Ep.124: Machiavellian Moment in the Arctic

Germany and Sweden are among states deploying troops to Greenland. Yet Trump's power play for the island in the wake of his Venezuela raid has left much of Europe bewildered. As author and historian Luuk van Middelaar observes, the continent's geostrategic vulnerability has barged, uninvited, into view, and Europeans now are confronting the possibility of being pushed to the margins of a newly assertive American empire and left powerless. It’s the type of situation Luuk identifies as a Machiavellian Moment, a term borrowed from historian J.G.A. Pocock to describe the instant when polities must exchange lofty ideals, aimed at creating a more perfect future, for amoral strategies, to survive a perilous present. The EU "almost lived outside time," says Luuk, but now must contend with the prospect that “the EU no longer exists." Addressing its own mortality and meeting the Machiavellian Moment implies shedding a habitual, almost pedagogical approach to policymaking and favoring improvisation and action, such as converting car plants to armaments factories, creating a European Security Council, and moving ahead with a multinational presence on Greenland. The deployment, albeit tiny, for now, shows “strategic maturity” and should change "the calculus for Trump” by increasing the risk of an armed conflict with allies, says Luuk, who is founding director of the Brussels Institute for Geopolitics. Yet brinksmanship with the United States could hasten an unravelling of the NATO alliance. And other vexed questions loom. What becomes of a geopolitical European project that leans more toward Machiavelli than Monnet and is stripped of its higher ideals? And does an emboldened Europe risk reinvigorating a neo-colonialist mindset? 

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