The autocratic Alliance

And how we learnt to live with Evil

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The United States, with the second re-election of Donald Trump in January 2025, has delivered powerful shocks to international politics.

The UN, NATO, global trade, the war in Ukraine and the genocide in Palestine. These are the main arenas impacted by the decisions of the second Republican term. The U.S. has effectively withdrawn from the “Western front,” reshaping international balances. The National Security Strategy, published a few days ago, has transformed what was “merely” a political orientation into a long-term strategic doctrine.

On a global level, we are witnessing two major trends, embodied respectively by the United States and Russia.

On the one hand, Donald Trump as sponsor of international law & order. On the other, Vladimir Putin as leader of a “coalition of chaos,” intent on blowing up the table in order to reshuffle the deck.

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The United States

The Abraham Accords, the invoked necessity of Ukrainian territorial concessions in the name of an unjust peace on the ground, the farcical performance staged in Anchorage, the withdrawn hand from Taiwan — and thus momentarily extended to the Dragon, the relentless war against the U.S. trade deficit and the goal of nationalizing production, putting a leash on globalization.

The examples abound: the President’s desire to pursue a Monroe Doctrine no longer continental but global. To domesticate the forces of disorder that undermine American interests worldwide.

To go down in history as a warlord, the man who put an end to the conflicts of the early century: it matters little if at the cost of enormous suffering and injustice, as the Ukrainian and Palestinian peoples remind us every day.

To be remembered as the one who first reined in “runaway” globalization — the same globalization that in the 1980s and ’90s struck the broadest and most loyal segment of his electorate: over fifty, white, living in rural or suburban areas of the country.

Him. Completely alien to his voters by social background. Chameleon-like, he blends in, senses their grievances even before they are born, earning total consensus.

This is 21st-century democracy: tyrannized by the will of the masses, loudly demanding its own end and transformation into autocracy at the hands of the supreme leader.

To understand what is happening today, it is useful to remember that American history is an accordion of openings and closures, an incessant shuttle between these two extremes with few nuances in between.

From the “America for Americans” of the early 19th-century Monroe Doctrine, to the recurring “America First” that has periodically resurfaced in public debate: usually hand in hand with xenophobic and supremacist cultural movements such as the Ku Klux Klan first, McCarthyism later, and the MAGA movement today.

American exceptionalism casting its shadow over the world, Winthrop’s “city upon a hill” looking down from above, intoxicated by its supremacy and ethical obsessions. But also isolationism, a Pavlovian reflex that activates whenever this awareness of being the best is burned.

Opening and closing.

The typical supporter of the MAGA movement — before embracing the Trumpian cause as a faith — at the turn of the century was the victim of something akin to post-traumatic stress.

On September 11, 2001, the country turned on the television and discovered it was at war. Until a minute earlier, it believed itself hegemonic and secure, untouchable, alone at the summit of the world. From that moment began a spiral of events whose long tail we see today in the domestic and international political scenarios we comment on daily.

A shot in the silence triggered panic reactions that since 2001 have totally compromised the rational capacity of American public opinion.

On September 10, the United States were the victors of the Cold War and the spearhead of globalization, leaders in trade and technological innovation worldwide. In this sense they were also the planet’s “ideological” leader, given both the consolidation of China’s capitalist turn initiated in the previous decade and Russia’s post-1991 democratic experiment (with all its stumbles, it must be said).

To move, in the span of a single day, from that almost unreal horizon to the scenes of terror witnessed glued to television screens conveys the emotional whiplash.

Let us remain inside the head of the average American, without venturing into the international scenario and the reasoning of the American ruling class of the time (which certainly carried enormous weight but are not strictly necessary for our argument).

From the first months after the event, there was a vertiginous rise in distrust toward ethnic minorities and new immigrants. The explosion of xenophobia went hand in hand with that of Islamophobia, a circumstance traceable to the supposed ideological matrix of the attack. This scenario resulted overall in a significant increase in episodes of violence and social marginalization, unprecedented in the preceding decades.

Public opinion lined up compactly in defense of the Bush administration, legitimizing even the decisions most harmful to personal liberty. In the name of security and the fight against terrorism, restrictions were accepted that only the day before would have unleashed fierce waves of protest from civil society.

The Patriot Act dealt a decisive blow to American freedom.

Among other things:

• government officials were given the green light to conduct searches without prior notification to the individual under investigation

• preventive detention was authorized (even for periods longer than those provided by law and without the need for formal charges) of foreign nationals suspected of terrorism

• the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was granted the possibility of requesting, even without a warrant, data on citizens accessing libraries, websites, banks, and so forth

  
  

These are some of the controversial provisions introduced by the federal law, which in any case convey an idea of the climate of collective hysteria that followed the attack and the securitarian demands that arose within American society.

Only a few months after 9/11, 55% of the population believed that the average citizen should accept these quasi–Asian autocracy measures and renounce civil liberty in order to combat terrorism.

In hindsight, September 11 functioned as a catalyst for the most regressive, closed, and patriotically insecure mentality within American civil society. The dark side of America First — a dream that runs through the country’s history like a trigger and that only the most burning shocks have managed to ignite, reducing it to ashes.

The country never processed that trauma and, gripped by terror, in the years that followed fell prey to reactive and hysterical attitudes, emotional and disproportionate responses. The rational capacity to confront problems within part of its civil society gravely compromised.

Without engaging in reckless logical leaps, it is not difficult to see in these dynamics the ideological matrix of the MAGA movement.

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Russia

In Russia, consent in the strict sense is not a concern; instead, a democratic little theater is staged for external spectators (fake opposition, fake elections, and everything else). The Russian “democratura” is an autocracy in every respect; it skillfully disguises its profoundly Asian nature in democratic garments that do not belong to it.

A bear dressed as a Bolshoi étoile.

The element of fiction satisfies Russia’s eternal need for international recognition — European recognition above all: the irreducible inferiority complex that runs through the country’s history.

For more than twenty years now, Vladimir Putin has been the principal agent of chaos at the international level.

He took Russia by the hand in Christmas ’99, exhausted by decades of Soviet failures and — most recently — dismembered by the voracious carve-ups during the “democracy” of the oligarchs, when it became the private playground of unscrupulous men. From that Christmas onward, the Tsar had a single mission: to restore autocratic order at home (child’s play, in a country that for eleven centuries had known nothing else) and to satisfy the perennial need for recognition from the West. “We are a great power — nuclear, moreover — we want to be treated as such: you will understand it the easy way or the hard way.”

The latter were necessary — and continue to be.

Specifically, chaos. A lethal cocktail of traditional warfare (Chechnya, Georgia, and Ukraine — excluding all the scenarios in which it operated “only” alongside friendly forces, Syria above all), dezinformatsiya and hybrid warfare.

To foment chaos in order to destabilize that Western-led international order which, at the turn of the century, was so little inclined — from Moscow’s point of view — to recognize and treat Russia as a global great power. To reshuffle the deck, to blow up the table, to enter Western nightmares as the primary threat to their leadership. Use of force and violation of other countries’ sovereignty; cyber warfare; satellite disruption operations in space; politically motivated assassinations at home and abroad, even with the use of chemical agents; electoral interference and destabilization of public opinion — on the ground or on social media, through disinformation campaigns employing armies of bots; use of energy resources as a weapon of political retaliation.

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Russia and The United States, together

Two apparently opposite aims, then, the Trumpian and the Putinian ones: order and chaos. And yet, on closer inspection, in the long term the paths of the two converge at one point: autocracy.

If in Russia it reigns uncontested — Putin’s objective being to exclude any possible alternative — in the United States we see attempts to promote its rise. To suffocate the system of checks and balances; to repress the ferment and autonomy of civil society as a counterweight to state power; to silence dissent by co-opting the world of information; to accustom citizens to an elementary and instinctive language of hatred; to divide society into factions whose only reason for existing is to annihilate one another.

This within their respective national spheres. The two leaders, however, also play dirty in the international context — one actively, as in Putin’s case, and the other through a guilty and cowardly tacit consent, as Trump does. Here the red lines — the thresholds deemed not to be crossed according to the sensibility underpinning international law — have gradually shifted forward, perhaps to the point of disappearing. What twenty years ago was inconceivable now passes almost unnoticed, the international public opinion having grown accustomed to accepting even the most unpalatable power grabs.

There has been, in this sense — domestically and beyond — a precise, long-term strategy aimed at testing the reactions and the possible readiness of Western societies in response to violations of the international order (Russia) and of the rules of coexistence of liberal democracies (USA).

In the United States we have witnessed the violent contestation of electoral results — which incited the assault on the Capitol in 2021 — and transfers of power far from peaceful that have irreparably undermined the population’s trust in the democratic process. The systematic labeling of the press and political opponents as enemies of the people. Arbitrary travel bans targeting specific nationalities. The progressive erosion (this — it must be said — by both Democrats and Republicans) of the autonomy of the Federal Reserve, whose excessively permissive attitude toward governments’ expansionary policies must be read in political terms, an assist to the party in power to guarantee its re-election, at everyone else’s expense. The complicit silence in the face of the genocide in Gaza, which has definitively alienated from the country the sympathies of that part of the world which, a few decades ago, still managed to see in the United States the champion par excellence of the liberal international order. From 2001 to today this capital of trust has been completely lost, and it is perhaps the greatest tragedy of which we, as Westerners, must all become aware.

Russia has progressively taken a sledgehammer to the international order. Period. The examples mentioned above stand, but it is useful to recall also the news of recent weeks: violations of the airspace of sovereign nations, cyber warfare operations against foreign civilian infrastructure, missile attacks on Ukrainian civilians to break the country’s resistance.

A line that runs from Washington to Moscow, then.

If it is clear what the affinities are between the American and Russian autocratic projects and their respective strategies in the international arena, less easy to imagine is the geopolitical arrangement that should take shape under their impulse.

Launching into reasoning of this kind too often means, as we see in media and on social networks, announcing apocalyptic scenarios that do not help us understand what is happening around us.

If it is true, in fact, that a certain degree of unpredictability is irreducible when speaking of international relations… it is equally true that the power frameworks of any country — and even more so of global great powers — move within codes of thought and values transmitted to them. Varying on the theme, perhaps, but never overturning them excessively. Deciphering these codes, the subterranean lines that run beneath global history, helps — and not a little — to bring order to the chaos of events.

Let us start from a fact: both Putin and Trump, in international politics, reason according to imperial logics. Pursuing their respective national interests, to the detriment of third countries and at the cost of injustices sanctioned by international law, is for them fundamental and just. There is no room for countries, laws, or rights that obstruct their path.

The long-term objective seems to be the re-settling of a global equilibrium, guaranteed by the management by the two empires of their respective spheres of influence. A modern and global revisitation of the balance-of-power politics promoted by the Congress of Vienna at the beginning of the 19th century. No longer, therefore, a “Concert of Europe,” but rather a concert of global autocracy.

On closer inspection, the analogies hold.

In both cases, two hundred years ago as today, at the basis of collaboration among nations there was above all the hatred they shared for certain ideas.

In 1815 the European powers gathered in Vienna to restore order after Napoleon’s imperial adventures and the spread, across the soil of the old continent, of ideas they found unpalatable.

It was not merely a matter of redrawing borders, but of containing two forces perceived as destabilizing. On the one hand political liberalism born of the Revolution — with its claims for constitutions, civil rights, and popular sovereignty. On the other nationalism, fueled both by the revolutionary experience and by the Napoleonic campaigns that had spread the idea of the self-determination of peoples.

One must never forget that, however much Napoleon has gone down in history as an imperial-autocratic sovereign, in the minds of the European monarchies of the time he was the foremost promoter of the liberal forces born of the Revolution.

Just as the Congress opposed the French emperor and the new evils of nascent liberalism, Putin and Trump today are the undisputed leaders of the anti-globalization front.

In their imagination, and especially in that of those who vote for or support them, globalization is nothing but an incurable evil from which to free themselves. It has led to the exponential growth of global free trade, to the significant increase of migratory flows, to intolerable ideological perversions due to secularization and the emancipation of consciences. In their mission they are backed by substantial segments of the global population. These are people left behind, belonging to the poorest and least educated social strata: globalization represents a world of progress to which they will never have access, which they do not understand and which frightens them.

It is interesting to note another analogy between the two historical periods, apparently so alien to one another.

The French Revolution, whose ideological debris the European sovereigns sought to eradicate in Vienna, is canonically considered the moment in which so-called “Progressivism” consolidated itself.

The French bourgeoisie and its Enlightenment ideas had in 1789 the moment of consecration of their efforts, against the Ancien Régime. Globalization, almost two hundred years later, is a daughter of Progressivism, understood as a political philosophy that promotes the progress of society through secularization, reforms, innovation. Then as now, the European sovereigns — like Putin and Trump — fought for the restoration of order.

A large portion of our societies today demands protection, security at any cost against the “uncontrolled forces of globalization.” Power promptly presents itself as the pure exercise of force, autocratic, because it must respond to this popular demand.

The fact that Putin is the “leader of a ‘coalition of chaos,’ aimed at blowing up the table in order to reshuffle the deck” — as stated earlier — might seem discordant with these arguments. How can this definition be reconciled with the thesis that the two leaders are seeking to restore an ancien régime preceding globalization?

The contradiction disappears if one considers that the Tsar enjoys a completely different reputation compared to his American colleague. He does not possess his hegemonic position — militarily, politically, economically — and must fight at all costs to have it recognized. To construct, in the minds of foreign citizens who are victims of Russian hybrid warfare, the myth of his power. The aim is to evoke the power of the Kremlin which, like all things merely evoked, leaves free rein to imagination, conducive to overestimating its scope.

In the long term the Trump-Putin-led Autocratic International, if victorious, will collaborate in placing the propulsive drives of globalization — especially the ideological-cultural ones — under a suffocating lid.

One of the main instruments they will likely use will be the coordinated management of the major political realities external to the two empires, Europe above all.

It is unlikely to imagine a direct control of those territories, however much international scenarios have accustomed us to everything in recent years. It is easier to foresee an indirect one, as the European political landscape seems to be taking shape. The parties riding the wave on the old continent are all, at least in the major countries, traceable to the Autocratic International. Brothers of Italy and the League, the National Front in France, Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, Fidesz in Hungary, the FPÖ in Austria, Vox in Spain, the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands. Some openly and some stealthily, but all in any case economically and ideologically financed by the two empires. The polls leave little room for imagination: when these parties rise to power the two empires will have their satraps sitting in parliaments across Europe, ready to kneel and await instructions. With good peace to the libertarian claims against “stepmother” Europe.

It is well known, after all, that for many freedom simply consists in choosing the most convenient master.

The two autocrats see in the old continent a terrain of conquest, an implicit fact in the imperial logic that moves them. The European parties that have risen to prominence in recent years are children of the Russo-American Autocratic International. Once elected they will implement measures aimed at combating immigration, apparently the continent’s main problem. The historical convergence that will see all the aforementioned parties simultaneously in government in Europe will do nothing but create within our civil societies a climate of passive acceptance of their decisions. Even the most unpalatable ones.

Many believe that the levels of brutality and violence reached in Trump’s United States cannot be touched here. A partially founded conviction.

European civil society and American civil society have not experienced the last twenty years in the same way. On the one hand the tensions following 9/11, with the subsequent war on terror and the hysterical support for wars in the Middle East, later revealed to be true martyrdoms. On the other the social divisions generated by growing inequalities.

It must also be said that the average level of political awareness of the European citizen is undoubtedly more solid than that of the American.

One always forgets, however, that politics today moves on social media. A non-place where we arrive with our personal baggage and our identities, certainly. We are not a tabula rasa; when we encounter content on social media we digest it with our particular sensibilities. And yet we also know that platforms are designed to tickle our lowest instincts, to stimulate the most irrational and emotional part of our mind.

“Do you think that European society will never be able to reach the levels of polarization and violence attained by the American one?” I confess that, if someone were to ask me this question, I would have to resort to my best skills of dissimulation (which are, moreover, scarce) to answer with conviction “Yes.”

A Europe under the suffocating lid of the Trump-Putin-led Autocratic International, hostile to Black people, to homosexuals, to Progress and to secularization. A nightmare.

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The section that follows was written

and completed on 01/22/2026

In the meantime, many things have happened. So many that evoking them in chronological order is difficult: from Venezuela to Iran, from Greenland to Sudan and Gaza, in addition to the various negotiation tables opened over Ukraine, Mercosur, U.S. tariffs, and so on.

It is not a matter of recounting events, but rather, four months later, of reflecting on two aspects.

The first. What are the fixed points of the previous analysis; which, instead, have been totally or partially disproven by the test of events. I leave the verdict on this point to the reader, less interesting for the purpose of understanding the problems. It would be, if anything, to flatter or mortify the ego of the undersigned, his capacity for analysis. Frankly, it does not matter.

The second. The fact that today, in four months, international political scenarios can undergo Copernican revolutions. It would be a superficial and banal reflection to reiterate, for the umpteenth time, how we live in enormously accelerated times compared, say, to a century ago.

It becomes stimulating, instead, when one lingers on the almost theatrical dynamics underlying events: there are international stages, state actors, a script that is written day by day, recording the moods of the audience — that is, the reaction to the most unthinkable plot twists and power plays.

! A small premise. The reader partially or totally blinded, forgive me, by that anti-Americanism which is a bitter enemy of clarity of analysis — especially in international politics — may skip this part altogether. !

For instance. Would we ever have imagined seeing the United States militarily invade a country, remove its president — admittedly corrupt and pitiful — overnight, suspend its democratic process — needless to say, already widely compromised — by force? All this without referring in the slightest to Congress, much less to the UN Security Council. A veritable invasion passed off as a police operation against drug trafficking (on international territory, where by definition the jurisdiction of national law enforcement ceases, in any country in the world).

Someone will object: something similar has already happened. Above all, Iraq 2003. And it is a partially legitimate objection (without getting bogged down in the legal, military, and political details of the two operations).

The United States of America have never been an actor immune from controversial choices, nor from strategic errors of enormous magnitude.

But that is not the point. It is not a matter of constructing an immaculate image, nor of denying the fractures produced by unilateral interventions.

The point is that we are speaking of the country historically the first creator and promoter of the UN and NATO (and even earlier, of the League of Nations). The country whose human and other sacrifices made it possible to defeat the coalitions of Evil in the two world wars. The country that politically, economically, and militarily supported the architecture of European security in the postwar period. That financed the military and value-based shield which for decades protected Europe from those who wanted it enslaved.

It is precisely this tension that makes the grotesque invasion of Venezuela so significant.

The backbone of the Atlantic order today appears to distance itself from the rules it itself codified. And it does so — this being the most relevant and central fact for our reasoning — no longer even worrying about preserving that semblance of formal respect for norms which on other occasions it had maintained.

The effect is not simply that of a regional crisis, but of a symbolic and systemic shift. Not because the West is devoid of guilt, but because the equilibrium built after the Second World War was also founded on Washington’s normative and institutional credibility.

And it is precisely this credibility — more than military force — that enabled the consolidation of open societies and international law in the Atlantic world.

We are speaking of the architrave upon which decades of peace since ’45 have rested.

This is not, as some will say, a consolatory myth. Nor a moral absolution of Western guilt. There are historical facts, very precise and hardly open to interpretation.

There are names and surnames of human beings who lived between the Second World War and its aftermath, endowed with incredible strategic foresight — political, economic, military — and architects of a historical miracle: Dean Acheson, Charles E. Bohlen, W. Averell Harriman, George F. Kennan, Robert A. Lovett, John J. McCloy. Lawyers, bankers, diplomats. Successful lives, they chose to devote themselves body and soul to the question of how to rebuild the devastated European continent. To become full-time presidential advisers, responding to a solid sense of civil commitment. Above all, they were lifelong friends. Having met during their formative years, they found themselves working side by side during the years of reconstruction. The backbone of open societies, ruling classes worthy of the name.

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The facts.

Since 1945 the great powers of Western Europe have no longer waged war against one another, an event without precedent in the modern history of the continent. A historical anomaly, in every respect. An equilibrium resting on concrete pillars, planted above all by the United States of America. The distillate of a highly sophisticated cocktail: nuclear deterrence and permanent American military presence on the continent, transatlantic economic integration, containment of the USSR.

Without the American umbrella this historical anomaly would not have occurred.

For the skeptics: what is the most evident difference between the post–WWI and the post–WWII periods? The degree of proximity — not only ideal but concretely physical — of the United States to our continent.

In 1918 they did not integrate themselves permanently into the European system, they did not even enter the League of Nations, of which President Wilson had been the first creator and promoter.

Only twenty years passed, from 1918, before they returned to shed the blood of their brothers on European soil. Today, thanks to the foresight of the men mentioned above, Europe has almost forgotten what the expression fratricidal war means. A true anthropological evolution has taken place, especially if we consider what the old continent witnessed for centuries.

Another fact: the economic reconstruction guaranteed by the Marshall Plan, which politically and socially stabilized Europe devastated in the aftermath of ’45. A great deal of money, an enormous amount. But, at a deeper level of political analysis, above all the stabilization of European democracies in their moment of maximum vulnerability. A strategic American act but above all one of political foresight, which prevented Europe from falling back into the crisis–radicalization–war cycle.

To complete this design, in the industrious silence that is the premise of great deeds, European figures such as Konrad Adenauer, Robert Schuman and his trusted Jean Monnet, Alcide De Gasperi and Paul-Henri Spaak contributed. They gave birth to the ECSC (European Coal and Steel Community), the EEC (European Economic Community), the EEA or Euratom (European Atomic Energy Community).

This symphony between the ruling classes of the two sides of the Atlantic made possible economic cooperation between former enemies and the stabilization of the continent.

Furthermore, the military deterrence ensured by NATO, with the American strategic guarantee that made any conflict among member states unlikely and deterred Soviet expansionism during the Cold War.

NATO was first and foremost a military shield. What is of interest, however, as a collateral effect of its activity, is above all its function of internal stabilization in post-’45 Europe. European security was “outsourced” to the United States, a decision that made it possible to neutralize certain historical rivalries. Franco-German reconciliation was finally possible, under the American umbrella which warded off any intention of revanche with a late-nineteenth-century flavor.

The external security of the continent, guaranteed by the United States, provided another enormous strategic advantage. Without the American umbrella the Europeans would never have been able to afford integration at the community level, economic and otherwise. A common market, a European welfare state, round tables to define the terms and timing of reconciliation and future collaboration. Taking care of the continent’s defense meant allowing the European ship to sail in calm waters, to reach port without the jolts that had destroyed it in previous decades.

These are the facts.

We are speaking of the systemic role the USA played in the postwar period in founding the Atlantic alliance and the European pax. Of the positive repercussions this axis had for the global front defending open societies.

Rule of law; free market; welfare state; free movement of goods and people; civil rights; international monetary and financial stabilization to guarantee predictability, growth, and market integration; an international order based on rules, treaties, and permanent organizations; circulation of human capital and stimulus to technological innovation.

We are not yet speaking of the degenerations of American foreign policy in the second half of the 20th century.

To make of these two phases of Atlantic history a single narrative is an intellectually dishonest operation. More likely, a short-sighted reading of facts born of distorted judgments, children of emotional prejudices. That anti-Americanism regardless of circumstances which is so widespread in Europe.

We are speaking not of a perfect world but of a system that, for over seventy years, prevented the return of systemic war in Europe and guaranteed the continent the longest period of stability and growth in its history.

Whatever our friends may say — with their interpretative acrobatics, according to which the post-’45 world and today’s world are, one does not quite understand how, the same scum — many things have changed in recent years.

No, it is not true that “the United States have always behaved like this.”

The post-’45 Western peace has been stained, yes, by the events we all know, which we all evoke to downsize our pride as white Caucasians and to indulge the sense of guilt that is also part of our civilization. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan: I do not need to make a shopping list.

But the level of impunity, of lightness and carelessness with which the Trump administration handled the Palestinian genocide and Operation Absolute Resolve is unprecedented.

Attention: above all, we have changed.

Remaining with Venezuela. On January 3, 80 people died, civilians and soldiers. How many Western citizens are aware of this? Among them, how many digested the matter within the span of a coffee break?

In Gaza, for more than two years, a humanitarian tragedy unprecedented in recent decades has been unfolding. A level of moral collapse, of compromise with Evil, that sinisterly recalls the Holocaust.

There exists a threshold of pain that is invisible, not physical. It reacts to ideal tensions, not mechanical ones. Each time the premises of Atlantic peace and of the survival of our open societies are violated, it enters a state of alert and reacts. It activates first to understand what is rotten in the events that solicit it, then to act and take concrete countermeasures.

Silently, with a very clear plan in mind, autocrats around the world have subjected us to small tensions. Year after year, apparently nothing dramatic. Small negligible strains, viruses that enter the organism and are not immediately detected, proliferating undisturbed. They have shifted, centimeter by centimeter, that threshold without us realizing it. And so, precisely now that autocratic pressure has reached unsustainable levels, we find ourselves insensitive to external stimuli.

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Enemies of ourselves, in Europe

The violence we exercise upon ourselves produces infinitely greater damage than that which others use against us. Today, whether we like it or not, we are our own fiercest enemies.

The last years have been disturbing not only for the indiscriminate violence we have witnessed, on so many global fronts. Also because, day after day, the truth we wanted to ignore has revealed itself before our eyes, intoxicated as we were by a precarious material well-being. A process underway for decades, slow and subterranean, which today fully shows its effects.

Today we know that we are consuming ourselves from within. That our democracies are indeed also destroyed from the outside but only as a consequence of an internal rotting.

An inestimable patrimony has been consumed. Inestimable because immaterial. Through the erosion of the values, the institutions, and the language that made possible the miracle of our open societies.

A bombed building can be rebuilt, even in record time. Try instead to convince yourself again, for example, that it is worth sacrificing for basic human rights, when you have accepted the most heinous violations of human life.

The enemies of Europe are not (not only) the autocracies that threaten it. We are, when we renounce defending what defines us! What differentiates us from autocratic regimes!

Words evoke ideas, ideas evoke actions, actions shape our destinies. Starting from the front of words, the first level of confrontation, we have retreated across the entire line: we have renounced fighting the battles that, lost from the outset, are now marking our destinies.

Concrete cases.

Thinking of the European Union as a technocratic project before a political one, economic before moral.

Europe has made the market, the currency, regulations and directives its foundational terrain. It has deliberately avoided the more slippery — and for that very reason more decisive — level of all: that of European civic identity, from which the necessary corollary of our civil commitment as Europeans descends.

A functional but fragile building has been erected, reminiscent of the immense glass facades of the buildings in Brussels. A structure incapable of generating loyalty when the cost of belonging becomes tangible.

An aside. I am a realist. Pragmatic. Incurable. The single market, the common currency, regulatory harmonization have not been a mistake: they have produced real prosperity, stability, interdependence.

I go further. I am convinced that this beautiful building we have constructed will be saved only by building — alongside the European Union as it is — a more pragmatic and realist core. Restricted, cohesive, demanding.

An avant-garde of resolute and concrete countries. A hard core that does not merely coordinate but decides what history requires to be decided. That does not merely harmonize but takes on the responsibilities that history requires to be taken on. That does not merely produce regulations but exercises sovereignty over decisive matters.

Defense, industrial policy, energy security, strategic research. A political center capable of embodying the “subjective factor” that guides and directs decisive moments in history is still missing. That set of will, capacity, initiative and organization that makes things happen when objective conditions are already mature.

It is not a new idea, nor is it mine.

The idea of a two-speed Europe — evoked pragmatically by Angela Merkel — first brought to public debate this possible development of European institutions.

The writer believes it is not a compromise downward but a wager upward. A Europe in which those who are ready integrate more, those who are not remain nevertheless within the broader orbit. Without impositions but above all without the empty rhetoric that today slows us down, preventing us from escaping the grip of the autocratic International. A Europe that evolves by attraction, not by conformism and inertia.

This “Europe within Europe” would, over time, end up attracting the EU into its orbit. The tired body of the Union would fall into the arms of that avant-garde almost by political gravity.

It is the institutions that function, that decide, that set the example and obtain loyalty that naturally become the moral and operational center of the entire system.

The Union, in this way, would not be denied but surpassed. Not for the worse, but for the better.

“When the facts change, I change my opinion,” someone said. The facts have shown us that if Europe wants to play at the table of the great powers it must change course. It is not empty rhetoric but the most basic test of reality.

In the name of pragmatism we should be willing to sacrifice the European Union as we know it, to transform it by destroying it from within.

And yet, the most pragmatic and decisive question remains the one introduced earlier: the failure to build a true European civic identity. It is not a naïve argument, an anachronistic nostalgia for a Europe of peoples sung in ballads and never practiced.

The problem is that European institutions — whatever form they take, EU or non-EU — function as long as the happy island that we are is not battered by adverse winds.

Let me put it clearly. If belonging to the European institution is perceived as a multiplier of advantages and not as a request for sacrifices, everyone enjoys it happily. And when contingencies turn negative? When one has to sit at the table and ask uncomfortable questions: who can advance investments for this expenditure? Who is free riding on accounts borne by others? Who takes responsibility for the defense of that specific border? Who is not innovating their respective national strategic sectors, thereby endangering the solidity of the continent?

Sacrifice, giving oneself to others. Who manages to glimpse, in the long term, the fact that these behaviors foresee initial expenditures for final returns multiplied tenfold? Who has a horizon of meaning solid enough to render those sacrifices understandable. Better, necessary. It is not a matter of justice, much less of convenience.

Europe, whatever name one gives it, is a destiny: it lives in the sphere of historical necessities, breathes the purest air of the solitary summit that stands immense, observable from every point of the continent.

Paradoxically, therefore, it is precisely the ideal element that is the most pragmatic of all.

The only one capable of holding when well-being fails. That is, almost always (the last seventy years have been a unicum precisely because our founding fathers had accepted, to the sound of gas chambers and blitzkrieg, that the universal law of the universe is entropic chaos).

Political identity, shared values, the sense of communal belonging are strategic reserves. The European Union bypassed the accumulation of these reserves, gently cradled by the calm. Finding itself without them, instead, in moments of storm. That is, now.

One cannot choose to be post-political, unless one is already political. Politics is that wasp which, expelled from the door, re-enters through the window. Often angrier than before. Today it answers to the name — one must always name names, another good practice that the last decades of European cowardice have taken from us — of sordid, paid-off parties: Fratelli d’Italia, AfD, Front National, Fidesz and so on. Hysterical and pathetic nationalisms, insecure and resentful sovereigntisms, identity markets fueled by populist leaders who peddle negative forms of belonging, constructed more against someone than for something.

Europe today errs because it demands discipline without having built a true framework of identity-based meaning, the first brick of a civil commitment worthy of the name.

Without this shared value matrix each returns to measuring interest on an exclusively national, immediate, short-sighted basis. The European error was not having been too idealistic, but not having been idealistic enough at the right moment. Today, under the pressure of the autocratic International, we pay the price of this stumble.

We no longer know what the democracy of open societies requires, nor why it is worth defending it when it is attacked. A society that reduces politics to management and citizenship to Schengen prepares the ground for its own civil death, from which descend the economic, health, military ones…

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Before us, the Americans were the worst enemies of themselves.

The empire has never truly questioned the meaning of its own hegemony, though evident. American exceptionalism historically struggles to go beyond mystical ardor, to found itself in a true civic self-awareness capable of guiding it in the salient moments of its history.

From great powers derive great responsibilities. The last seventy years of American history tell us how all administrations, more or less, have replaced the language of responsibility with that of force. Above all — here lies the decisive point — they replaced the language of example that guides and inspires with that of the unpunished exception that crushes.

Here the decisive match is played, at a global level. It is not possible to deny, at least for those who care about facts, that the management of U.S. foreign policy has progressively eroded that value capital which served as the unassailable foundation of the Atlantic alliance. Eroded, unfortunately, in the eyes of all. Of that global South that looked at our societies as an example, to be copied at home or reached at all costs by putting one’s life on the line. In our own eyes: forced as we have been — and are — into an inhuman effort of coherence to defend those founding values. The same ones raped in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. Seen from outside, we are probably victims of psychosis.

On the domestic front, in the United States, the erosion of this value capital has had consequences.

9/11 is the moment in which the drift becomes irreversible: fear is institutionalized, security elevated to the supreme value, freedom a privilege subject to the whims of power.

The Patriot Act and the normalization of the state of exception, on the domestic front, are children of this value erosion. When a democracy accepts the idea that its principles are a luxury to be suspended in difficult moments, it ceases to be a model. It returns to being simply a power among others. The richest, militarily prepared, globalized and ethnically varied, yes. But that quid that in the eyes of others legitimized it as the pivot upon which the system revolves is lost. It loses the silent and implicit consent of the round tables at which it sat recognized as leader.

In light of what has occurred in recent months — the casual use of force, the contempt for multilateral institutions, the indifference toward international law — this discourse assumes considerable specific weight.

The Trumpian United States embody exactly this: a superpower that has stopped questioning the limits of its own power, an indispensable premise for it to be exercised with that minimum of legitimacy without which true leaders cannot do. A superpower convinced that force suffices to guarantee order, and that order is preferable to justice.

Yes. Democracies can die of fatigue, habit, habituation to injustice. They can survive formally, continuing to vote and legislate, while their substantive content empties out.

Let us return to the threshold of invisible pain of which I spoke at the beginning.

Indifference in the face of others’ death, the rapid absorption of events that once would have shaken consciences, are not accidental deviations: they indicate that we have internalized the logic of the exception, accepted the idea that order is worth more than right, stability more than dignity.

We must find the courage to rethink ourselves as a moral community — capable of limits, self-awareness and of thinking for itself an impassable common value framework — or the autocratic International will not need to win. It will only need to wait for its adversaries to continue, methodically, to be enemies of themselves.

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The autocratic Alliance.