The European American century is over.
Two geopolitical thunder on Wednesday will transform transatlantic relationships.
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The call by Donald Trump with Vladimir Putin brought in the Russian leader of the cold while bursting plans to end the war in Ukraine and agreed to change presidential visits.
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The American Minister of Defense Pete Hegseeth has meanwhile went to Brussels and told European allies to “take ownership of conventional safety on the continent.”
The basin emphasizes the 'America First' ideology of Trump and his tendency to see every issue or alliance as a dollars and cents value proposition. It also underlines its freedom of location advisers who are steeped in the foreign policy mythology of the West, who, according to him, thwarted his first term.
Although Hegseeth has recommended NATO, something has changed fundamentally.
The interventions of America won two world wars that started in Europe and then guaranteed the freedom of the continent towards the Soviet threat. But Trump said on the campaign track that he may not defend members of the Alliance who have not invested enough in the defense. Thus new life in a multi -year point, Winston Churchill appointed the most eloquent in 1940 about when “the new world, with all its power and power” will “go to the rescue and the liberation of the old”.
Trump returns to the reasons used by many presidents who are on their care for foreign complications from the start of the Republic and says on Wednesday: “We have a small thing called an ocean in between.”
Hegseeth's stunning boneness
It has long been clear that the second Trump government would make new requirements for the European partners of America, which will now lead to cooled choices for governments that have opted for social expenses for defense. NATO Secretary -General Mark Rutte told the European Parliament last month that Europeans should come up with more money for their soldiers. “If you don't do it, get your Russian language courses or go to New Zealand,” he said.
But Hegseeth was still shocking. He formalized Trump's question to the members of the Alliance to spend 5% of GDP on the defense and said that the US would give priority to the growing collision with China and the safety of its limits across Europe. “The United States will no longer tolerate an unbalanced relationship that encourages dependence,” said the new Pentagon Chief, who wore a pocket square of stars and stripes.
The tough new approach is not like Trump's imagination to move Gaza's Palestinians to build the 'Riviera of the Middle East'. It is a rational answer to changed political realities. The largest generation that fought and presidents fought against the Second World War that understood the dangers of a power vacuum in Europe has disappeared. Every American who has an adult memory of the Cold War against the Soviet Union is at least mid -1950s. And the most powerful competitor of the United States is not in Asia, not in Europe. So it is honest for Trump to ask why the continent has still not taken over his own self -defense 80 years after the defeat of the Nazis.
Successive American presidents and European leaders have not reconsidered NATO for the 21st century. In retrospect, the Transatlantic Alliance has been heavily exposed to the most transactional and nationalist US president since the 19th century.
State Secretary Marco Rubio suggested in a recent interview about “The Megyn Kelly Show” in Sirius XM that the US should not be the “front -end” of European safety, but rather the “backside”. And he punished large European powers. “If you ask those guys, why can you no longer spend on national security, their argument is because it would require us to make austerity on welfare programs, unemployment benefits, to be able to retire on 59 and all these other things , “Said Rubio. “That is a choice they have made. But we subsidize that? “
Trump's treatment of allies such as Canada and Mexico, as well as his calls for Denmark to transfer Greenland, shows his contempt for the multilateral American foreign policy of yesteryear. He always praises Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping about their cleverness and strength. It is clear that he thinks they are the only worthy conversation partners for the tough leader of another great power, the United States.
“Trump's agenda is not about European safety: it is that he believes that the US should not pay for European safety,” said Nicholas Dungan, founder and CEO of Cogitopraxis, a strategic consultancy in The Hague. “This is not a new era of transatlantic relations, it is a new era of global BIG-Power relationships that replace the deliberate institutional structures of the liberal international order.”
The American message about Ukraine that Europe did not want to hear
The first test of this new reality of the US-Europe will come over Ukraine.
Trump said the negotiations to end the Ukraine war, “immediately” will start after his phone call with Putin, who has been out of the West since his illegal invasion of Ukraine, a sovereign democracy, three years ago.
The Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zensky was not included in an alarming sign for the government in Kiev. Zensky was central to everything that the Biden administration did during the war. Trump called Zensky later on Wednesday, but the American president feeds all the fear that he will prepare a resolution that benefits Russia. Asked by a reporter if Ukraine would be an equal partner in peace talks, Trump replied: “It is an interesting question” and seemed to think carefully before he answered: “I said that wasn't a good war to go in” Putin's line that the conflict was the fault of a nation that was brutally invaded by an authoritarian neighbor.
Hegseeth was just as blunt. He explained our starting points for the negotiation: that Ukraine could not return to the boundaries before 2014 before the invasion of Crimea that it could not join. Every peace force should consist of European and non-European troops and would not be covered by the Mutual Defense clause of the NATO What means that the US would not make it in the case of a collision with the troops of Moscow.
Former President Joe Biden was also cautious that Ukraine was given a path to NATO membership, for fear of a collision with nuclear armed Russia that could change in the Second World War. And Trump's insisting that European peacemenichters will not wear NATO uniforms will be seen as a similar cautious movement of many observers to prevent the US from dragging a conflict with Russia.
But Wednesday was also the best day for Putin since the invasion, because it demonstrated many of the ambitions of Ukraine. Hegseeth argued that he simply visited realism. And he has a point. No one in the US or Europe thought the clock could be turned back to 2014. And Ukraine could not win his country on the battlefield despite billions of dollars in Western help.
Nevertheless, by taking such problems off the table, Trump deprived the supposed dealmaker Supreme de Ukrainians of a negotiating ship that could have been used to win concessions from his old friend Putin. As it looks now, Trump seems to have no objection to Russia, which retains the loot of his not led invasion. This is not surprising – because, just like Russia, America now has a president who believes that great powers are entitled to expansionism in their regional areas of influence. But rewarding Russia with a favorable arrangement would create a disastrous precedent.
A horrifying historical analogy
The call from the US and Russia and a future top with Putin in Saudi Arabia, of which Trump said it would happen soon, can be a hint that he not only cuts Zensky from the deal but also Europe.
In a statement, France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Spain, the European Union, the European Commission, Plus the United Kingdom and Ukraine, warned: “Ukraine and Europe must be part of any negotiations.” And they warned Trump, who seems to want a peace agreement at all costs, that “a just and lasting peace in Ukraine is a necessary condition for strong transatlantic security.”
Former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt is concerned about the cozy call between Trump and Putin. “The disturbing thing is of course that we have the two big boys, the two big egos … believe that they can maneuver all the problems themselves,” he told Richard Quest on CNN International. Bildt called on the most damn historical analogy – the reconciliation of Adolf Hitler by Great -Britain so that the Nazis could annex the Sudetenland. “For European ears this sounds like Munich. It sounds like two great leaders who want to have peace in our time, (more than) a distant country that they know little. They prepare a deal about the heads of that specific country. Many Europeans know how that specific film ended. “
Trump's detailed strategy remains opaque. The turbulent of many of Zensky's ambitions means that the Kyiv agreement with a Putin-Trump deal cannot be considered obvious. And after his steady profits on the battlefield, there is no certainty that the Russian leader is just as desperate to a fast settlement as Trump, who has long received a Nobel Prize for Peace.
But the framework of a possible scheme has been a subject of private conversations in Washington and European capitals for months, even during the Biden administration. As Hegseeth made clear, the hope of Ukraine to recover all his lost country is unrealistic. What could appear is a solution in the lines of the distribution of Germany after the Second World War, frozen territory under control with the rest of Ukraine-on the other side of a hard border that remains a democracy. Perhaps the western edge could join the European Union, such as the old West Germany. But this time American troops will not make it safe for freedom.
“The American position on Ukraine as articulated today, no one in Europe should be surprised: it is exactly what European insiders have said to me from the record, in rear channels, behind the scenes for two years: West -Ebraine and East -Ukraine, such as West -Germany, such as West Germany, such as West Germany and East Germany but in this case -EU yes, NATO no, “said Dungan.
Such a solution would evoke a cruel historical irony. Putin, who looked in despair of his position as a KGB officer in Dresden while the Soviet Union is dissolved, can be about to create a new East Germany in the 21st century Europe with American help.
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