Tea Time on the Volcano

As Jérôme Denariez brilliantly points out, we are witnessing a fascinating convergence of brutalities. On one side, the Tsar rewriting History with a quill to justify his tanks; on the other, the Tycoon turning the Monroe doctrine into "Donroe," treating the Southern Hemisphere not as a neighbourhood, but as a foreclosure managed by a sheriff on steroids. Shocking? Perhaps, but ruthlessly effective.

What Denariez highlights with necessary cruelty is that international law has become, for Washington as for Moscow, the equivalent of a lace doily beneath a battleaxe: purely decorative. Putin wants the land (the continent), Trump wants the flows (the sea), but both speak the same grammar: one where the economy is no longer the consequence of peace, but the spoils of war.

And us Europeans? We are, to use the paper’s image, "on the balcony." We continue to indignantly cite the building regulations while our neighbours are moving the furniture with dynamite. The new perspective opening up is one of glacial solitude: if we persist in believing that legal politeness is enough to stop predators, we will end up not as actors of History, but as mere sports commentators of a match where we are the ball. It may be time to put down the teacup and learn, finally, to speak the language of power without stuttering.