It is – and there’s no way of sugaring this – a pathetic sight. Europe’s leaders arrive in Washington DC as supplicants, virtually pleading with the Americans not to betray Ukraine.
Half in shock (though it cannot have come as a surprise), half in denial, they cannot quite bring themselves to confront the fact that Donald Trump is not on their side – and not even a neutral mediator, but the active advocate of Vladimir Putin.
As has been well observed, Trump has dropped his ambition to end the war in a day (a metaphorical day or otherwise), forgotten his demands for an immediate ceasefire, and there have been no “severe consequences” stemming from Vladimir Putin’s “nyet” to the Trump peace plan, such as it was.
Instead, we have a delegation of European leaders waiting in a side room at the White House while their friend and ally, Volodymyr Zelensky, is shaken down again by Trump. Let’s call them the Z-Team.
The Americans have switched sides (some might say “again”) and are now telling Zelensky to accept the settlement tabled by Putin in Alaska. Trump has gone back to being Putin’s messenger, with the veiled threat that if Ukraine refuses to be dismembered, then America will cut off aid (again) and start trading with Russia.
That is to say, the US will be doing precisely what Trump sanctioned India for only days ago – building the Russian war machine. In return Ukraine, what’s left of it, is to be given a promise by Putin not to invade again (worthless) and an “Article 5”-style security guarantee by Trump (also worthless).
And yet the leaders sent to represent the old world order have been mostly well chosen, with some champion “Trump-whisperers” among them. But it is they, not the US president, who should be in charge of determining the destiny of their own continent.
Italy’s hard-right prime minister Giorgia Meloni is an ideological soulmate of Trump, but sound on Ukraine. Keir Starmer has virtually nothing in common with Trump politically, but the president likes and respects him, and he has has long sought to act as a bridge between Europe and the United States. Much the same goes for Mark Rutte, head of Nato, who, in June – in an act of strategic self-emasculation – debased himself for the greater good, calling Trump “daddy” and showering him with praise over Iran.
Perhaps lesser known is Alexander Stubb, the golf-loving president of Finland who, while the pair played an impromptu round in Florida warned Trump about the danger of trusting Putin. Stubb can speak from the heart, as his nation knows what it is to be invaded and subjugated by a belligerent neighbour; after decades of non-alignment, the invasion of Ukraine in 2023 convinced it to join Nato.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz brings German financial heft, while Emmanuel Macron is there because he has to be, as the de facto leader of the EU. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, will be in the curious position of advocating for strongly pro-Ukraine Poland and the Baltic states, while knowing that Hungary’s Viktor Orban is a virtual Russian “spy in the cab” at EU meetings.
It will be heartening to see this show of solidarity for Ukraine. But it should not have come to this. Europe should be determining its own borders, not Russia and America. It’s demeaning, but that’s not the main problem. It’s dangerous.
At its simplest, Trump is telling Zelensky and his European minders that he can have peace if he surrenders. That’s not noble, nor honourable, nor practical.
We may wonder how it came to this. There’s more dark rumours about kompromat. Maybe that played some role. More likely is that Putin understood that, in the case of Trump, flattery will get you everywhere.
Tell him he won the 2020 election “by lots”, and he’ll give you anything you want – a job in the cabinet or large swathes of another country. Putin sees in Trump a man who doesn’t understand the Russians, fatally so.
Trump thinks that if he gets along with Putin and gets him interested in what he, Trump, is interested in – peace, money, deals – then everything will be fine: they can trust one another, and that that is all in America’s interests. That’s not how it works, as successive American administrations have found.
The Russians aren’t into personal diplomacy, much more into power. You cannot trust the Russians, and especially this one, who’s blown every peace agreement he’s ever signed and has described the collapse of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century.
He doesn’t bother to discuss his world view. The Alaska summit really was appeasement – just as at Munich in 1938, the dictator has been given a reward for aggression, and in return he’s offered a useless promise not to do it again. We know he will, sooner or later, even if he’s polite enough to wait until Trump leaves office.
He senses that the Americans – the people as well as their government – have turned isolationist. They will no more fight for Estonia or Poland or Britain than they would Ukraine. That world, the one that saw them in long, arduous struggles for “freedom” in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, is over. They don’t want “forever wars”. That’s their prerogative. Putin is only doing what comes naturally to him – taking best advantage of this golden, historic opportunity of American moral and military retreat.
It should not be like this, and it’s Europe’s own fault.
In a better, alternative universe, today the American president would be flying to Europe as a lauded friend and observer of the final, formal stages of the Ukraine process brokered by the leadership of Europe.
The Ukraine-Russia treaty would see Putin retreat to the lines prevailing in 2022, with an agreement to further talks on the status of Crimea and the eastern Donbas. Vienna would be an excellent venue for such an event – still outside Nato and neutral, and with better hotels and conference facilities than Alaska.
With Europe’s far larger economy, industrial might, technological edge and military potential, it should have been able to defend Ukraine, to give Zelensky the tools to finish the job. That Europe finds itself divided and dependent on an erratic American president is a shameful affair.
