Carl Schmitt in Washington

Money and rare earths for protection. As has been said in this newspaper, the US proposal to Ukraine has the air of mafia extortion and is worthy of Al Capone. But if we put it in motion, this air takes on the hurricane-like aspect of an old theory that blows ever stronger in the speeches on the new international order. “ Protego te obligo ” (I protect and I oblige) is a principle that Thomas Hobbes put into circulation in the 17th century in Leviathan .

Carl Schmitt, who recycled it in the 20th century, said that it was like the “cogito ergo sum” of the modern State before the process of dismantling to which liberalism subjected it. But he also described it as the axiom of a possible new international order, desirable for him, based on the division of the world into large spaces (“ grossräume ”). Schmitt’s doctrine of “ grossraum ” advocates a world where a few powers share the cake.

This world is governed by three very simple rules. Each great power has its own area of ​​protection and influence. No great power intervenes in the great space of another. And the order within each space is strictly hierarchical. The similarities between Trump and Al Capone stem from this last principle and from the new US administration's consideration of Europe as a region of a great Western space led by the US.

Schmitt saw in the Monroe Doctrine (“America for the Americans”), which Theodor Roosevelt eventually turned into an instrument for legitimising a new form of imperialism, the prototype of the great spaces he theorised about with a view to justifying the domination of the German Third Reich over the European continent. For several years now, this theory has been thought of in China and Russia as an alternative to the liberal international order advocated by the USA since 1945, which Trump, who has always spoken of the Monroe Doctrine as a pillar of his foreign policy, now also considers obsolete. Is the incorporation of Europe into a “ grossraum ” of the USA through the application of an expanded Monroe Doctrine part of Trump’s doctrine? There is mounting evidence pointing in this direction.

Al Capone and Trump are similar, the latter sees Europe as a US-led region.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the new 47th president does not want to disengage from Europe, but rather to redefine the relationship with Europe based on the theory of “ grossraum ”, which gives the great powers the right to impose the rules of the game and political and economic compensations on the countries that depend on their protection.

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The invectives of Trump and his team against Europeans respond to Schmitt's arguments in The Concept of the Political about peoples who entrust their defence against external enemies to others. According to the German thinker, nations that act in this way de facto lose sovereignty and must assume the correlation between protection and obedience. This is the logic of the new European policy of the USA.