This will of necessity be an abbreviated post. I promise a longer, more deeply considered one next week when I am back in my office with time to think.
At the moment, I am on a Eurostar train to London traveling at 298 kilometers an hour. As the Trump regime explodes the post-WWII order of the past eighty years and throws us to the twin mercies of the Russian bear and the American eagle, I did just want to tell you, cherished readers and subscribers, that I am rattled, as all of us are in Europe, to the bone.
It's been a nonstop one-two-three punch, hasn’t it? Trump-Vance-Musk. Bam-Bam-Bam. Now and again, Pete Hegseth dances in with a little extra bit of malevolent news, but his announcements, while all very bad, seem like accessories to the larger crimes being committed against democracy and plain human decency by the gang-leader trio.
As the French countryside hurtles past my train window, I am thinking about the ambush and public humiliation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinsky in the Oval Office last Friday, and wondering who is nastier, Trump or Vance?
I am thinking about Musk condoning on X the abandonment by the United States of NATO and the United Nations and I am trying to imagine my world without them.
As an old church spire catches my eye, I am thinking about Franz Fanon and how we in Europe are now being treated by the United States as Europeans treated their former colonies.
I am also thinking about all of that after Pankaj Mishra’s The World After Gaza.
I am thinking about the jaw-dropping video posted by the American president on social media of an AI-imagined Trump Gaza dystopia that is the most terrifying vision of our future I have ever seen, a future where such videos will, I fear, become commonplace and will enchant guileless millions.
This makes me, naturally, think about Guy Debord and his Society of the Spectacle.
I am thinking that the French call rollercoasters “montagnes russes” or “Russian montains” for their stomach-churning rapid climbs and steep descents, and I am wondering if we should start calling them “montagnes américaines” or if we need to coin a new kind of theme-park scary ride that is a fusion of Russia and America.
I am also daring to hope, just a little, that there is a way out of this nightmare. I am thinking of Volodymyr Zelensky’s warm welcome in London by Prime Minister Keir Starmer and King Charles, and about how satisfying it was to see Zelensky treated decently after what Trump and Vance did to him. And I am thinking about the succession of emergency meetings by our European leaders and hoping as hard as I can hope that this diverse and divided assemblage of nations will pull itself together and use the weight of its 400 million people, its formal allegiance to human rights and democracy, and the dissuasive power of its two nuclear powers, France and the United Kingdom, to arm up and protect our sovereignty our own damn selves finally, beginning with that of Ukraine.
I am thinking that the words to La Marseillaise, our French national anthem, “Aux armes, citoyens! Formez vos bataillons! ” never seemed more prophetic to me.
What a miracle Europe is. We are about to enter the Chunnel. Some fifty kilometers further, and we will emerge in England. Soon, I will be in London, just a couple of hours after leaving Paris.
High-speed rail. A landscape dotted with wind turbines that are a visible sign of our effort to transition away from fossil fuels. This is Europe. May it survive the Russian and the American aggressors.
I’ll take a longer, deeper dive into all this next week. Meanwhile, hang tough through the punches the Trump trio will try to land before another week is out.