The Trump Admin Should Lay Down the Law to the Europeans
The Munich Security Conference is an opportunity to tell the Europeans the facts of life about Ukraine and their own security.
An army of Trump administration officials is descending on Europe this week, hopefully with the intent of renegotiating the transatlantic relationship entirely. Vice President J.D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, special envoy Keith Kellogg, and a number of others will be in Europe this week for the NATO ministerial, the Munich Security Conference, or both. The ground is beginning to shift in Europe, and the Trump administration should seize the moment, making clear the party is over for America’s European wards.
Start with the war in Ukraine. For weeks, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has been preparing to accuse the Americans of stabbing him in the back. At Davos in January, Zelensky lashed out at the United States and Germany, accusing the two leading NATO states as having lied when they made promises of future NATO membership. As he put it,
I think from the very beginning, this was not a very transparent policy, and they did not support us in NATO. And those were simply false words—that yes, Ukraine would be in NATO—because decades have passed, and Ukraine is still not in NATO. That was unfair to Ukraine and to Ukrainians.
He complained a week later in an Associated Press interview that American leaders were overstating aid to Ukraine by referring to the $177 billion they have allocated to aid for Ukraine:
I don’t know where all that money went. Perhaps it’s true on paper with hundreds of different programmes—I won’t argue, and we’re immensely grateful for everything. But in reality, we received about US$76 billion. It’s significant aid, but it’s not US$200 billion.
All of this should be viewed in the Ukrainian political context. The war is going poorly for Ukraine, and Zelensky is not going to take responsibility for its failures. It makes sense he would try to deflect blame onto his leading patron and portray himself as a fellow patriot betrayed by a perfidious third party. But the Trump administration should view this effort to shift blame onto Americans as a good sign: It indicates that Zelensky is reacquainting himself with reality. Ukraine is not joining NATO, and it is not winning the war. With no massive aid packages likely to be forthcoming, the time has come to end the war.
The Europeans appear to believe Trump means business. Most notably, the British have taken over leadership of the vehicle for distributing aid to Ukraine, the Ukraine Defense Contact Group. At a meeting last Wednesday, the group announced that London would be leading the way. POLITICO EU cryptically admitted that “it’s still uncertain whether the U.K. will take on leadership beyond Wednesday’s meeting,” noting that negotiations over who will lead the effort in the future are ongoing. The Trump administration should offload the Contact Group, and backing for Ukraine more generally, to the Europeans—permanently.
But the Trump administration cannot allow the Europeans to bog down the trip in the fine-grained details of the Ukraine war. In meeting after meeting with European scholars and officials, it has become clear to me that they intend to use Ukraine negotiations as an instrument to block progress on shifting the burden of European defense onto European shoulders. They will argue that it is irresponsible and risky to negotiate such a deal while a war is raging in Europe. They will argue this because it suits their interests. It allows actors with maximalist goals in Ukraine to push further, and more importantly it slows down efforts to force them to pay for their own defense.
The officials visiting—ideally Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—should use their meetings (and particularly their public speeches) to signal that Uncle Sam will no longer play the role of Uncle Sucker in Europe. The United States is stepping down from its role as Europe’s pacifier, and if European states view Russia as anything close to the threat they say it is, they need to snap to.
Hopefully the president’s recent demand that the Europeans spend five percent of GDP was designed as a poison pill. The major European powers are never going to spend five percent of GDP on defense. Given that, demanding they do so sets them up for failure. Their failure could be used as grounds for withdrawing U.S. forces.
The Italian press reported weeks ago that Trump wanted to withdraw 20,000 troops from Europe. That’s a good start, but his predecessor deployed an additional 20,000 US troops to Europe after Russia invaded Ukraine. 80 plus 20 minus 20 is 80. The status quo ante should be intolerable for Americans. Getting back to 2022 troop levels in Europe is not an America-First goal. Getting to zero, as quickly as possible, is. The administration should make clear that 20,000 is the first of several, comparable moves, and tell the Europeans to get ready, now.
Finally, Trump’s people should make clear that the recent cuteness from France and Poland about putting European peacekeepers in Ukraine under non-NATO auspices is unacceptable. It is true that the Washington Treaty does not cover troops deployed outside member-states, and so would not cover peacekeepers potentially killed by Russian forces in Ukraine. But the politics would be different than the law. The countries whose forces were killed would demand solidarity and U.S. aid against NATO’s enemy. NATO’s permanent escalation caucus in the Baltic states and Poland would likely use it as a vehicle to try to expand the war.
The Trump administration should pour cold water on this peacekeeper idea and begin sending loud, clear signals that not only does it oppose the policy, but that US forces are being withdrawn from Europe in any case, and will not be around should the balloon go up.
In 2011, no less of an establishment figure than Robert Gates warned of a “dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress—and in the American body politic writ large—to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense.”
Trump’s 2024 victory suggests that the American body politic has lost its appetite and patience. Trump has a mandate on Ukraine and on Europe policy. The administration should use the visits this week as a chance to take Europe by the lapels and make clear that the Americans may still be oversexed, overpaid, and overfed, but they will no longer be over there.
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