“Between the United States and Europe, the schism of values”: the analysis of historian Thomas Gomart

In his new work, “ Who controls who? “, luminous, the historian dissects the new global balance of power.

You notice a “transatlantic schism”, a “change of era” of which you say you become aware in February 2025, in particular by attending the speech of JD Vance, American vice-president, in Munich, very acerbic against European democracy… Comment would you describe this schism?

The transatlantic relationship is multiple. Political, commercial, military, cultural… This complexity means that we cannot really speak of a rupture, but rather of a schism in terms of values, of ideology. There was first a strategy of prostration by a certain number of European economic or political actors between the re-election of Donald Trump, in November 2024, and the first months of his new administration at the beginning of 2025. This almost admiring phase was short-lived: the turnaround began from April 2025, just three months after the inauguration of Donald Trump, with the start of his trade war.

This distancing will continue to increase, with the twelve-day war in Iran, the fact that Donald Trump adopts a Putinian reading of the war in Ukraine, the Greenland affair which shows how little he cares about his European allies, the capture of Maduro in Venezuela, a military success but a completely unilateral and lawless decision, the campaign launched in Iran on February 28…

Some analysts think that we are too obsessed with Donald Trump and that we forget to see that he embodies what many Americans think about Europeans…

Americans are not monolithic, but the fact is that Donald Trump was elected and re-elected. The Americans know very well who they re-elected in 2024. This vote reflects a profound change in trajectory for the United States. Not so much towards isolationism, as towards unilateralism. The American authorities tell us: “We are autonomous in energy terms, we have two ocean frontages, we have the first world economy, the first manufacturing economy. So, we have the possibility of changing the rules of the system.” As for the relationship with the Europeans, Trump abruptly affirms what several American presidents have thought for twenty years: you Europeans do not spend enough on your defense and your security. It brings us back to a fundamental contradiction: how is it that 500 million relatively prosperous Europeans still rely on 380 million Americans to cope with 140 million aging Russians?

Donald Trump has been stepping up his efforts for a year, but for what political successes?

Its main success, at this stage, is to saturate our media agenda. The paradox is that we are in a moment of transatlantic schism in ideological terms, perhaps even in theological terms – Donald Trump and JD Vance openly attacking the Pope – but of strong media convergence. European and American public spaces are closer than ever. The Epstein affair is a striking example. Donald Trump continues to crush, through his daily declarations, this media space, which has become less globalized than “transatlanticized”.

How do you explain his activism on the international level when during the campaign, he promised to stop all wars abroad?

He gives the impression of being convinced that he can, through his supposed genius, make peace, including through war. There is another, more structural factor: American military power, extraordinarily efficient. It gives him the ability, for example, to eliminate the supreme guide on the first day of an operation in Iran. Such a tool gives American presidents, not just Trump, the feeling that the use of force allows them to reshape the international scene as they wish. But this does not happen as he imagined, because he does not find a political translation for his military victories.

Military gains without a lasting political outcome, isn’t that also the problem of Benyamin Netanyahu, in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Iran…?

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