Sir Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz have become adept at scrambling to deal with the latest bad news from Washington. Their meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Downing Street on Monday was so hastily arranged that Mr Macron needed to be back in Paris by late afternoon to meet Croatia’s prime minister, while Mr Merz was due on television for an end-of-year Q&A with the German public.
But diplomatic improvisation alone cannot fully answer Donald Trump’s structural threat to European security. The US president and his emissaries are trying to bully Mr Zelenskyy into an unjust peace deal that suits American and Russian interests. In response, the summit helped ramp up support for the use of up to £100bn in frozen Russian assets as collateral for a “reparations loan” to Ukraine. European counter-proposals for a ceasefire will need to be given the kind of financial backing that provides Mr Zelenskyy with leverage at a critical moment.
More broadly, though, an ominous lead-up to Christmas has underlined the limits to firefighting and turning the other cheek to Maga provocations. The extraordinary national security strategy paper published last week by the White House did European leaders a service in this regard. Brimming with contempt for liberal democratic values, it confirmed the Trump administration’s desire to minimise security guarantees in place since the second world war, while simultaneously pressuring the EU into betraying the principles on which it was founded. This was a “for the record” version of the US vice-president JD Vance’s mocking Munich speech last February. Passages predicting the “civilisational erasure” of Europe through migration and EU integration could have been written in the Kremlin, which duly noted an overlap in worldviews. Ditto the hostile calls to cultivate “resistance” to Europe’s supposed trajectory, and support for “patriotic” nationalist parties. For good measure, Mr Trump echoed “great replacement” conspiracy theory tropes this week in an interview that rammed home the same talking points in less coherent form.
However tempting it may be to pretend otherwise, given the desire to persuade Mr Trump to do the right thing over Ukraine, a US administration that acts in such a way cannot be viewed straightforwardly as an ally. The president and his America First ideologues see the EU as a drain on security resources best deployed elsewhere, an economic competitor to be dominated, and a cultural adversary to be undermined at every opportunity.
The response must be a belated push towards greater strategic autonomy and unity in defence, and the promotion of European interests in the wider economy. That, in turn, will mean playing hardball with Washington in a way that the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, conspicuously failed to do when negotiating a humiliatingly one-sided trade deal in the summer. A world where China and the US both wish to eat the EU’s economic lunch, and Russia harbours darker designs to the east, is no place for a romantic view of multilateralism.
The White House national security strategy paper and the US president himself have laid it out in black and white: Mr Trump seeks a fragmented, weakened Europe that is reliant on US industry and tech, and will therefore meekly comply with its aggressive demands. Europeans deserve far better than a continent made fit for Elon Musk. Time to fight back.
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