The writer is chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia and fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, IWM Vienna

The recent European tour of Mike Pompeo, US secretary of state, included visits to the Czech Republic, Austria and Slovenia. It concluded with the inking of a bilateral US-Polish military agreement. It was as if President Donald Trump’s administration had decided to resurrect the once-powerful Habsburg empire in the hope of keeping Germany down and Russia out of Europe. Consolidating a strategic bloc of countries within the EU that are suspicious of Russia and Germany seems to be at the heart of this administration’s policy towards Europe.

As Wess Mitchell, a former US assistant secretary of state and gifted Republican strategist, has observed, a German-led Europe would most probably mean a Russia-friendly Europe. The European hope of retiring from history would turn into a nightmare because, as he remarked, “irrelevance .?.?.?is not a luxury that a strategically sandwiched, geopolitically declining, multinational great power can afford”.