<
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/17/from-london-to-lviv-how-trumps-new-world-order-has-shaken-europe>
"While Donald Trump talks of the “big beautiful ocean” separating the US from
the war in Ukraine, 1,000 miles of rail track links London St Pancras to the
city of Lviv in western Ukraine.
The 19-hour trip takes in Brussels, the German economic powerhouse of
Frankfurt, and Vienna, the Austrian capital, before the train rattles into
Kraków in south-east Poland and Przemyśl, the Polish border town where the
slimmer railway gauges of western Europe meet the wider tracks of Ukraine and
Russia to the east.
At each stop, Europeans are grappling in different ways with new and unsettling
realities after the US president appeared in recent weeks to herald the end of
Pax Americana.
In London, rightly or wrongly, and perhaps out of sheer necessity, the idea of
the special relationship remains a comfort blanket. There is a new steely
resolve in Brussels but the temptation persists to push decisions back.
A leading German politician described the incoming government in Berlin as
“democracy’s last bullet” but some worry they will shoot themselves in the
foot. Austrians cling to their traditional neutrality as if that alone will
keep them safe. In Poland, there is, perhaps, the greatest clarity as to what
they think must be done. Yet its polarised political class, traditionally
Atlanticist in outlook and discombobulated by the turn in Washington, argues
about how to find the money to do it as public opinion wavers over the presence
of 1 million Ukrainian refugees. As the Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci was
quoted as saying in 1929: “The old world is dying and the new world struggles
to be born; now is the time of monsters.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
