Donald Trump and his Secretary of Defence, former Fox News television presenter Pete Hegseth, have offered Vladimir Putin exactly what he wants when it comes to Ukraine: no Ukrainian membership of Nato, no American boots on the ground, and Russia gets to keep all the Ukrainian land it has grabbed so far.
Under these terms, which Trump suggested had been discussed with Putin in a phone call on 12 February, there may even be a deal to end the war. Ukraine will be disinclined to accept it, since there is nothing on the table for Kyiv, but then Trump also suggested this was to be a deal hammered out between Russians and Americans. As feared by many of Kyiv’s Western allies, it now looks like Ukrainians may be left out of negotiations where its fate is to be decided, or perhaps compromised. A new Munich, two big leaders wanting to have peace and preparing to make a deal over the heads of a faraway country.
The backlash against Trump was swift. If his proposal did not amount to 1938 and the rape of Czechoslovakia, then it was like the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan all over again: solemn promises made to a close partner have been nullified with such nonchalance it is as if none was made in the first place. But in Afghanistan, Washington was paying a heavy price for its military occupation. In Ukraine, the burden of war has always been carried by Ukraine. Why would Trump give Putin what he wants? Does America get anything out of the deal? How is he planning to present it as a victory?
Hegseth also said Europe must take responsibility for its own security, a comment which offers a number of important clues. As he put it on 12 February, speaking to defence ministers at a lunchtime meeting in Brussels, America is no longer “the primary guarantor of security in Europe”. One should not assume the sentence means that Europeans have to become more independent of American power. America might be planning to extricate its troops from Europe, but it is not planning to withdraw from Europe. The fact of its presence – and of Europe’s dependence – can only become more explicit under Trump. If he manages to reach a grand bargain with Putin, the outcome will be a new security arrangement where European troops guarantee Ukraine’s security – it will be a diminished Ukraine and a country under permanent threat from Russia – while American economic interests benefit from increased arms sales and privileged access to Ukrainian natural resources, to which a fragile Ukrainian state can pose little resistance. Reconstruction of a destroyed Ukraine will be paid for by Europe and Europe alone. There will be no negotiation on that.
The Trump administration hopes to present a Ukraine deal as a victory for Americans because the onerous task of securing the historically fraught borders between West and East, Europe and Asia, will now fall, exclusively, to the European taxpayer. And if the deal solves none of the fundamental security problems responsible for the Ukraine war, so much the better. That means Europeans will remain highly dependent on American leadership.
Trump thinks in imperial terms. And empires are not primarily concerned with other empires but with their own. The end goal is to create the right framework to extract a maximum amount of resources from Europe rather than a framework to confront Russia. The latter, it seems, only made sense in a world where different empires had been subsumed under the post-1989 genuinely global order, something Trump does not believe in.
In Washington we have returned to a tripartite nature of politics that every British observer will easily recognise. A century ago, British officials used to think of three circles of policy: domestic, imperial and foreign. Trump on Ukraine is imperial policy, not foreign policy. It concerns Europe, not Russia. How should the wealthy European domains be ruled? First goal: get them to pay for the border wars.
From this perspective, the way many European officials have reacted to the terms Trump has set out remain ambiguous. When they agree that Europe has to “do more”, are they agreeing that Europeans must transfer greater wealth to the imperial core? Are they suggesting greater purchases of American weapons, something that can only increase Europe’s dependence? Or, on the contrary, are they saying that Europe must break with America because the logic presented by the Trump administration is a logic with which no European can agree, as its inevitable conclusion is a deep social and economic crisis threatening the very survival of European democracy?
In his speech at the Munich Security Conference on 14 February, Vice President JD Vance announced a programme of ideological realignment between the ruling dispensation in Washington and Europe. To many in the audience, it sounded like a programme of regime change in Europe. “What I worry about is the threat from within,” Vance said, after castigating European leaders for policies he said amounted to censorship, unchecked immigration and anti-democratic positions. He made a point of later meeting with the leader of far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD), a rather brazen interference ahead of Germany’s election on 23 February. Vance’s speech was met with a frigid reaction among the predominantly European audience.
For countries such as Poland, the Baltic states, Sweden and Finland, Czechia and even Britain, we are still in 1989. To these nations, America still appears in the guise of a higher divinity credited with the bloodless and miraculous liberation of half of Europe and the defeat of the Soviet “evil empire”. The worst that a god can inflict on mere mortals is to abandon them. Isolationism is thus regarded as the only danger. Others regard this worldview as in need of revision. Western Europe, for whom 1989 does not carry the same weight, never took it very seriously to begin with.
Unsurprisingly, according to Bloomberg, in recent weeks American officials have told their counterparts in Europe that they want closer interoperability between their militaries with regard to missile systems, ammunition, artificial intelligence and cyber warfare. That would require European nations to sign more contracts with American defense companies. Even the notion of an independent European defence-industrial base is now under attack.
The moment could not be more critical because Europe has to lay the foundations of its independence at the moment when it feels more in need of American power. It must thread a narrow and dangerous path and do it alone. It must save Ukraine from destruction when it feels incapable of preserving itself from danger. But it must not waver because the two goals come together in the end: a Russian defeat in Ukraine will make Europeans less dependent on American protection and, ultimately, more free to determine their destiny.
[See also: Donald Trump has already delivered a win for Russia]
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This article appears in the 19 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Europe Alone