In 2014, Victoria Nuland, then Assistant Secretary of State for Europe in the Obama administration, was exposed by the leak of a telephone conversation between her and the US ambassador in Kiev. Both diplomats were relieved to say that the UN would mediate in the Ukrainian conflict and, in the middle of the conversation, Nuland blurted out "fuck the EU" and the ambassador replied with "exactly." The phrase (which remains fresh in the memory of European diplomacy) has become the symbol of a transatlantic rift that has been accelerating and deepening for years. It was enough to read the signs: the Obama administration's turn towards Asia, the chaotic withdrawal of international troops from Afghanistan without consulting the Europeans, the contempt of the first Trump administration and the beloved dependence on the United States in the war in Ukraine to avoid going to the bottom of existential divisions and assuming responsibilities that until now had been delegated. But Donald Trump has decided to turn those words stolen from a confidential conversation into the fundamental and explicit idea of his relationship with the Old Continent. And the European Union, which has taken more than a decade to understand the new reality, is now forced to rethink its immediate future without the guarantees of transatlantic cooperation.
But there cannot be a post-US Europe without first overcoming the Union's internal contradictions and weaknesses. Ukraine is the acid test. Europe has been responding reactively for years, without concrete plans, and now that it wants to take the initiative, the misgivings and different agendas of the community capitals are back. The summit this Thursday, March 6 in Brussels to discuss increasing defense spending already contemplates a confrontation with the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, and the Slovak Prime Minister, Robert Fico. The Italian Giorgia Meloni calls for rebuilding bridges with Washington in the face of common challenges. Even the British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, who leads the European response, has recognized that compliance with a ceasefire in Ukraine cannot be guaranteed without the United States.
"We have reached a point where all options involve substantial risk," writes the expert from the Egmont Institute in Brussels, Sven Biscop. The EU has tied its fate to that of Ukraine, both by the future continental security architecture and by granting it candidate status for the Union. The problem is that European emancipation plans have a horizon that is too long and diffuse given the urgency of the moment in which we live.
The key question now is who would guarantee the security of a hypothetical peacekeeping operation in Ukraine. Who would bear the responsibility of deterrence if the United States were to withdraw militarily from Europe?
The response forces a whole constellation of Washington's traditional allies to reposition themselves, as was seen this weekend at the London summit. The Trumpist challenge has accelerated the rapprochement between the United Kingdom and the continent. A powerful side effect. In terms of defence, London has remained an indispensable partner for the EU despite Brexit. Now, the French and the British (both European nuclear powers) have begun to build a coalition to send peacekeeping troops to Ukraine. The participation of Canada (which has also intensified exchanges with the EU since the first threats of tariffs), Turkey and Norway in the meeting demonstrates the need to strengthen alliances in the face of the security crisis unleashed by Trump. However, the summit was a display of calculated balances, on the one hand, to try to minimise the damage of the humiliating meeting between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office and, on the other, to begin to imagine life without the United States, however unreal this may still seem.
Ukrainian writer Andrei Kurkov writes to British weekly The Statesman The current situation has reached such levels of surrealism that – as is done with earthquakes – a symbolic scale should be created to measure with "Orwells or Kafkas" the twists and turns that we have experienced in recent weeks. That Trump says that Zelensky is a dictator and is unable to call Putin an aggressor supposes a "level of surrealism that should be measured in four, five or six Orwells," Kurkov ironically said in an interview with the weekly.
Post-US Europe also seems today still political fiction, as unreal as thinking that there can be an agreement on the security of the Old Continent without the Europeans. "Europe has woken up," said Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk this weekend. For the moment it has woken up to the new geopolitical reality of Trumpism and a Europe willing to begin to assume responsibilities in a world that is hostile to it is barely awake.
