The Q&A: "A deep fracture within the Western camp"
Le Monde's top columnist Sylvie Kauffmann on the Trump-Europe crisis
On Wednesday I caught up with Sylvie Kauffmann on the phone. She’s a veteran foreign correspondent, a former editor-in-chief, and a leading columnist on international relations, for Le Monde. She’s a frequent contributor to the Financial Times. Top officials in every European government talk to her. Her book Les Aveuglés, published last year, is a definitive account (so far untranslated into English) of Western governments’ reaction to Vladimir Putin’s aggressive authoritarianism after 2007. I met her on the train to Kyiv last autumn.
Kauffmann was in Munich last week when Donald Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, delivered a speech that has rocked the relationship between the United States and its traditional European allies.
More shocks have followed. On Tuesday the Russian foreign minister met the US Secretary of State in Saudi Arabia to discuss Ukraine’s future. Ukraine’s president wasn’t invited. Neither was any European leader. On Wednesday Donald Trump called Volodomyr Zelensky a dictator. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?
I wanted to hear from Sylvie Kauffmann about how this is all playing in Europe. We spoke on the phone, and the shaky sound quality precluded my posting the conversation as a podcast episode. But I’m glad to share this transcript with you.
Paul Wells: You wrote that there are now two conferences in the history of the Munich Security Conference that will stand in history, 2007 and 2025. That's quite a statement. Why was 2025 so important?
Sylvie Kauffmann: You know, 2007 was the now-famous speech by Vladimir Putin, when the West discovered — or realized, should I say — that Putin's Russia was going to be an adversary and was turning in a very different mood and posture than was, somehow, naively expected until then.
2025 is as dramatic, and I think even more dramatic, because that's when the Europeans realized they probably wouldn't be able to consider the United States as a friend anymore, but rather as an adversary. I'm not saying an enemy, I'm saying an adversary.
And so that came as a shock to most people in the audience, just as people were shocked in 2007. I wasn't there, but I worked on that episode, interviewed people who were there. They were shocked. But as soon as they left the hall in 2007 they went back to business as usual — until, I should say, 2014 when it was really obvious to them, because of Crimea and the start of Russian aggression in Ukraine.
But I think this time we're not going back to business as usual. It's impossible. I think that really, we have seen the start, in Munich, of a deep fracture within the Western camp.
PW: It now looks like Donald Trump views Russia as a more reliable partner than the European Union. What's the reaction been in Europe?