The first is populated by Atlanticists such as European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, outraged by Macron's alleged ingratitude towards US security guarantees and his suggestion that Europe must consider its own strategic interests independent from Washington. The second contains Macron's neo-Gaullist and pan-European supporters, such as European Council president Charles Michel, who praised him for standing up to Washington with a vision of the European Union as the alternative "third pole" to China and the United States in a multipolar world.

Both responses were entirely predictable; and both suffer from a similar misapprehension about the emerging paradigm of international relations today and the structural shifts on the horizon.

From the Euro-Atlantic standpoint, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a galvanising event. The war reforged a long-dormant Manichaean framing of existential conflict between Russia and the "West". What is, for Ukraine, a physical and territorial conflict thus assumed ontological, apocalyptic dimensions. In the spiritual fires of the war, the myth of the "West" was rebaptised. For a Nato that was seeking a mission ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, here was an opportunity to renew its institutional and ideological rationale, as well as to project solidarity in an the face of an emergency crisis.