European leaders have been working to support Ukraine and beef up their own defences. But the blowup between President Trump and Ukraine’s president on Friday made those goals more urgent.
European leaders have dealt with President Donald Trump’s return to office by trying to keep him co-operating on Ukraine while pushing to ramp up their own defence spending so they are less reliant on an increasingly fickle America.
But Friday’s meeting in the Oval Office, in which Trump berated President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, underscored for European leaders that while they still need to try to keep the United States at the table, they also might need to come up with more concrete plans of their own – and fast.
Following the heated exchange, a visibly annoyed Trump cancelled a news conference with the Ukrainian leader and posted on social media that Zelenskyy was “not ready for peace” so long as he has American backing.
His anger – and his threat that the United States could stop supporting Ukraine if it did not accept any US-brokered peace deal – was just the latest sign that Trump was pivoting US foreign policy away from traditional allies in Europe and towards Russia.
The stark shift in American strategy has left the continent’s leaders reeling. Many worry that if the war ends with a weak deal for Ukraine, it would embolden Russia, making it a greater threat to the rest of Europe. And the change in tone makes achieving greater self-reliance more urgent than ever, even if the European leaders face the same daunting challenges as before.
It would take years to build the weapons systems and capabilities that Europe would need to be truly independent militarily. And supporting Ukraine while building homegrown defences could take the type of rapid action and united political will that the European Union often struggles to achieve.
“Everything relies on Europe today: The question is, how do they step up?” said Alexandra de Hoop Scheffer, acting president of the German Marshall Fund. “They have no alternative.”
European leaders had been debating how they could help to guarantee security in Ukraine if a peace deal were struck, what terms they would find acceptable, and what they might give Ukraine in their next aid package.
In fact, top officials are poised to meet this week to discuss defence, first in London on Sunday at a gathering organised by Keir Starmer, the British Prime Minister, then in Brussels on Thursday at a special summit of the European Council, which brings together EU leaders.
Representatives from the bloc’s 27 member countries met Friday afternoon to come up with a draft of ideas for the meeting in Brussels. The plan included calls to beef up EU defences faster than previously expected, and to more clearly define possible security guarantees for Ukraine, according to an EU official briefed on the matter.
And that was before Friday’s exchange between Trump and Zelenskyy.
The flare-up spurred an immediate outpouring of outrage and public support for Ukraine from many European officials.
“The scene at the White House yesterday took my breath away,” Germany’s President, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, told DPA, a German news agency, on Saturday. “I would never have believed that we would ever have to defend Ukraine from the United States.”
It also prompted calls for fast action, with some European diplomats and leaders hoping that even countries that have been reluctant to increase spending on defence and support for Ukraine will now get on board with a more ambitious approach.
“A powerful Europe, we need it more than ever,” President Emmanuel Macron of France posted on social media. “The surge is now.”
Kaja Kallas, the EU’s top diplomat, was even more emphatic.
“We will step up our support to Ukraine,” she wrote on social media Friday night. “Today, it became clear that the free world needs a new leader. It’s up to us, Europeans, to take this challenge.”
Yet for all of the bracing pronouncements, speeding up Europe’s transition to greater autonomy on defence will be no easy task.
For starters, shouldering a greater part of the financial burden for aiding Ukraine is likely to be expensive. The United States alone has spent about US$114 billion ($203b) on military, financial and humanitarian aid for Ukraine over the past three years, according to one frequently used tracker, compared with Europe’s US$132b.
Plus, when it comes to European defence more broadly, America provides critical weapons systems and other military equipment that would be near impossible to replace quickly.
“We still do need the US,” said Jeromin Zettelmeyer, director of the Brussels-based research group Bruegel.
EU nations have been increasing their military spending in recent years – spending 30% more last year than in 2021. But some Nato countries are still short of the goal of members’ spending 2% or more of their gross domestic product on defence.
Part of the problem is that spending more on defence typically means spending less on other priorities, like health care and social services. And given economic challenges and budgetary limitations in Germany, France and smaller economies like Belgium, finding the political will to rapidly ramp up outlays has sometimes been a challenge.
Still, European leaders are trying to find ways to make bloc-wide deficit rules more flexible to enable more military investments.
“Decisions on massive investments are needed with regard to our common European defence capabilities,” Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s Foreign Minister, said Saturday, calling for such action this week.
When it comes to finding more money to support Ukraine, Europeans are not speaking with one voice.
European officials had been discussing a future aid package for Ukraine, one that could total tens of billions of euros. By Friday night, countries that have been pushing for more ambitious sums were hoping that Trump’s tone during the Zelenskyy meeting would help to prod European laggards to open their pocketbooks, according to one diplomat familiar with discussions.
But Hungary is expected to oppose the new aid package for Ukraine, which could force the EU to cobble together contributions from member states, rather than passing a package at the level of the bloc, since the latter would require unanimity.
In a clear sign of the disunity, Viktor Orban, Hungary’s Prime Minister, stood apart from many other European leaders, thanking Trump for his exchange with Zelenskyy. He wrote on social media that the US leader “stood bravely for peace” even if “it was difficult for many to digest”.
European officials have also been considering whether, when and how to put European peacekeeping forces on the ground in Ukraine if a deal is reached to stop the war. Britain has expressed a willingness to send troops to Ukraine, as has France. Discussions on that are expected to continue this week.
But in light of Friday’s exchange, some say the time for slow-moving deliberation may be over. While officials had just begun to talk about what security guarantees for Ukraine might look like, they may need to begin to quickly think about how to implement them, de Hoop Scheffer said. “This is a time for Europe to very, very seriously step up,” she said.
She added that the Oval Office blow-up had underscored that European officials will need to put forward their best mediators to try to keep the United States on board to the extent possible.
Giorgia Meloni, the Italian Prime Minister, is seen as one of the closest leaders to Trump in Europe. She said in a statement Friday night that she would try to push for a meeting among all of the allies.
“It is necessary to have an immediate summit between the United States, European states and allies to talk frankly about how we intend to face today’s great challenges,” she said. “Starting with Ukraine.”
This past week, Starmer and Macron travelled to Washington to meet with Trump, gatherings that seemed to go considerably better than Trump’s meeting with Zelenskyy – even if they failed to achieve major goals like getting a US security “backstop” for peacekeeping troops.
In fact, Starmer’s plans to debrief European leaders on his trip during the Sunday summit highlighted one side-effect of the shift in America’s tone: EU countries and Britain are coming closer together as they draw up defence plans.
That puts Starmer in a position to play more of a leadership role in dealings with the United States, as Germany works to put together a new Government and the French struggle with domestic political challenges.
Given how necessary US support remains, European leaders are likely to strategise about how to keep Trump engaged as they talk this week. Already, Zelenskyy posted messages thankful for US support on social media.
On Sunday, before his trip to London, Donald Tusk, Poland’s Prime Minister, said officials were talking about the need to have the “closest possible alliance with the United States”.
But as Europe increasingly recognises that the United States is “super unreliable,” Zettelmeyer said, the time for simply hoping for continuity in relations may be past.
“We’ve had several of these shocking moments – every time there’s a shocking moment, there’s a lot of hand-wringing,” he said. “The really interesting question is: Is this time going to be different?”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Jeanna Smialek
Photographs by: Doug Mills, Tyler Hicks and Nicole Tung
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