In response to Trump’s gratuitous gifts to Putin, Emmanuel Macron convened Monday’s emergency summit of Europe’s defence powers. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, warned that the choice for European leaders was between Brussels and Moscow: the time had come for a European army.
This is all welcome, but every decision from now on should be premised on the awareness that what is at stake is not “just” a repeat of Munich 1938, in which Ukraine is sold out to Russia, just as France and Britain did to Czechoslovakia to appease Nazi Germany. The ominous spectre, after Vance, is that of Poland in 1939, squeezed and then attacked by Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany, both intent on imperial expansion. Europe as a whole this time (starting with Ukraine) is under attack militarily by Putin’s Russia and politically by Trump’s America. China is waiting in the wings to partake in the feast.
The sense of urgency and the call to action should not be about merely pleading pathetically for a seat at the negotiating table on the war in Ukraine. Only Ukraine and Russia should be at that table. Neither should European governments bend over backwards to reassure Washington they are ready to pick up the bill on whatever the US and Russia agree. Nor should Europe’s focus be on how to retain US interest by increasing spending on US weapons or gas.
What Europeans (Ukraine included) must agree fast among themselves is what they want, what their red lines are, and what actions they are ready to take collectively for Ukraine regardless of what the US and Russia stitch up. Sanctions, military support for Ukraine, the use of Russian frozen assets, accelerated EU membership and a European deterrence force in the event of a truce are all options. More broadly, Europe will need to make itself more capable and less dependent on the US for defence. Temporarily exempting defence investments from EU fiscal rules, establishing new EU borrowing for defence, increasing European investment bank lending for defence or setting up a defence bank among the willing and able European governments will have to be considered.
Europe should neither pick fights with the Americans nor focus on pleasing them. But European governments must now act on the assumption that they are alone in a world dominated by malign imperial powers. A Europe in which the far right takes power, as Trump and Putin would like to see, is one in which European integration would cease to exist. After years of discussing how the transatlantic partnership against threats from Russia could be strengthened, we find ourselves in a world in which we are not just abandoned by the US to defend ourselves, but attacked by it.
