British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz have become adept at scrambling to deal with the latest bad news from Washington. Their meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Downing Street on Monday was so hastily arranged that Macron needed to be back in Paris by late afternoon to meet Croatia’s prime minister, while Merz was due on television for an end-of-year question and answer with the German public.
Diplomatic improvisation alone cannot fully answer US President Donald Trump’s structural threat to European security. Trump and his emissaries are trying to bully Zelenskiy into an unjust peace deal that suits US and Russian interests. In response, the summit helped ramp up support for the use of up to ￡100 billion (US$133.7 billion) in frozen Russian assets as collateral for a “reparations loan” to Ukraine. European counterproposals for a ceasefire need to be given the kind of financial backing that provides Zelenskiy with leverage at a critical moment.
An ominous lead-up to Christmas has underlined the limits to firefighting and turning the other cheek to “Make America Great Again” provocations. The extraordinary national security strategy paper published last week by the White House did European leaders a service in this regard. Brimming with contempt for liberal democratic values, it confirmed the Trump administration’s desire to minimize security guarantees in place since World War II, while simultaneously pressuring the EU into betraying the principles on which it was founded. This was a “for the record” version of the US Vice President J.D. Vance’s mocking Munich speech last February. Passages speaking of the “civilizational erasure” of Europe through migration and EU integration could have been written in the Kremlin, which saw an overlap in worldviews. Ditto the hostile calls to cultivate “resistance” to Europe’s supposed trajectory, and support for “patriotic” nationalist parties. For good measure, Trump echoed “great replacement” conspiracy theory tropes this week in an interview that rammed home the same talking points in less coherent form.
However tempting it might be to pretend otherwise, given the desire to persuade Trump to do the right thing over Ukraine, a US administration that acts in such a way cannot be viewed straightforwardly as an ally. The president and his “America First” ideologues see the EU as a drain on security resources best deployed elsewhere, an economic competitor to be dominated, and a cultural adversary to be undermined at every opportunity.
The response must be a belated push toward greater strategic autonomy and unity in defense, and the promotion of European interests in the wider economy. That means playing hardball with Washington in a way that the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, conspicuously failed to do when negotiating a humiliatingly one-sided trade deal in the summer. A world where China and the US wish to eat the EU’s economic lunch, and Russia harbors darker designs to the east, is no place for a romantic view of multilateralism.
The White House national security strategy paper and Trump himself have laid it out in black and white: Trump seeks a fragmented, weakened Europe that relies on US industry and tech, and meekly complies with its aggressive demands. Europeans deserve far better than a continent made fit for Elon Musk. Time to fight back.
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