Europe’s American century is over. Two geopolitical thunderclaps on Wednesday will transform transatlantic relations. The watershed highlights Trump’s “America First” ideology and his tendency to see every issue or alliance as a dollars and cents value proposition. It also underscores his freedom from establishment advisors steeped in the foreign policy mythology of the West, who he thinks thwarted his first term. Although Hegseth recommitted to NATO, something fundamental has changed.
America’s interventions won two world wars that started in Europe and afterwards guaranteed the continent’s freedom in the face of the Soviet threat. But Trump said on the campaign trail he might not defend alliance members who haven’t invested enough in defense. He thus revived a perennial point posed most eloquently by Winston Churchill in 1940 about when “The New World, with all its power and might” will step “forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.” Trump is returning to the rationale used by many presidents wary of foreign entanglements from the start of the republic, saying Wednesday, “We have a little thing called an ocean in between.”
Hegseth’s stunning bluntness
It’s long been clear that the second Trump administration would place new demands on America’s European partners, which will now lead to agonized choices for governments that have chosen social spending over defense. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte told the European Parliament last month that Europeans must come up with more cash for their militaries. “If you don’t do it, get your Russian language courses or go to New Zealand,” he said. But Hegseth was still jarring. He formalized Trump’s demand for alliance members to spend 5% of GDP on defense and said the US would prioritize its growing clash with China and the security of its borders over Europe’s. “The United States will no longer tolerate an imbalanced relationship which encourages dependency,” said the new Pentagon chief, who was wearing a stars-and-stripes pocket square.
The tough new approach is not like Trump’s fantasy of displacing Gaza’s Palestinians to build the “Riviera of the Middle East.” It’s a rational response to changed political realities. The Greatest Generation that fought World War II and produced presidents who understood the dangers of a power vacuum in Europe is gone. Any American who has an adult memory of the Cold War against the Soviet Union is in their mid 50s at least. And the most powerful competitor to the United States is in Asia not Europe. So, it’s fair for Trump to ask why the continent has still not taken over its own self-defense 80 years after the defeat of the Nazis. Successive American presidents and European leaders have failed to rethink NATO for the 21st century. In retrospect, the transatlantic alliance left itself badly exposed to the most transactional and nationalist American president since the 19th century.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested in a recent interview on “The Megyn Kelly Show” on Sirius XM that the US should not be the “front end” of European security but rather the “back stop.” And he rebuked big European powers. “When you ask those guys, why can’t you spend more on national security, their argument is because it would require us to make cuts to welfare programs, to unemployment benefits, to being able to retire at 59 and all these other things,” Rubio said. “That’s a choice they made. But we’re subsidizing that?”
Trump’s treatment of allies like Canada and Mexico, as well as his calls for Denmark to hand over Greenland, shows his disdain for the multilateral US foreign policy of old. He’s always praising Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping over their smarts and strength. It’s obvious he thinks them the only worthy interlocutors for the tough leader of another great power, the United States.
“Trump’s agenda isn’t about European security: it’s that he thinks the USA shouldn’t pay for European security,” said Nicholas Dungan, founder and CEO of CogitoPraxis, a strategic consultancy in The Hague. “This isn’t a new era of transatlantic relations, it’s a new era of global big-power relations replacing the deliberately institutional structures of the liberal international order.”
The US message on Ukraine that Europe didn’t want to hear
The first test of this new US-Europe reality will come over Ukraine. Trump said that negotiations to end the Ukraine war will start “immediately” after his call with Putin, who has been frozen out by the West since his illegal invasion of Ukraine, a sovereign democracy, three years ago. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was not included, in an alarming sign for the government in Kyiv. Zelensky was at the center of everything the Biden administration did on the war. Trump did call Zelensky later Wednesday, but the American president is already fueling fears he’ll cook up a resolution that favors Russia. Asked by a reporter whether Ukraine would be an equal partner in peace talks, Trump replied: “It’s an interesting question,” and appeared to think carefully, before replying, “I said that was not a good war to go into,” apparently buying Putin’s line that the conflict was the fault of a nation brutally invaded by an authoritarian neighbor.
Hegseth was just as blunt. He laid out US starting points for the negotiation: that Ukraine could not return to its pre-2014 borders before the invasion of Crimea, that it could not join NATO and that US troops would play no part of any security force to guarantee any eventual peace. Any peacekeeping force would have to be made up of European and non-European troops and would not be covered by NATO’s mutual defense clause — meaning the US wouldn’t bail it out in the event of a clash with Moscow’s forces.
Former President Joe Biden was also reticent about Ukraine getting a path to NATO membership, fearing a clash with nuclear-armed Russia that could morph into World War III. And Trump’s insistence that European peacekeepers will not wear NATO uniforms will be seen as a similarly prudent move by many observers to avoid dragging the US into a conflict with Russia. But Wednesday was also the best day for Putin since the invasion, since it swept away many of Ukraine’s aspirations. Hegseth argued that he was simply dispensing realism. And he has a point. No one in the US or Europe thought the clock could be turned back to 2014. And Ukraine was unable to win back its land on the battlefield despite billions of dollars in Western aid.
A chilling historical analogy
The US-Russia call and a future summit with Putin in Saudi Arabia, which Trump said would happen soon, may be a hint that he’s not just cutting Zelensky out of the deal – but Europe too. In a statement, France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Spain, the European Union, the European Commission, plus the United Kingdom and Ukraine, warned “Ukraine and Europe must be part of any negotiations.” And they warned Trump, who seems to want a peace deal at any cost, that “a just and lasting peace in Ukraine is a necessary condition for a strong transatlantic security.” Former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt is worried by the cozy call between Trump and Putin. “The disturbing thing is of course that we have the two big guys, the two big egos … believing that they can maneuver all of the issues on their own,” he told Richard Quest on CNN International. Bildt evoked the most damning historical analogy possible — the appeasement of Adolf Hitler by Britain that allowed the Nazis to annex the Sudetenland. “For European ears, this sounds like Munich. It sounds like two big leaders wanting to have peace in our time, (over) a faraway country of which they know little. They are preparing to make a deal over the heads of that particular country. A lot of Europeans know how that particular movie ended.”
Trump’s detailed strategy remains opaque. The dashing of many of Zelensky’s aspirations means that Kyiv’s agreement to any Putin-Trump deal cannot be taken for granted. And after his steady gains on the battlefield, there’s no certainty that the Russian leader is as desperate for a swift settlement as Trump, who has long craved a Nobel Peace Prize. But the framework of a possible settlement has been a topic of private conversations in Washington and European capitals for months, even during the Biden administration. As Hegseth made clear, Ukraine’s hopes of regaining all its lost land is unrealistic. What may emerge is a solution along the lines of the partition of Germany after World War II, with Russian-occupied territory frozen under its control with the rest of Ukraine — on the other side of a hard border – remaining a democracy. Perhaps the western edge would be allowed to join the European Union, like the old West Germany. But this time, US troops won’t make it safe for freedom.
“The US position on Ukraine as articulated today should surprise no one in Europe: it’s just what European insiders have been saying to me off the record, in back channels, behind the scenes for two years: West Ukraine and East Ukraine, like West Germany and East Germany but in this case – EU Yes, NATO No,” said Dungan. Such a solution would conjure a cruel historical irony. Putin, who watched in despair from his post as a KGB officer in Dresden as the Soviet Union dissolved, may be on the verge of creating a new East Germany in 21st century Europe with America’s help.
