DIPLOMACY AND EUROPEAN ALLIANCES IN THE SHADOW OF WAR

The “Coalition of the Willing,” a “Fallback Alliance”

If the “Coalition of the Willing” was conceived along anti-Russian lines and as a pro-Ukrainian security guarantee with a view to a peace agreement in Europe, the logic of the international system and the shift of the center of gravity of world power toward the Indo-Pacific should have advised Paris, Berlin, and London to draw closer to Moscow. The aim would be to master the upheavals to come in at least three dimensions: Europe–Near and Middle East–Gulf, the Maghreb, and Africa. Not to mention the new defense linkages of the Sunni alliance between Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, ready to confront the Houthis and seize the Strait of Bab el-Mandeb.

The “Coalition of the Willing” is already mortgaged from birth by the tutelage of the United States, from which it would like to emancipate itself, and by the internal hostility of several European countries. Inspired by a disavowed European leader, Keir Starmer, and by Emmanuel Macron—contested inside a France on the brink of civil war—what credibility does it have as an interposition force if it is perceived as a force of provocation?

Nature of the Initiative

The initiative, made public at the London summit on Ukraine of 2 March 2025, is not neutral; it aims to strengthen European support for Ukraine in a context of political instability. Its goal is therefore to establish a diplomatic and military framework to ensure lasting peace in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict.

At a press conference following the London summit, Starmer presented the four key elements of the coalition:

1. A commitment to maintain the flow of military aid to Ukraine while increasing economic pressure on Russia through sanctions and other measures.
2. An affirmation that any lasting peace agreement must guarantee Ukraine’s sovereignty and security, and that Ukraine must be present at all peace negotiations.
3. A commitment to strengthen Ukraine’s defensive military capabilities “after” any peace agreement in order to deter possible future invasions.
4. The development of a “coalition” composed of several nations ready to defend the terms of a peace agreement.

Starmer stressed that European nations should assume primary responsibility for the initiative and that the agreement would require the support of the United States and the involvement of Russia.

Later clarifications enter into the definition of the conditions on the ground, according to which:

- The establishment of a ceasefire monitoring mechanism will be placed under U.S. direction.

- Support for the Ukrainian armed forces will make them the first line of defense and deterrence.

- The continued establishment of a multinational force for Ukraine - on the seas, in the air, and on the ground - would make Ukraine a force of reassurance the day after the ceasefire and on the line of contact.

It is observed that 28 of the 32 NATO member states are part of the coalition, the exceptions being the United States, Hungary, Slovakia, and North Macedonia.

Diplomatic Observations and Historical Reminders

A first observation leaps immediately to the eye: the predominance of conditionality and the essential support of the United States - excluded from participation - as well as the involvement of Russia as the opposing power. There does not appear to be much room for maneuver for the Europeans to persuade, nor many diplomatic precedents for success; nor do they have, in the West, credible leaders capable of conducting the hazards of a diplomacy marked by the seal of secrecy, when, on the contrary, the appeal to public opinion and to electoral deadlines is a precious guarantee for the politicization of public space. This space is further marked by the predominance of internal problems, as well as by the absence of imperious popular passions.

Starmer, Macron, and Merz and the End of Dialogue with Moscow

Considering the role of the three major actors of the coalition - Starmer, Macron, and Merz - their respective objectives clearly show that European diplomacy has turned its back on any option of dialogue with Moscow. Indeed, the coalition initiative leaves no window of opportunity for resuming it.

At the root of his position, Starmer wants to strip Russia definitively of the status of a great power, having lost the “Cold War,” and wants to re-establish a policy of balance in accordance with the precepts of David Hume, in the event that a local conflict must be settled with a great regional, or even global, conflict. It appeared at once, at the London conference, that Starmer, then leader of the Labour Party in the Commons in the service of a transitional monarch, wanted to draw closer to the European Union ten years after Brexit, conscious of the general deficiency of the principle of legitimacy in Europe, and intended thereby to perpetuate an alliance of the “status quo,” under the American flag, among drifting democracies.

Among the three, Starmer, the archetypal Briton, embodied the cold and determined spirit of the Ocean; Macron the voluble imagination of skies stirred by the Atlantic wind; and Merz the spirit of reason of the northern plains, dense with clouds and conflicting sentiments. Starmer was the most determined of the three and Macron the most unpredictable - hated in the Hexagon and on the way out, eager to be crowned with a laurel - while Merz, preoccupied with an internal coalition that was hardly solid and observed in all his expressions, was like a condemned man on suspended sentence, barely out of prison.

It was necessary to find a common point among these three forces - solid, intrepid, and dominating - that nature had granted each of these countries in the course of history, and that common point was identified in the will: a coalition of volunteers supposed to administer necessity under the supposed threat of Russia. But without enthusiasm or empathy.

These three Consuls of the European Republic became aware that the map of the continent had been radically modified and that that of America had been modified as well, in a world of three great poles of power. Europe had become a Titanic, risking shipwreck on the first Atlantic iceberg, and that iceberg was very clearly called Ukraine, drifting between the two parts of the continent, East and West. A disparate glacis, coagulating corruption and tyranny, state falsehood and organized mafias, without territorial unity and without ethnic cohesion, neither socialist nor liberal, neither part of the Moscow Duma nor willingly accepted into the “European Concert,” refused by NATO and in permanent dispute with all its neighbours, kept on permanent financial life-support for a resuscitation without hope - Ukraine was not asking for a coalition of the willing to spare it the humiliation of defeat, for Zelensky had discovered that the continuation of the conflict allowed him a last resource: the strategy of terror.

In the new map of the world, the United States, having entered a dance of all dangers in the Near and Middle East, the Gulf, and the Arabian Peninsula, are discovering the history of the end of the great empires and that the alliance with Israel is leading them along the mythical path of the Pentateuch. President Trump, taking care not to humiliate the Europeans but only to intimidate them in order to draw closer to Putin, sharpens the rivalry of Xi Jinping in Japan and in the Pacific and Southeast Asian rim.

The “London Summit” and the European “Little Entente” of Three Poles

Thus one sees taking shape, at this end of the year 2026, a great attempt at understanding that heralds the dark times of history, between the Hegemon and Central and Eastern Europe, the ensemble of the BRICS tempted by multipolarism - which is not egalitarian and does not eliminate hierarchies of power - and the countries of the Rimland scattered across the immense space that runs from the North Pacific to Oceania.

At the periphery of the Northern Hemisphere, in what was once the decision-making center of the world, on the banks of the once-imperial Thames, the London Summit aspires to redraw a new European diplomatic system, a sort of “little entente” of three poles—Paris, London, and Berlin—standing in the way of the principle of partition in Europe between America and Russia. A collegial leadership would then replace, in terms of security, the great triangle of the world of Washington, Moscow, and Beijing, built on an edifice of trust and force for thirty years. Can a contradictory and scarcely credible European decentralization succeed its global political and nuclear centralization and its operational and deterrent credibility?

Macron, like Starmer and Merz, comes to diplomacy through politics and knows how to dominate the great ensembles only through words, but he understands that diplomacy taken by itself can do little. That is why he is seduced by the importance of strategy and of war, of which he possesses neither the grammar nor the logic. He obeys, on the other hand, intuitively, a mixture of globalism and democratism à la Davos, whose ancient model was the Holy Alliance, and, faced with adversities, attempts turnarounds in Europe without being able to avoid them in Africa, the Near and Middle East, or Mayotte; and to that end he embraces the guarantee of insularity of Starmer, disappointed by the “open sea,” and concerns himself with the rearmament of Germany, which he wants to integrate in a subordinate position into France’s nuclear strategy.

In this context, the Alliance of the Willing appears as the advanced laboratory of a diplomatic revision of European and world scale. On a more political and personal background - that of the ambitions of decision-maker and warrior - Macron, torn between the extremes of the European geopolitical landscape, wants to repudiate any diplomacy of peace and encourages resort to firmness. He prepares, without too much concealment, an already lead-sealed coffin for any resumption of negotiation and cares not at all for the rhetoric of the “Franco-German couple.” Obstinate and not very subtle, he appears deaf to the legitimate interests of the Mittellage (the constraints of centrality), which had led to the Sonderweg (the solitary path of the Reich) during the misunderstandings and tensions of the interwar period inherent in the application of the Versailles clauses.

Thus, and in a position of greater difficulty, Joachim Merz, faced with the hypothesis of a Euro-Russian confrontation, must combine three policies: a “policy of reason” in the manner of Stresemann of the 1920s–30s; a revisionist and bellicose policy in the manner of von der Leyen (EU) and Rutte (NATO), with a reinforced budget for the rearmament of the Bundeswehr; and, finally, a “great economic power” policy with China in order to preserve its status as an industrial and manufacturing country.

For those for whom the evidence is written in the defense budgets, Germany’s military expenditure will amount to 153 billion euros per year, and by the horizon of 2039 the Bundeswehr will dispose of the most powerful conventional force in Europe. Seen more closely, the situation tells us that from 2027 Germany will devote to its armed forces nearly twice as much funding as France (France’s defense budget for 2026 stands at 57.1 billion euros). The Bundeswehr budget will then reach 183.7 billion euros in 2035, well before the 2035 deadline fixed by respect for NATO criteria. According to experts, the French budget for 2026 already validates a definitive shift of France toward preparation for major conflicts.

For those for whom the security of a country is written in its geography and its history, the Mittellage (“central position”) designates Germany’s geographical situation at the heart of Europe, which implies a major economic strength through East–West exchanges and a strategic vulnerability of encirclement between neighbouring powers. Now the difficulties of Germany yesterday and today are determined by the fact that the model of alliance policy of yesterday led Europe to the abyss, and the integrationist policy of the European Union has not known how to elaborate an alternative model nor make diplomacy an instrument of crisis management and international negotiation. The European Union, deprived of a realistic conception of the international system - still regulated by frontiers and sovereignties jealous of their security prerogatives, which include the ideas of enemies and of irrationality as well as a tectonics of societies and systems - appears at the mercy of a mediocre and inexperienced political personnel.

Compared with the European vision and understanding, the diplomacy and foreign policy of Trump, which appear to some incoherent and confused, recall on the contrary the initiatives inspired by the historical leadership of two exceptional ministers, William Pitt and, on the same line, Winston Churchill. These two giants, conquerors of European contradictions and wars, undid two established systems of alliances by calling upon the “open sea.”

William Pitt, Donald Trump, and the “Reversal of Alliances”

By way of reminder, the great minister who had taken responsibility for the foreign policy of Great Britain in 1763, the date of the proclamation of the British Empire, William Pitt, carried out a great diplomatic upheaval in Europe, similar to that of Trump, which has remained in memory under the term “reversal of alliances.” This reversal was obtained by the dissociation of the two principal theatres of the Seven Years’ War: the European theatre (Germany) and the American colonies of the New World. A dissociation that historical analogy could bring close to that of today and that gained for Great Britain world domination and the hegemony of the English-speaking peoples over the rest of the world for three centuries and up to our own time. It was the source of a civilizational, linguistic, and cultural upheaval that we risk undergoing again, for one passed from the French civilization of the beautiful and the great, in the service of kings and cultivated elites, to modern civilization, of the practical and the useful, in the service of uncultivated masses, to revolutionary, egalitarian, and democratic brutality.

Pitt operated, in short, as Trump does today: a dissociation of the two theatres and of the two contexts, of Europe and of America - a dissociation more desirable today than yesterday in an interdependent planetary system. Now the unity of conception of world policy requires a geopolitical distinction between the great regions of the world and a multipolarization of strategies, so that the Great Game of the Hegemon can unfold across the entirety of the planetary chessboard. A conceptual unity that hierarchizes the importance of priorities and that of the great actors, and principally of one among them, that of Kung-fu, on watch at the great crossroads of history. The conquest of the world, which was exercised yesterday in Europe, will be realized today in the mountains and valleys of the Persian Empire. Here the West will be excluded from the new rising universe, where the human race will begin again to speak and to think in another idiom, Mandarin, celebrating the harmony of heaven instead of the harmony of kings and their courts.

It is of ill omen to think that the historical rise or affirmation of China will be won in Iran and, in parallel, by an accumulation of military successes in Ukraine, by the erasure of the European countries and of NATO, at Bab el-Mandeb, and, for freedom of navigation in the Black Sea, by the combined action of the Sunni powers (Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan), and finally by the duel of the century between the two titans of the Hegemon and the Celestial Dragon in the Far East and in the Pacific. The hegemony of the Middle Kingdom will then be due, in large part, to the general exhaustion of the West, which has occurred at the level of minds and hearts across the uncertain totality of the different theatres, where, in the end, that of the rising Empire will prevail over all the others - decisive and vital - to the profit of a systemic revolution with incalculable historical repercussions.