In der Woche schüttelte die USA die Welt Europas

**The Munich Security Conference, held from February 14 to 16, saw a fracturing of the transatlantic relationship. European leaders will hold an emergency meeting at the Elysée Palace on Monday.**

Shaken, worried and sometimes outraged, the hundreds of representatives of Europe’s diplomatic and military elite who gathered at the Munich Security Conference over the weekend left the snow-covered Bavarian capital on Sunday, February 16, with the impression that they had lived through three days that had shaken the world. Or at least their world, that of an ironclad transatlantic relationship, a pillar of the international system since WWII, which suddenly appears deeply fractured. The Finnish president, Alexander Stubb, tried to sum up this feeling with a nod to Lenin, to whom he attributed this phrase: „There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.“

To say that history between Europe and the United States has accelerated over the past week would be an understatement. On Monday, February 10, in an atmosphere that had already been electric since President [Donald Trump’s inauguration](https://www.lemonde.fr/en/videos/video/2025/01/21/trump-s-inauguration-watch-the-ceremony-s-highlights_6737247_108.html) on January 20, Vice President JD Vance, invited to Paris, [lectured the European Union](https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2025/02/12/at-the-paris-summit-the-us-charge-against-ai-censorship_6738046_19.html) on its „over-regulation“ of artificial intelligence. On Wednesday, February 12, Washington fired its first salvo with the announcement of a most cordial telephone conversation between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin with the aim of putting an end to the war Putin is waging against Ukraine. The American leader then called his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, to inform him of this.

Unsettled, the European defense ministers left Brussels for Munich. The worst was yet to come. On Friday, Vance delivered a virulent diatribe on the way Europe manages its democracy and stifles freedom. „A fascist, anti-European speech,“ said one of the diplomats present. Without providing the slightest answer to the audience’s main question, namely how the Trump administration intends to make peace in Ukraine, the vice president refused to meet with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, preferring instead to meet the candidate of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, Alice Weidel, as the country’s in the middle of an election campaign. An unprecedented interference tinged with provocation: clearly, [ideological war has been declared](https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/02/15/in-munich-jd-vance-declares-ideological-war-on-europe_6738189_4.html). „They want to kill us and divide Europe,“ said German Christian Democrat MP Norbert Röttgen, a long-time Atlanticist.

**Read the full article here:** [**https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/02/17/the-week-the-us-shook-europe-s-world_6738249_4.html**](https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/02/17/the-week-the-us-shook-europe-s-world_6738249_4.html)

Europe should offer all US citizens with graduate degrees a fast track to immigration. Accelerate the brain drain.