This is not the “end of history” heralded by some after 1989, but certainly the end of an era marked by the post-war transatlantic alliance of Western democracies. The Alliance was created at the instigation of the United States; it is being undone by the United States. Trump’s pivot to Russia in dealing with the war in Ukraine closes a 75 year old chapter in our history. It leaves behind a series of casualties’, not just collateral damage. Here are briefly sketched the most important.**
The first casualty is Ukraine
After the Alliance, first and most obvious is Ukraine. After the roasting given to president Zelensky in the White House, broadcast live to the world, the message is clear: the will be a ‘peace’ negotiated by Trump and Putin (their foreign ministers’ meeting was held in Ryiad) and imposed on the Ukrainians. It’s not a “give and take” negotiation, it is “take it or leave it”. Trump branded as a minor trophy in his speech to the Congress on 4 March 2025, the letter received from the Ukrainian president, revising his defiant stance: “I want peace quickly and am prepared to negotiate now”. “Negotiate”? He has not so far been invited to a negotiation which will be about Ukraine without Ukraine. Chose your historical analogy: Munich where Britain and France abandoned Czechoslovakia to Hitler in 1938 or the Hitler-Stalin pact of August 1939 which divided East European spheres of influence between them.
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In accepting the would-be ‘peace deal’ Ukraine would also give the US access to rare earth in Ukraine (some of it happens to be in Donbas controlled by Russia). In short, Ukraine’s choice, now deprived of US military backing (including intelligence and the capacity to strike in Russian territory), is: do you want to continue fighting on your own with the risk of being gradually exhausted and occupied by Russia or are you willing to cede, say, half of your territory – to the “Donald Trump & Co” mining company? Make-up your mind fast as the US president promised the deal would be settled within hundred days.
The second casualty is Europe
The second casualty is Europe or more precisely the political and security predicament inherited from the cold-war era and confirmed during America’s “unipolar moment” (Charles Krauthammer) which followed 1989. The moment was just that, a moment. Until now, the overwhelming majority of EU member-states cherished as an article of faith the idea that the American security umbrella was there and would stay there. That meant clinging to US foreign and security agenda and provide support to US international adventures including the 2003 war in Iraq. The East Europeans in particularly were adamant: you follow the US in the Mesopotamian desert, whether or not you believed the case made for it, but because you considered it as the best investment in your own security just as you were joining NATO. America was and remained the “indispensable nation” as Madeleine Albright put it. For many, particularly in Germany, Trump’s first term in office was seen as a mere parenthesis. Now it is Biden’s presidency which looks like a parenthesis between Trump I and Trump II.
Macron’s call for European “strategic autonomy” or “European sovereignty” were seen with some suspicion as perhaps another neo-Gaullist ploy to distance Europeans from their American allies. A misperception as what was Macron was proposing was “Eurogaullism”, i.e. not French but European “strategic autonomy”.
The harsh truth about Trump’s pivot to Russia
Now the Europeans in a state of shock have to confront some harsh truths about Trump’s pivot to Russia and the Alliance losing its most precious asset: trust. The Nato article 5 guarantee – the principle of collective defence, which means that an attack against one Ally is considered as an attack against all Allies – is still formally there, but the faith in the American guarantee is gone.
What we have just witnessed is the ‘de-coupling’ between the European and American allies. That had been a long-term objective of Soviet foreign policy during the cold war; it now comes true under Putin. In the 1980’s when the Soviet SS20 medium range missiles were deployed (could hit Western Europe, not the US), West Europeans supported the deployment of American Pershing missiles. French president Mitterrand went to the Bundestag to make the case in the face of a strong pacifist reaction in Germany: “Les missiles sont à l’Est, les pacifistes sont à l’Ouest” (“Missiles are in the East, pacifists are in the West”), Mitterrand said.
A defining moment for Europeans
This is now a defining moment for Europeans and it remains to be seen if and how they will rise to the occasion. The Munich conference displayed one, not very encouraging version. J .D. Vance first surprised his audience saying he was more worried about the threat from within (liberalism and its liberal and/or progressive values) than from without (Putin). He chastised the Europeans for not living up to the democratic values, leaving the European establishment present at the conference baffled and amazed: not just the war in Ukraine, but democracy too was now explictly part of the new Atlantic divide. Tensions between popular sovereignty as expressed in elections, and the rule of law with the separation of powers and its constitutional constraints, has been at the center of a more than two centuries old debate on both sides of the Atlantic (back to Tocqueville and his warnings about the “tyrany of the majority”). Vance made the case for the Trumpian version of “populist democracy” attacking the prevailing European version of liberal democracy based on the rule of law. Instead of responding in kind, as Vance rushed off to his meeting with the leader of the extreme right AfD, the president of the Munich conference, Christoph Heussgen, an experienced German diplomat, collapsed in tears. The whipping boy vs the weeping boy. A sad symbolic moment for Europe.
However, in response to Trump’s pivot to Russia, the Europeans are coming to terms with the fact that they are now on their own. The meeting organized in London on 2 March 2025, suggests that a coalition of the willing is in the making in support of Ukraine and determined to give substance to a European “common security and defense policy” long discussed, now to be implemented.
Who will be part of it?
Who will be part of it? France and Britain, because of their military capacity, their nuclear power status and their old strategic culture. The Weimar triangle Paris-Berlin Warsaw is likely be its crucial axis within the EU. Macron has taken an increasingly tough stance on Russia and can claim to be a forerunner in terms of Europe’s “strategic autonomy”. The new German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has for the first time openly suggested that defense spending should not be constrained by outdated spending limits and that German/European security will have to be envisaged independently of the US. Poland’s Donald Tusk, now in charge of EU’s rotating presidency, has been a forerunner in his warnings about Russian expansionist ambitions and is the most explicit among Europeans concerning the effort needed in terms of building a European defense capacity (Poland spends 4,5% of the GDP for defense). The coalition will also include the Nordic countries: Danmark, mobilized in defense of… Greenland (!), Finland and Sweden who know a thing or two about the Russian threat and have now joined Nato only to discover that its founder is on the way out… As Tusk aptly put it: “500 million Europeans expect 340 million Americans to protect them against 140 million Russians”. Time for Europeans to take charge of their own destiny.
