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LONDON — The thing about a war is it forces people to pick a side. And Donald Trump, it seems to many in Europe, is siding with Vladimir Putin.
Seven days of presidential interventions in the Russia-Ukraine conflict have made real the nightmares of Ukrainians and many of their allies, upending the transatlantic relationship that has underpinned European security since 1945.
Europe’s politicians are beginning to grasp how profoundly their world has changed: They must now deal with an America that is at best skeptical and at worst hostile to the old world they represent.
If there were any lingering doubts about the extent of Trump’s willingness to make enemies in Europe, he ended it Tuesday night when he blamed Ukraine for having “started” the war with Russia. Such blatant defiance of the fact of Putin’s unprovoked invasion three years ago shocked even America’s most loyal friends in the region.
“Jesus,” one British government official said privately in response to the president’s outburst.
“We now have an alliance between a Russian president who wants to destroy Europe and an American president who also wants to destroy Europe,” another European diplomat observed in recent days, declining to be identified discussing sensitive matters. “The transatlantic alliance is over.”
After almost three years of staunch support for Ukraine’s resistance under Joe Biden’s presidency, the new man in the White House is spouting Putin’s lines. In a fresh diatribe on Wednesday, he branded Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksyy a “dictator” for not calling elections, and admitted he didn’t care much about the outcome of the war.
“This War is far more important to Europe than it is to us,” Trump wrote on social media. “We have a big, beautiful Ocean as separation.”
The sentiments are devastating for Europeans but consistent with the hostility Trump has shown toward the continent since returning to office.
In his first month back, Trump and his team have announced tariffs, repeatedly savaged the EU as an institution, sold out Ukraine before peace talks have even started, called time on historic American commitments to European security and welcomed Putin back into the international fold.
In internal discussions in Brussels, some diplomats are directly broaching a notion that was once unthinkable: that the U.S. leadership is finding common ground with Russia in seeking to destroy the EU.
‘Irritants’
During the first round of talks between American and Russian delegations in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, the two sides discussed the “irritants” in their relationship, which include sanctions imposed on Moscow in response to the illegal war.
They talked about opportunities for future energy cooperation and investment — even as the EU agreed a new round of sanctions against Russia.
The new reality is dawning on Brussels: The U.S. is simply not on our side.
Pro-European political parties in the European Parliament issued a joint statement acknowledging the scale of the crisis they face.
The leaders of the center-right European People’s Party, the Socialists and Democrats, the liberal Renew Europe and the Greens declared: “Europe can no longer fully rely on the United States to defend our shared values and interests.” European countries must now act urgently to secure their own defenses, with more spending on military and more support for Ukraine, the statement added.
“Ukraine’s security is Europe’s security,” the parties said. “The European Union and its member states have no choice but to take immediate action, with NATO and likeminded non-EU allies, to invest in a more efficient and integrated European security and defense architecture.”
Not everyone is ready to accept the changed reality. Elsewhere, especially among the parties whose politics are closer to Trump’s, such as the one belonging to Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, there was dissent.
A spokesperson for the European Conservatives and Reformists group, which includes Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, explained why it didn’t sign the joint statement: “We were not fully satisfied with the wording of the assessment of the United States in the text … Now is the time for calm, measured dialogue and a focus on pragmatic solutions.”
In the U.K., former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who has been in regular contact with Trump, insisted Europe was overreacting. “Trump’s statements are not intended to be historically accurate but to shock Europeans into action,” he said.
A senior Polish official also argued that Trump didn’t want to quit NATO or divide Europe. “He wants Europe to take more responsibility for its security to strengthen NATO,” the official said.
Who’s not talking?
But even if many of Trump’s comments are merely positioning for a negotiation, what exactly is being negotiated? For whose benefit? And which side is feeling the most pressure as a result? Right now, Ukraine and Europe are not even in the negotiating room and are feeling the strain, while Russian media gloats.
In a sign of how badly damaged U.S. relations with the EU have become, the head of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen has not managed even to have a call with Trump in his first month back. She did sit down with Vice President JD Vance in Paris but he gave her no warning that Trump was about to set up talks with Putin the following day.
In Kyiv, Zelenskyy initially tried to appeal to Trump’s commercial instincts as a real estate developer, offering a share of Ukraine’s critical minerals, such as lithium, in exchange for continuing military support. That seems to have backfired, with Trump now demanding access to the minerals as back payment for aid the U.S. has already supplied.
Since then, Trump’s direct targeting of Ukraine’s president has only increased. In a move that many Europeans fear could undermine the prospects for a stable democracy in Ukraine and play into Russian hands, Trump is pressing for a quick election to remove Zelenskyy.
British lawmakers remain optimistic that the so-called special relationship between the U.K. and the U.S. will endure. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is heading to Washington next week to meet the president.
Government officials in London have also tried to treat Trump as a “transactional” politician, and hoped he would not want a bad deal on Ukraine in which it looked like he had lost out to Russia.
The truth is, Trump’s idea of a bad deal may be very different from Europe’s if he’s negotiating on behalf of his version of America — and not in the interests of Ukrainian and European security.
James Nixey, Russia-Eurasia director at the Chatham House think tank in London, said Trump and his team did not appear to be negotiating with Putin from an “oppositional” stance.
“The reality is this current crop of Republicans regard Russia and Ukrainians as sort of equal,” he said. “There is a way of dealing with Russia which is not militarily or aggressively and that’s to give Russia all it wants. And maybe they’re quite prepared to do that.”
If, as European officials increasingly fear, the transatlantic alliance is fatally wounded, how bad could it get?
Putin has ambitions to go far beyond Ukraine and to extend Russia’s territorial control over a swathe of Eastern Europe, including the Baltic countries which were formerly part of the Soviet Union, Nixey said.
As for the U.S. relationship with Europe, Trump has already floated the idea of potentially using military force to gain control over Greenland, a mineral-rich Danish territory strategically located in the Arctic. That outlandish idea raises the prospect of a possible armed conflict between two founding members of NATO.
Trump’s second term is barely one month old. In his inauguration speech on Jan. 20, he declared the United States would be “a growing nation” that “expands our territory” again. “Nothing will stand in our way because we are Americans,” Trump said. “The future is ours, and our golden age has just begun.”
Stefan Boscia, Jan Cienski, Nicholas Vinocur and Jamie Dettmer contributed to this report.
