Pete Hegseth’s speech in Normandy illustrates the strategic rupture between the United States of Donald Trump and the European Union, summoned to ensure its defense alone in the face of contemporary security challenges. Faced with Russian, Chinese and now American pressure, the EU is gradually developing financial, industrial, commercial and military instruments intended to strengthen its autonomy.
Came to Normandy, on June 6, for the commemorations of the 82eOn the anniversary of the D-Day landings, Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War of the United States (so called since Donald Trump decided to give this name to the Secretary of Defense in September 2025), notably went to Colleville-sur-Mer, in the Calvados. After reflecting in front of the 9,387 white crosses in the cemetery of American soldiers who fell on Omaha Beach, he delivered a speech perfectly consistent with the American National Security Strategy published in November 2025.
Citing the arrivals of ships and migrants on the coasts of Spain, Italy, Greece and Bulgaria, Hegseth said that Europe was under the threat of migratory flows, described as an “invasion”, and questioned the capacity of EU member states to react to to this “landing of a new type” and wondered if it was not already too late.
Refusing to participate in the official international celebration, he admonished the Europeans: quickly strengthen your military autonomy, and no longer count on the United States to defend you, he said in substance.
This sequence will have provided additional confirmation of the new European policy of the United States hammered out by the Trump administration since February 2025 – including by Hegseth himself in Brussels less than three weeks after he took office on the 20th. January. From the point of view of its overall geopolitical picture, the European Union has been facing a singularly unprecedented situation for sixteen months, which makes it vulnerable. To respond to it, is it inventing a unique form of response, which would be robustness?
The inventory of means: a capacity to take action
The EU has already begun to demonstrate an unexpected ability to act concretely in the face of unforeseen and unprecedented shocks. In the financial and budgetary domain, the creation of the NextGenerationEU recovery plan in the wake of Covid and the confinements in 2020, laid the foundations of a “proto-European Treasury”, making it possible to finance our public goods through common borrowing.
At the same time, the economic and commercial aspect has strengthened with the Anti-Coercion Instrument (ACI) – which makes it possible to sanction companies, or states, or to quickly introduce exceptional customs duties, and which was designed to respond to commercial blackmail, in particular from People’s Republic of China – while the Chips Act and the Net-Zero Industry Act aim for technological sovereignty, in particular by seeking to refine in Europe 40% of the rare metals necessary for our industry.
With Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the biggest challenge remains defense, where the goal is now “military self-sufficiency.” If Europe has realized that it already produces more munitions than the United States, it must still break the “nationalist corporatism” of its industries; this is why the EU has developed levers called the Munitions Production Support Regulation (ASAP) or the European Defense Industrial Strategy (EDIS) in order to encourage the desire to gradually build a European defense industrial and technological base (BITD), that is to say a European defense industry and a European arms market. These instruments are the premises of an authentic European industrial defense policy.
This dynamic of new responses to the challenges of imperialist policies does not stop at the borders of the EU: it is part of a vast “European territorial system” including the United Kingdom, Norway or even the candidate countries for membership including Turkey, which is in a customs union with the EU.
In a world of rivalry, the EU has an interest in uniting “middle powers” to protect interdependence against predation. In 2026, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney explicitly called, in Davos, for the networking of these states to weigh together (trade, standards, economic security). In a certain way, Mark Carney proposes to extend well beyond the small European territory (this cap… wrote Paul Valéry) the toolbox, DIY and assembly that have been implemented, without fanfare or particular pride, by Europeans for three generations.
Seen from this angle, the European Political Community reveals in broad daylight the existence of a European territorial system (the expression is from Pascal Orcier) which polarizes and animates the EU: the EU and all its associates, from Turkey (customs union) to Canada (Ceta), via Space European Economic, Schengen, Neighborhood, United Kingdom (trade and cooperation agreement) and Candidates.
The doctrine: from normative power to robustness
This responsiveness is based on a unique political nature: the EU is a “multi-territorial state”. Since 1950, it has been constructed by substituting law for force, favoring what Zaki Laïdi calls “power through norms”. Through the “Brussels effect”, it imposes its standards (AI, environment, GDPR) on the rest of the world because access to its market remains vital. Since 1950, Europe has been built against the classic spirit of power which had led to the suicide of the continent. The EU does not seek power through coercion, but through regulation and interdependence.
However, in the current context, simple regulation is no longer enough; To this must be added robustness. Robustness is the ability of a system to absorb external shocks and to preserve its autonomy without betraying its legal identity. This involves moving from sustained dependence to “chosen vulnerability” (Mathilde Lemoine, economist) thanks to the diversification of partnerships. Europe is not looking for the classic coercion of the 20th century, but an ability to remain free and autonomous in a hostile environment.
A direct answer is the end of Atlanticism and the “triple coercion”
We must first make a lucid diagnosis of our environment. This need for robustness is the direct response to an environment marked by “triple coercion”: Russian, Chinese and, this is the radical novelty of 2025, American.
Russian imperialism. Since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia has asserted itself as a “mafia state” that establishes violence as a principle of government. It vitally challenges the European model based on law and pluralism. While Russia occupies eastern Ukraine and bombs every day the towns and civilians behind the front, the Europeans support them financially, by sending weapons and by welcoming refugees. Remember that the EU shares nearly 2,300 kilometers of borders with Russia, and nearly 1,300 kilometers with Ukraine.
Chinese rivalry. The People’s Republic of China is now a “systemic rival” (according to the EU doctrine published in 2019 by Jean-Claude Juncker, then president of the European Commission), that is to say not only economic, but also ideological. the scale of the international system and the global space. It uses unfair competition practices to oust Europe from relations with the Global South and to create critical dependencies, threatening entire sectors of our industry, such as the automobile industry.
Finally, the most disturbing shock is that of “trumpisme 2“, which marks the death of Atlanticism. The United States no longer treats us as allies but as “resource deposits”. This is what we can describe as “emprisism”: a form of American influence transforming our historical interdependence of almost a century into a restrictive balance of power, where access to intelligence and technologies becomes a lever of blackmail to impose unjustified customs duties, a weakening of support to Ukraine and interference in the political lives of EU member states.
Autonomy for Europeans
Ultimately, while Europeans do not aspire to become a warlike power capable of aggression and occupation, their singularity is to seek to build a practicable autonomy.
The EU could assert itself as an “architectural power”: it stabilizes the world by codifying interdependence through law and arming its common market against coercion. This transformation of normative power into robust autonomy must now accelerate to face Russian, Chinese and American policies of an imperialist type.
In finethe viability of these tools will depend on the mobilization of citizens themselves; because the robustness of theState of Europeans is, above all, in their hands.
