A hungry pigeon given food at frequent, but irregular intervals will develop weird rituals — tics, dances, erratic head jerks — in the hope of summoning another morsel. B.F. Skinner, the psychologist who first demonstrated this effect in 1947, described the birds adopting “a sort of superstition ... as if there were a causal relation between its behavior and the presentation of food, although such a relation is lacking.”
It would be unkind to compare that bird-brained affliction to the behavior of European leaders trying to make sense of US President Donald Trump’s erratic distribution of favors. Their diplomatic maneuvers are more rational and they get results, but there is also an element of superstition. Visiting politicians make lavish gestures, strike unusual poses, cultivate White House contacts, looking for the sequence of steps that would unlock a steady supply of US amity. The causal relation is not lacking, but it is unreliable.
In February, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer wooed Trump with an invitation to visit the UK as a guest of his majesty the king. The prime minister was rewarded with relative leniency under the White House’s punitive tariff regime. In March, Finnish President Alexander Stubb impressed his US counterpart with technical prowess on the golf course. Between shots, he seeded the conversation with warnings not to trust Russian President Vladimir Putin. There followed a discernible dip in Trump’s patience with the Russian president.
At a summit in June, NATO leaders presented hikes in their national defense budgets as tributes paid in honor of the US president’s superior statecraft. NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte performed a rhetorical kowtow, praising “daddy” Trump, thanking him for making Europe pay more for its own defense. Choreographed sycophancy seemed to work. Trump spoke of NATO with uncharacteristic warmth. His tone toward Russia turned chillier.
It did not last. Putin countered with his own campaign of flattery. Trump emerged from last week’s bilateral summit in Alaska with a roadmap to peace in Ukraine that followed twisted Kremlin directions — no imminent ceasefire and cessions of unconquered land to Russia.
So the ritual dance began anew. A flock of European pigeons raced to Washington, cooing and flapping in support of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, hoping to generate a fresh portion of transatlantic solidarity.
The result could have been a lot worse. There was no repeat of the notorious ritual humiliation that Trump inflicted on Zelenskiy for the cameras in February. In place of bullying there was bonhomie. On the substance of a peace settlement, there is talk of security guarantees for Ukraine resembling, but not replicating Article 5 — the mutual assistance clause of NATO’s founding charter. What that really means, how it might be enforced, whether it would be underwritten by US military might and therefore how deterred Russia would be from any renewed land grabs are all questions left hanging.
The next stage is a proposed face-to-face meeting between Zelenskiy and Putin, followed by a trilateral summit with Trump. The Russian president is reported to be open to the idea of direct talks with his Ukrainian enemy, but there is no enthusiasm for such an encounter in the Kremlin.
To justify full-scale invasion, Putin cast Zelenskiy as the despised boss of a drug-addled, neo-Nazi junta preventing Ukraine’s eager reintegration into the greater Slavic motherland. When that fiction proved hard to sustain, the emphasis shifted to presenting the Ukrainian leader as a pawn in a long-running Western campaign to diminish and humiliate Russia. That story was meant to end with Zelenskiy’s death or surrender. It would not be easy for Moscow propagandists to narrate a different denouement where the Ukrainian president talks terms with Putin as his unvanquished peer.
Avoiding such a scenario had been one of the Russian president’s two big achievements in Alaska. First, by insisting on a bilateral meeting, Putin was able to bounce Trump into endorsing a template for peace that contains no hint of rebuke or reparation for flagrant territorial aggression.
Second, by recreating the optics of Cold War detente — a superpower summit to settle the fate of lesser nations — Putin signaled to his domestic audience that Soviet-style parity with the US was restored. To European democracies, he hoped to prove that their efforts at isolating Russia as a thuggish pariah state would come to naught.
The notion of Russia as the US’ equal on any measure of power (except the size of nuclear arsenal) was a delusion even before the USSR unraveled, but one that Trump willingly indulges. It is a corollary of his obsession with making America great again, and doing so by authoritarian measures. It predisposes him to denigrate the accomplishments of 20th-century US democracy and project greatness on to regimes that showcase despotism under a personality cult.
Putin is skilled at manipulating that attraction. While European leaders lobby Trump in the style of supplicants at the court of a king, Russia’s modern tsar cultivates him as something more like a protege — a recruit to the exclusive club of world historical figures who dictate the destiny of millions. They are the kind of men who redraw borders and parcel out land among themselves, not the kind that whines when the territorial allocation is unfair. It is a concept of geopolitics that despises international law and denigrates multilateral alliances as crafty games that minnow countries play to trap the big fish.
That speaks to Trump’s narcissistic personality and aversion to any institutional constraint on his power. It means the Russian president is communicating with the White House on his own special channel, on a higher frequency.
European countersignals are not blocked. The evidence shows real success in shifting Trump away from a policy of unthinking pro-Kremlin alignment. However, there is a perverse imbalance of influence. Just when the leaders of the US’ oldest and most loyal allies think they have mastered the art of Trump-whispering, they find his ears have been thoroughly bent by Russian disinformation.
In the short term, there is not an obvious alternative, but to carry on with the current method, using force of numbers and repetition to persuade Trump that his route to greatness goes by way of durable Ukrainian independence with muscular security guarantees.
It is certainly feasible that the Europeans’ diplomatic dance could nudge the president’s position in a more equitable direction on the road to a peace deal. However, they would not effect any revision of his view of a world divided between mighty power players, to whom no rules apply, and vassal states.
The challenge then is to develop European capacity as a coherent and autonomous power player — to evolve and coordinate the continent’s economic and military heft with confidence and on a scale to command respect in the only language the US president understands.
The current approach is not exactly failing, but at best, Trump-whispering is an unstable and inherently transient method. At worst it starts to look like a superstitious belief that performing the rituals of an old alliance would conjure it back into being. The right pigeon steps can win vital favors from the US president. The idea that he could ever be the true friend Europe wants him to be is for the birds.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist.
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