“Are we ready to become a power?” Emmanuel Macron asked his fellow European leaders in the run-up to the Munich Security Conference, which concluded on Sunday. The French President has been trying to rally EU countries to collectively be independent of an increasingly cold – at times, even hostile – America. Transatlantic tensions have grown steadily worse since a vituperative speech delivered by US Vice President JD Vance at last year’s edition of the conference.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who led the US delegation instead this year, was more conciliatory but not entirely comforting. He spoke of western decline, and called the rules-based global order an "overused term" and a "dangerous delusion".
Friedrich Merz, Germany's Chancellor, said the same in his own speech, that the rules-based order has ended, though his tone was more mournful of this fact.
For non-western countries, observing from the sidelines, a pertinent question is whether the world can handle two western superpowers. For decades, people from the Middle East and North Africa to South-East Asia have largely seen America and its European allies work in tandem to promote joint foreign policy aims, with the cadence most often set by Washington. The “western agenda”, real or perceived, could mean many things – sometimes good and other times less so. But there was little doubt that it reflected a worldview shared across most North American and European capitals. Dealing with divergent and competing “western agendas” could further complicate an already complex and fragile global order. Fast-moving geopolitical events in the Middle East and beyond could become even less predictable than they are now.
At the same time, greater European influence on the world stage could provide a net benefit, if the 500-million-strong bloc used its heft to champion open markets, facilitate co-operation and discourage superpower adventurism. Whether Europe can rise to the occasion, and at what speed, remains an open question. As Josep Borell, then the EU’s top foreign policy official, told an American audience in 2024: “The European project has historically been built…to reduce the instinct for power that existed among Europeans, who had been at war with each other for centuries.”
Polling by Politico last week shows that nearly half of voters in the US, UK and France believe that a third world war is likely in the next five years. In the face of such a tragedy, the EU would face monumental challenges. The union, which often requires unanimity among its members for big policy initiatives, lacks a common army or a unified foreign policy. Neither would be worth much without the other, and achieving both would require rewriting the EU’s DNA. As Mark Rutte, Nato’s Dutch secretary general, has emphasised repeatedly, European defence will rely on American partnership for a long time to come.
However the geopolitical drama gripping the West is resolved, non-western countries can and should adapt to a new world order. But leaders should still take pains to ensure that we are not instead left with is a world without any order at all.
