BERLIN ¨C It is past time that Europeans get serious about Ukraine. With Russian President Vladimir Putin posing the greatest threat to European security since the end of the Cold War, the stakes are clear. U.S. President Donald Trump¡¯s approach to the issue has rightly terrified European leaders, but rather than proactively defending their interests, they have spent most of their energy reacting to events and attempting damage control.
At the beginning of 2025, many Europeans hoped they could keep the U.S. on side by purchasing more American weapons and liquefied natural gas. They have even shown that they can work together to handle Trump, as they did following Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy¡¯s catastrophic Oval Office meeting, and again following Trump¡¯s chummy meeting with Putin in Anchorage and later interactions. But zoom out a bit and you will see that European diplomats have been swimming upstream. Regardless of how much energy they put in, the tide is against them in the U.S., in Russia and even in Ukraine.
In the U.S., their luck will run out sooner or later, simply because Trump¡¯s core interests are antithetical to their own. His closest MAGA advisers and hangers-on have three overarching goals: to force a ¡°peace¡± at any price; to normalize relations with Russia in order to profit from the resulting business opportunities; and to bring U.S. troops back to the Western hemisphere. Some European leaders have been in denial about this agenda, but following the release of the Trump administration¡¯s National Security Strategy, they no longer have any excuse.
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