Is there a chance that Europe will lose its best features?

We tend to think of Europe as a noble and ancient lady, whose habitual restraint and stability are explained by its experience in victory and defeat. However, since the beginning of 2025, that is, on the eve of President Donald Trump's inauguration, European unrest has escalated, prompting unexpected precautions. Europe has just taken a turn that shocks everyone, allocating hundreds of billions of euros of its budget to defense.

Perhaps it's worth first reviewing a few minor chapters from the second half of the 20th century to better understand the historical idiosyncrasy of Europe. In May 1978, several suitcases arrived at the prestigious Hotel Meurice, almost opposite the Louvre in Paris. Upon learning that they belonged to officers of the Argentine dictatorship—Rear Admiral Lambruschini—the three baggage handlers refused to take them inside. They were dismissed. Eventually, President François Mitterrand and Bernard Stasi, a centrist MP known for his humanist views, paid tribute to the employees' "courageous gesture."

A quarter of a century later, in the 2002 presidential election, the extreme fragmentation of the left allowed fascist leader Jean-Marie Le Pen to advance to the second round and face the right-wing candidate, Jacques Chirac. But the left called for a "cordon sanitaire" to isolate the far right and to vote for Chirac, who won with more than 82% of the vote.

Twenty-two years later, Gabriel Attal, appointed Prime Minister by President Emmanuel Macron, appeared before Parliament: “Being French in 2024” means being able to be “Prime Minister and not hide my homosexuality.”

These three facts are indications of a collective awareness of human rights, the common good, and freedom that, to a greater or lesser extent, with fluctuations, also characterizes the rest of liberal and democratic Europe, from Helsinki to Madrid, from London to Berlin.

Under the current European shift, its leaders are currently debating how to unify their armed forces. In several countries—Sweden in January, Germany in March—they are distributing survival kits or urging their citizens to stock up for the first few days of a possible attack. The supplies are supposed to last 72 hours, they explain, the time it would hypothetically take governments to recover from the shock of an attack. Are these gestures justified? Is Europe preparing for a fight for its "existence"?

The question concerns us: a nuclear conflict would affect the entire planet. Knowing Moscow's repeated threats to use its nuclear arsenal and the price of such a struggle, why is Europe so determined to prevent a Russian victory in Ukraine? Would a Russian victory pose an existential danger to Western Europe?

In any case, according to the Kremlin-authorized writers we see commenting on Moscow television and in its press, winning the war against Ukraine is indeed "existential" for Russia.

Let's pay attention. Just days before the invasion of Ukraine, ideologue Sergei Karaganov wrote: "This is not about Ukraine; NATO is not an immediate threat." Karaganov is the founder and chairman of the Defense and Foreign Policy Council, the think tank created by presidential decree in 2010, which advises Putin on international policy. It was an invitation to separate collateral damage from what was really at stake.

Collateral, but existential. An explanation contradicted the official narrative that justified the invasion by the military danger that Ukraine's integration into NATO would represent for Russia's existence. This argument was, of course, for the public, and it didn't hold water, since NATO bases were already right next to Russia's borders with several neighboring countries. But it did have some success in distracting a portion of world public opinion from the essentials, trapping it in a question as sterile as the chicken-and-egg debate: who is responsible for the war, Russia for invading or NATO for attempting to integrate Ukraine?

Now, if NATO wasn't the immediate threat, neither was military action against Russia. Why, then, is the "Ukraine operation" "existential" for Russia?

Thus, for Russia as for Europe, military and material danger is not the only existential threat. Another threat looms, also unacceptable because it targets what characterizes and distinguishes each of us: values, rules of coexistence, what we have called politics since the cradle of our civilization.

This is a threat that Russian leaders have never lost sight of; there are historical examples of this. In 1861, the German ambassador and future chancellor, von Bismarck, asked Alexander II why he did not allow a quota of representatives in the leadership of the empire, even if only from the high nobility ; the Tsar replied that it was impossible, given that historical experience showed that "liberalism would inevitably undermine its absolute power." In 1999, in his Millennium Manifesto , which spells out Russia's objectives for the 21st century, Vladimir Putin proclaimed that the country would remain, as always, alien to liberal democracy, although he looks beyond its borders: according to Karaganov, the task is to de-Westernize the planet in order to give rise to a post-liberal political world. This language may seduce cautious readers: it robs anti-colonialism of its words, but not its meanings.

Europe understood this message. So did Trumpism, and with it, the global far right.

The principles and values—let's call them by their name: liberal democracy—that provoke the current ire of the White House and the Kremlin constitute the foundation upon which the most generous and supportive regime of well-being and prosperity in history rests, a magnet for millions of foreigners from all latitudes. Political liberalism is not, however, a miracle cure for all social ills. The persistence of inequality and racism are some examples of its limits, widely shared by the United States and Russia.

However, the Europe detested by Moscow and now by Washington is the one that follows in the wake of that liberalism that rose up against despotism, the same one that in the 17th and 18th centuries invented the State , the separation of the three powers, and modern democracy (starting, let's say, with the publication of Thomas Hobbes's work). If the political plans of Trump and Putin are realized—the latter solemnly affirmed that Russia's destiny in this century is "to be a leading power" and added "we have achieved much and we can achieve everything"—then it will be remembered with nostalgia that political liberalism had been the only system that included, under penalty of ceasing to be liberal, the expression of conflicting interests in a political practice that embraced struggles for the improvement of the living conditions of the majority, women's rights, political plurality, respect for diversity, recognition of otherness...

Outside of liberal political regimes, these struggles have been and are either impossible or immeasurably more difficult, given that they are prohibited de facto and de jure. This was what happened under fascism, Nazism, apartheid, the misnamed "actually existing socialism," and it is what is also happening today in illiberal regimes like those of Russia and Nicaragua. In other countries, such as the United States and here, the Trump and Milei leaderships are forcibly pushing for a clear abandonment of this political liberalism.

US Vice President JD Vance explicitly intervened in the recent German elections to wish victory to the neo-Nazis of the Alternative for Germany party, and later praised British fascists. The first congress of European far-right and fascist movements took place in St. Petersburg, Russia, where openly anti-Semitic leaders and Nazi -nostalgic figures spoke. As I write these lines, I read that, with different but secondary nuances, Washington, Moscow, and the European far right expressed solidarity with Marine Le Pen, convicted in early April in France for embezzling public funds. A curious situation: those who condemn for ideological reasons and are also the greatest advocates of a very severe justice system simultaneously complain when, even if it isn't as brutal as they desire, this justice system catches up with them. At the same time, this conglomerate advocates fidelity to traditional values, the prohibition of abortion, and press censorship.

Blogger Curtis Yarvis (aka Mencius Moldbug), one of the main influencers of Trumpism, cited as an ideological reference by none other than JD Vance and the magnate Peter Thiel, creator of PayPal, explains that today the task is to end the “failed democratic experiment of the 19th and 20th centuries” and replace it with a monarchy of CEOs who must manage the country like a startup and ignore those who are not useful.

Liberal democracy is today evaluated from three perspectives. 1. It is believed that once achieved, it is eternal. 2. It is fought against and/or its death is decreed, to be replaced by technocratic and authoritarian executive powers, whether monarchical (Curtis Yarvis, Elon Musk, and the Trumpist thinkers) or dictatorial (Russia, China) and stateless (libertarians). 3. There is a desire to deepen it: improve the distribution of wealth, reduce inequality, gain rights, and recognize social heterogeneity. Faced with this simplified range of options, it becomes increasingly urgent to take sides. These are "existential" issues for humanity; they are not resolved quickly, but democracy wins if each person becomes aware of their position and acts accordingly.

Trumpism, strictly speaking, doesn't hide what it does or distort its political objective, that is, the destruction of democracy in its country. On the international level, although it's unknown what Trump will do tomorrow, his policy considerably weakens Europe and Ukraine vis-à-vis Russia. It seems he needs a free hand to redesign—for now, in complicity with his ally Putin—the new division of the world into economic-military and vassal empires.

To this question, there will likely be an answer soon, but it won't be definitive. On the one hand, European democracies, already weakened, could collapse without war. For example, if, as a result of the defense effort, achievements such as free healthcare and education or the reduced work week are undermined, while the far right manages to capitalize on the foreseeable popular discontent. Maneuvers such as Russia's financial aid to Marine Le Pen or its intervention in the campaign for the second round of the presidential elections in Romania this month are converging toward this same end. In both cases, they are just the tip of the iceberg of political "de-Westernization."

On the other hand, military aggression. Putin regularly threatens to use nuclear weapons, but he's unlikely to bomb London, Berlin, or Paris tomorrow, as some hotheads in Moscow demand. This doesn't mean there won't be war. There are several insoluble problems right now.

First, the Kremlin's word was devalued: a few days before the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov denounced talk of an invasion as pure "Western hysteria." Second, if Russia's destiny is to be "a leading power and achieve everything," Ukraine is not enough because the "existential" threat persists and is at its doorstep: Poland, Moldova, Romania, and the Baltic countries are governed, to a greater or lesser extent, by liberal democratic systems, and NATO is present in some of them.

I leave aside the fact that Russia's determined economic and industrial expansion toward eastern Asia, to strengthen its ambitions, will quickly clash with China. Third, and today's main problem: the dual perception of the conflict as "existential" by Russia and also by Europe makes satisfactory negotiations difficult.

History, however, is paved with negotiations. It's not impossible that one will be reached this time as well. But it would only mean kicking the definition down the road, clearing the immediate danger, because a major obstacle looms on the path to lasting peace: a new division of the world is brewing.

Trump may want to leave Europe in the Russian zone, but there is a catch: London and Paris possess nuclear weapons and not only do they not seem to aspire to be for Russia what the European "socialist" countries were for the Soviet Union , but they have just proposed extending nuclear protection to the whole of Europe, something that has already been accepted by Germany.

The division into zones of influence currently on the table is not the same as the one agreed upon at Yalta in 1945. One symptom of this is the current frequency of two words in conflicting discourses: empire and vassalage. Perhaps once again, science fiction works, with their imperial wars and miserable, subjugated subjects, are anticipating reality. Those who hold our destiny in their hands think in terms of Masters and Servants. The antidote could be the ancestral one, the rebellion of the people. But it coexists with another tradition, which a 23-year-old French nobleman, Étienne de la Boétie, defined precisely in his 1533 book, Voluntary Servitude .

Claudio S. Ingerflom is Director of the Bachelor's Program in History, UNSAM. He was Director of Research at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS, France) for several years.