Le Journal

Hier soir, dans le sud de l'Espagne, deux trains à grande vitesse sont entrés en collision. Le ministre espagnol des Transports explique que le "choc a été terrible", projetant des wagons en dehor...

You can draw a neat line around the eight countries Donald Trump has targeted for his 10% punitive tariff: Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, the UK, Germany, France, and the Netherlands. Europe’s liberal north-west is trying to frustrate Trump’s grab of Greenland. But there are 21 other member states who have not been sanctioned. One is Italy. Giorgia Meloni has already said she told Trump that his tariff threat was a mistake. I think it was too. But is Meloni going to break with the President over a patch of land that is far away and irrelevant to Italy’s security and economy? Will Spain? Or Greece? Or Malta and Cyprus? What about eastern Europe? Will Viktor Orbán, Andrej Babiš, and Robert Fico — the populist prime ministers of Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia respectively — run to the rescue of their liberal friends in Denmark? Even Poland, with a government that is as pro-EU as it can get, is hardly going to sacrifice its strategic alliance with America over a few rocks of ice near the Arctic. The truth is that the Europeans never really cared about Greenland. It was the first country to leave the EU – in 1985 – long before Brexit. It’s a fishing nation; fish is over 90% of its exports. And it left because EU fisheries policies would have deprived it of the right to manage its own stocks. Greenland could have been the EU’s, had it really wanted to keep it. “A union in which member states retain full sovereignty, is only as strong as its weakest member.” So here is my bold prediction: Trump will win his battle for Greenland. The Europeans will not stop him, for they are weak and divided. The irony is that the EU chose this military and geostrategic weakness. It chose to deprive our militaries of necessary resources in favour of welfare transfers and support for NGOs. A decade ago, the eurozone had an opportunity to create a political, economic and financial union in response to the sovereign debt crisis. But it chose not to because it was inconvenient. Meanwhile, the UK chose to leave. When the European member states of Nato decided to bow to Trump’s pressure and increase defence spending last year, they did not create a European defence union. They can’t agree on anything: a joint Franco-German-Spanish fighter aircraft project is on the rocks because the three countries cannot agree the workshare. Instead, each has only reinforced its dependence on the US. Everybody thinks they are better off with their own special relationship. But as Benjamin Franklin once said: “He that lies down with dogs, shall rise up with fleas.” And the Europeans have just woken up, and this time they are really cross, clamouring to issue press statements to condemn Trump. I am hearing commentators urging the EU to deploy the Anti Coercion Instrument, a legal device that came into force two years ago to counter economic pressure from adversaries. They insist that the EU is stronger than it thinks. It is the world’s largest single market and customs union, is it not? And it deems itself a regulatory super-power. It is deluded. The EU’s single market is full of regulatory barriers. Its hostile green and tech regulation did not change the world for the better; it succeeded only in damaging Europe’s competitiveness. As a result, unlike China and America, Europe will not share in the AI boom. The EU, in its current form, is further from becoming a superpower than it was 30 years ago. A union in which member states retain full sovereignty is only as strong as its weakest member. And that’s Germany right now. Given the state of Germany’s economy, and its dependence on the US, it would be utter madness for the EU to retaliate against Trump’s tariffs. What also mitigates against joint action is the bloc’s lingering delusion that someone or something out there is going to stop Trump. Last year, European leaders believed that the financial markets would push back against his tariffs, only to be shocked that after an initial wobble, Wall Street lined…

“Two dog sleds won’t do it!” In typically forthright language, Donald Trump stuck two fingers up to Denmark’s defence of Greenland — even as he ramps up the rhetoric around annexing the island wholesale. He now threatens Denmark and its allies with new tariffs. Combine this recent aggression with Trump’s long-standing claims that Europe is “decaying” from the inside, and it’s little wonder that Scandinavian leaders have been contemplating new ways of achieving self-reliance. In fact, the Nordics are beginning to ask themselves whether America really risk New York to save Stockholm in a nuclear showdown with Russia. And, if not: is it time for a Scandinavian nuclear deterrent? “Everything should be on the table in this situation,” proclaimed the leader of the Swedish Democrats, a member of the nation’s governing coalition. Similar views are being aired in the press. “The umbrella is gone,” writes one of Sweden’s largest daily newspapers, referring to the American nuclear deterrent, urging Stockholm to consider acquiring nuclear weapons itself. This might seem surprising, not least given the long-standing Nordic reputation for gentle diplomacy. In truth, though, Sweden is an ideal candidate for joining the nuclear club, quite aside from the nuclear-armed opponent on its doorstep. Boasting one of the most sophisticated arms industries in Europe, a robust civilian nuclear power sector, and indeed an abortive scheme to build a bomb during the Cold War, Sweden has everything it needs to go nuclear — even though Nordic proliferation could be the death knell for the whole Nato alliance. If America’s commitment to Europe no longer seems credible, the Nordics also can’t rely on partners closer to home. Certainly, the Nato goal of raising allied defence spending to 5% of GDP seems distant, while the continent’s stagnant economies, burdened by ballooning welfare schemes, show little appetite for higher defence budgets. Spain is emblematic of this attitude, with Madrid spending just 1.28% of GDP on its military. Calls to raise this level to 5% were dismissed by Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s Prime Minister, as “disrespectful”, and who instead pledged not to cut a single cent from welfare spending. Italy is in a similar position, while even France, the strongest proponent of European strategic autonomy, is unable to mend its bloated pension system. In other words, the Nordic countries find themselves alone, menaced by a threat they view as existential. For most other European countries — with the exception of Poland and the Baltics — the Russian danger feels remote. Few expect Putin’s tanks to roll into Berlin or Rome. The Nordic countries, on the other hand, see Russia as a clear and present danger, and for good reason. Swedish intelligence has long warned of Moscow targeting Swedish territorial integrity. Norway reports that Russian aircraft have violated its airspace for the first time in a decade, that preparations for sabotaging its water system could be underway, and that Russian GPS-jamming is making an airspace incident increasingly likely. Just two weeks ago, Finland caught a ship suspected of sabotaging undersea cables in the Baltic. The pressure, in short, is rising, pushing the Nordics to consider more drastic security options. More from this authorEurope's nuclear delusionBy Krzysztof Tyszka-Drozdowski And internally, too, Sweden has reasons to go nuclear. The expertise accumulated in its civilian nuclear sector — control over the fuel cycle, reactor physics, supply chains — provides a solid foundation for military development. Another advantage is Sweden’s world-class manufacturing base. Unlike much of Europe, it never embraced the idea of a post-industrial society, and its defence sector is among the most modern and well-rounded around, producing everything from submarines to fighter jets. Saab has extensive experience with aviation, missile systems, and command and control; BAE Systems Bofors provides deep expertise with warheads,…

This Martin Luther King Day comes at a grim moment for racial and cultural harmony not just in the United States, but across much of the West. In America, mass immigration and Left-wing racial politics have have stoked an ugly and vicious backlash on the Right, parts of which now openly speaks in terms of white racial identity and solidarity. From Portland to New York, immigration, integration, and belonging form fraught political fault lines. Similar problems dominate politics across the Atlantic, with no easy or obvious solution in sight. This shift is the result of deep, and perhaps inexorable, changes that contemporary Western leaders celebrated in the name of “diversity”. Western societies have indeed become more diverse, but the process hasn’t been the product purely of Western openness, but also of structural forces. To wit, modern communications and mass immigration have shrunken distances, making Western countries less like their past as exclusionary metropolises of racially based sea empires, and more like the multiethnic Eurasian land empires like Rome, Russia, Iran, and China. Thus, the history of those empires has important lessons — and warnings — for us. Above all, the Eurasian empires were civilisational states, dependent for their success upon the strength of their inherited civilisations, and on respect for these civilisations by their multiethnic populations. By these standards, Western countries today are in increasingly poor shape. Civilisational decline is not so dangerous in ethnically homogenous societies. Like many formerly great peoples before them, the ethnic English of the future could squat contentedly on the steps of the half-ruined monuments of their ancestors, scratching for fleas while telling themselves stories of their great past victories, great past works of literature that they no longer read, and great buildings that they no longer have the craftsmanship to build. This is, however, unlikely to impress new residents of their island. Suggested readingLooksmaxxing is the new transBy Nikos Mohammadi In a world in which new residents are a given, the historical distinction between oceanic empires and land empires becomes crucial. Western-European colonists traveled thousands of miles across the sea and encountered completely different cultures with whom they had had no previous contact, and which were generally at a markedly lower level of technological development. In the Americas, on top of this came the immense new commercial opportunities of plantation crops and industrialised slavery based on race. The result was institutionalised racist systems for social management. There were of course beliefs in imperial missions civilisatrices, but accompanied by an implicit or explicit assumption that the process of civilising the natives would take a very long time and probably always remain incomplete. The great land empires — Roman, Chinese, Muslim, and Russian, among others — couldn’t be like this. They had lived next to the peoples they conquered for hundreds or thousands of years. They had similar levels of technological development. Sometimes, the subjects were tacitly recognised by the conquerors to have in certain respects a higher level of “civilisation” than themselves: Greeks over Romans, Iranians over Arabs, Baltic Germans over Russians. For long periods, moreover, the subject peoples had been the former rulers: several of the great Chinese dynasties were from “barbarian” peoples; several of the great Iranian dynasties were Turkic; the Russian principalities lived for almost 300 years under the “Tatar yoke”. In these circumstances, hierarchies based on racial origin and proportion were hard to sustain — certainly if the empires wished to expand and survive. Dynastic intermarriage was a regular thing. To secure imperial rule over conquered territories required the successful co-opting of large parts of their elites. These elites then merged into the existing imperial elites. Hence the…