Европейская аналитика 2018

The federal chancellor Sebastian Kurz and Austrian president Alexander Van der Bellen made statements, which in effect run counter to the official policy of Washington and some of its allies towards Russia. However, Helsinki, and especially Stockholm have become a weak link in European neutrality. The sustained efforts of the USA to draw Finland and Sweden into NATO, if not de jure, then de facto, are by no means accidental. The next step in this direction was the signing on 8 May in Washington of a trilateral declaration on expanding military cooperation between the United States, Sweden and Finland.

Prior to this, in 2016, both North European countries had already concluded similar bilateral agreements with the United States.

The Euro-Atlantic solidarity is cracking at the seams. That makes the member states of the EU and its supranational structures review their strategic priorities. One of them was expressed in a statement in favor of normalizing relations with Russia, made by Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the European Commission, at the conference “Re-energizing Europe – Now!” on 31 May.

The conference was a concluding event of a major project, involving a number of leading European think tanks[5 - Http: www.newpactforeurope.eu (date of access 15.09.2018).]. Growing geopolitical solitude of the EU is pushing the national capitals and Brussels towards revival of the imperative of the pan-European security and common economic and humanitarian space from Lisbon to Vladivostok.

Transactional Relations

The dreams of the orthodox Atlantists of preserving the “liberal international order” led by the United States of the pre-Trump period are becoming ever more intangible. It is difficult to give more convincing evidence of its malaise than the recognition of Donald Tusk, President of the European Council, who calls himself “an incurable pro-American European fanatically devoted to the idea of trans-Atlantic cooperation”[6 - The European Council is the highest political body of the European Union; consists of heads of state and government of the EU member states.

]. On the eve of the G7 summit in Canada, he was deliberating whether the new policy of the White House was merely seasonal or a symptom of the breakup of the Western political community[7 - Tusk D. Despite Trump, the West Must Stay United // New York Times. 2018. 6 June.].