidly crumbling. The American president continuously erodes the relationship with his NATO allies. In recent days, he has multiplied his displays of contempt and threats to European partners.
Trump’s fury respects no one. Pedro Sánchez and Keir Starmer have been mistreated for weeks. He often says about the British prime minister that “he is not Churchill,” ignoring, however, that his relationship with President F.D. Roosevelt—initially reluctant to help London against Hitler—was sometimes very tense.
The current occupant of the White House expressed his anger at Pope Leo XIV for his pacifism. Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who defended the pontiff, have also been targets of harsh criticism. The German leader took the worst part because he dared to say that Washington lacks a strategy in the Iran war and that the Islamic regime is “humiliating” the American superpower. “The German chancellor should devote more time to ending the war between Russia and Ukraine (where he has been totally ineffective!) and lifting his country from ruin, especially regarding immigration and energy,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social network.
Angry because no NATO partner has supported him in the war against Iran, despite not even consulting them beforehand, and because some have raised many objections to the overflight of U.S. military planes heading to the Middle East, Trump has threatened to withdraw troops stationed in Spain, Italy, and even Germany, which during the Cold War was the cornerstone of the containment strategy against the Soviet Union and whose bases still house about 35,000 U.S. soldiers and nuclear weapons.
Trump’s snubs do not distinguish allies. It matters little, for example, that some of them, like Germany, are rearming at a rapid pace and buying massive amounts of military equipment from manufacturers on the other side of the Atlantic, a windfall of tens of billions of dollars that not only fattens the bottom lines of industry giants but also creates long-term technological and political dependence.
At first, among Europeans, there was disbelief about Trump and a certain tendency not to take his insults and rudeness too seriously, to give him the benefit of the doubt. After all, he was a New York real estate developer, used to surviving among business sharks and mafias. The Greenland crisis earlier this year made them open their eyes definitively. Had the historic protector become a predator? And no less against a small country like Denmark, one of NATO’s most faithful allies, which paid a high price in blood helping the U.S. in Afghanistan? Preparing for the worst, Danish soldiers sent to defend the Arctic island were equipped with explosives to damage the runway of the capital, Nuuk, thus preventing a U.S. invasion. The unimaginable could no longer be ruled out.
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Article in ‘Le Monde’
“The dissolution of NATO has already begun,” says Joschka Fischer, former German vice chancellor
In an article published this Friday in the digital edition of Le Monde, Joschka Fischer, the legendary German Green leader who was Foreign Minister and vice chancellor for seven years (1998-2005), asserts that “the dissolution of NATO has already begun.”
For Fischer, who began his career as a radical pacifist and later became a fervent supporter of NATO, “the only question left to know is whether (Trump) will officially withdraw the United States from NATO or be content to empty it of substance through negligence and contempt.”
What alarms the former number two of Gerhard Schröder in the so-called “red-green coalition” is that Trump offers incoherent explanations for his strategy of breaking with his European allies. Fischer recalls that the U.S. benefited from its guardianship and support of Europe. Moreover, he argues that Washington not only guaranteed the security and peace of the Old Continent, allowing its economic integration, but also prevented Europe—especially Germany—from returning to its nationalist demons, something that could happen again now, given the rise of the far-right party Alliance for Germany (AfD) and similar political groups in other countries.
From wards to adults
Bruno Le Maire, former French Minister of Economy, advises Europe to “break with the U.S., also mentally”
Another illustrious “ex” of European politics, Bruno Le Maire—Minister of Economy and Finance under Macron for seven years—has expressed similar opinions, even more aggressive due to the French tradition of sovereignty in the international context. Le Maire has published a book in which he mercilessly portrays Trump. In an interview for the geopolitical podcast of the weekly L’Express, the former minister urged Europe to “assume mental, moral, intellectual, and scientific independence from the United States” because the Trump phenomenon may not be an ugly parenthesis but a long-term trend. “Europe must break with the United States not only financially, economically, technologically, but also mentally,” he added. “We must become adults.”
In this severely deteriorated context of the transatlantic relationship, the G-7 summit will take place from June 15 to 17 in Évian, a French spa town on the shores of Lake Geneva. The meeting promises to be explosive.
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