The ground is crumbling beneath our feet and we're walking like sleepwalkers into the abyss. Donald Trump is accepting Russian propaganda word for word and choosing Vladimir Putin against Ukraine and Europe; Elon Musk and US Vice President JD Vance, see our democracies as enemies to be slaughtered, and are placing American might at the service of the most Putinist of European far-right movements; the German and Danish security services are predicting a Russian war on European Union soil before 2029; the Baltics and the Finns are digging trenches. What more do we need to finally feel the shared shock that alone can jolt us awake?

A few days have been enough to turn the page on 80 long years of history, before our stunned eyes. The world's most powerful geopolitical alliance has turned upside down, and the American umbrella – which has protected us since 1945 and made us subservient by protecting us – has closed. What we're going through is not a bad moment to pass or a simple turning point to negotiate, it's a rupture the likes of which we've never experienced in our lifetime. If we don't wake up now from our long strategic coma, it will simply mean that we have consented to our collapse.

Let's be clear: NATO membership no longer guarantees the security of European nations. Who could seriously believe that a man like Trump would activate Article 5 of the Alliance – the mutual assistance article on which peace in Western Europe has rested since 1949 – if a member country was attacked? Who could really believe that this American administration would come to the aid of Latvia, Estonia or Poland when Russian troops cross their borders? No one could – and most importantly, certainly not Putin. Never before has the threat of war within the borders of the European Union (EU) and NATO been so high and, related to this, never before have our deterrent capabilities been so weak.

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