The scene could have been from a dystopian film, yet it is all too real. A Ukrainian president humiliated on live television by a Donald Trump more determined than ever to reorient American foreign policy, an Emmanuel Macron playing the arsonist firefighter, and a Europe that, instead of seizing an unexpected opportunity for peace, is sinking ever deeper into escalation. This is where we stand.
The surreal press conference between Volodymyr Zelensky and Donald Trump has therefore failed to serve as a wake-up call for European leaders. Rather than acknowledging the American shift and seizing the opportunity presented by the proposal for a 60-day ceasefire—similar to those negotiated for Gaza and Lebanon—they have chosen to torpedo any chance of de-escalation. London, Brussels… Everywhere, European heads of state are scrambling to organize what they call a “strategic resurgence,” but which looks much more like a desperate attempt to avoid the inevitable. Macron, ever adept at empty rhetoric, repeats ad nauseam that “nothing is off the table,” while simultaneously explaining that it is a quarter to midnight before the collapse of the international order. What order? The one he himself is helping to destroy by refusing any serious initiative to achieve a negotiated peace in Ukraine?
The observation is clear: the Europeans sabotaged the American peace plan. A plan that, however, would have made it possible to impose a strategic pause in the conflict, to freeze hostilities and finally open the way to serious negotiations. But it seems that this perspective did not suit the leaders of the Old Continent. Far from easing tensions, Macron and his counterparts are clinging to a fictitious European leadership, seeking to impose a common defense project that has only one objective: to anchor Europe in a logic of confrontation with Russia, even if it means plunging the continent into the unknown.
You have to be blind not to see that this escalation is bringing us dangerously close to a major conflict. A war – let’s call it that – that would allow European leaders to stay in power without going through the electoral box, by invoking a permanent state of exception. No need to justify their economic incompetence, their social failure, their total disconnection from reality: war becomes the ultimate escape, the last pretext to impose their agenda without democratic debate.
What is most astonishing is that the majority of European heads of state seem to prefer confrontation to peace. Who among them still dares to talk about serious negotiations with Moscow? Who among them understands that the only viable future for Ukraine lies in compromise, not insane escalation? While Europeans suffer from inflation, deindustrialization and a lasting energy crisis, their leaders have only one obsession: to prepare the next round of conflict and open Pandora's box of accelerated militarization under the guise of "European solidarity."
If Europe still had leaders worthy of the name, it would position itself as a mediator, a stabilizing force. Instead, it is locking itself into a dangerous following, complicit in the rise of dangers. “It is a quarter to midnight,” Macron tells us. What he does not say is that it is he and his counterparts who are deliberately moving the hands of the clock forward.
