Europe must get ready for the post-Western world

After Friday’s bust-up at the Oval Office, Europe’s leaders were quick to express unwavering support for Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Trump’s fury had left his and Ukraine’s future hanging by a thread. ‘You are never alone, dear President’, Ursula Von der Leyen said on ‘X’. ‘There is an aggressor: Russia. There is a victim: Ukraine,’ French president Macron chimed in. The show of solidarity continued over the weekend, when Zelenskyy received a hero’s welcome in London.

Still, the shower of praise carried the unmistakable whiff of a political eulogy. If Ukraine wishes to do business with the US, Trump stalwart Lindsay Graham clarified on Friday, he must either resign or change. And that means swallowing whatever deal Trump agrees and saying, ‘Thank you, Mr President.’

Zelenskyy’s pride had made Trump fly off the handle before. It got the better of him at the White House once more, with fatal consequences. Not since the early days of the war has Ukraine’s future looked less certain.

The great clamour over Trump’s tirade shows that Europeans still do not grasp the full depth of the revolution unleashed in the White House. Yet we only need to listen to what he says. Never has there been a US president more truthful to the public than Donald J. Trump. Never does he dress up his intentions with blandishments such as freedom and democracy. Europe should be grateful to him for that, at least.

Trump believes the business of international affairs is decided by national interests and by the agency of a handful of great powers. And in a world that revolves around the balance among such powers, the norms and demeanours that govern interstate relations happen to be very different from those Europeans have grown accustomed to since 1945.

Where great powers compete for wealth and riches, the logic of spheres of influence is hardly indefensible. Such spheres are likely to stabilize and cushion conflict. One power encroaching on the borders of another heightens the risk of war, which is why such behaviour is judged to be reckless and unbefitting. Great powers ought to stay out of each other’s backyard.

For Trump, this norm is why Putin’s cause in Ukraine has a certain legitimacy, and why Zelenskyy, the Europeans and the US Democratic Party are aggressors and warmongers who now need reining in. As he told Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, ‘You are gambling with World War III.’

It is also why China’s Xi, India’s Modi, Turkey’s Erdogan, Saudi Arabia’s Bin Salman and many other leaders in the non-Western world still harbour sympathy for Russia. Europeans tell themselves Putin is the new Hitler, the epitome of evil and moral insanity. That is not the view elsewhere. With the US now sharing this position, Europe stands ever more isolated in its posture towards Russia. How isolated precisely, its leaders still fail to appreciate.

After Friday’s debacle in the Oval Office, Kaja Kallas, the EU’s chief diplomat, tweeted that ‘the free world needs a new leader,’ adding that ‘it is now up to us, Europeans, to take this challenge.’ But if there is one thing we, Europeans, must do it is to banish any such delusions. At this moment, the best-case scenario for Europe is quite simply survival. The continent would do exceedingly well if it managed to keep its sovereignty intact, retain its freedoms and not dissolve into disparate parts.

The ‘free world’ about which US presidents once gushed can hardly be revived. Like the post-1945 order itself, it has been overtaken by a world in which the rules of empire and dominion determine what is right and wrong. Europe can continue to register dissent, threaten countries with sanctions and international courts, and refuse to do deals with autocrats and strongmen. But the world moves on all the same.

Even now, before the US has formally withdrawn its sanctions, Kremlin officials are luring US businesses back to Russia, and, in time, many will return. Once Trump gets his deal, he will encourage them to do so. Sensing the historic significance of the moment, Putin has invited Trump, Xi and Modi to attend the 9 May festivities, at which Russia will celebrate its triumph over Nazi Germany 80 years ago.

So far it is unclear whether Trump will agree to toast a Russian victory at the Kremlin, but it is far from unthinkable. The thought alone sends shudders down European spines. Much more than that, it should make the continent think hard about how long it can hold onto a narrative of moral indignation that puts it on a path to international irrelevance. Trump has already said he wants Russia back in the G7, a suggestion the Europeans immediately rebuffed. How long will it be before he launches a G4 with China, Russia, India and no Europeans around the table at all?

With their charm offensive towards Trump in tatters, European leaders now have a choice. They can dig in and continue their unwavering support of Zelenskyy’s cause, insofar as the latter wishes to carry on the fight, a possibility that, as Trump added on Friday, ‘is not going to be pretty.’ Or they can begin to prepare for the post-Western world that is, in fact, already here. This begins by telling Zelenskyy (and his staunchest backers in the EU) to accept a Trump-led peace deal, even if this will likely leave Ukraine neutral, outside the EU, and more vulnerable to future Russian incursions than he and Europe would ideally wish.

That is not, however, where it ends.

First, if Russia obtains a neutralized Ukraine, Europe should make sure this is as far as its ambitions can take it. Not one inch further west, to paraphrase George H. Bush’s Secretary of State James Baker. It is clear that Europeans will need to build their own deterrence capacity to make sure Moscow will respects this, something that requires massive public investment, the consolidation of its defence industry and the creation of a European command structure, either inside or outside NATO.

Second, Trump’s foreign policy revolution is turning the world on its head in terms of alliances. As the notion of the West becomes politically meaningless, Europeans will need to reassess their own strategic relationships in the world, a matter no less important and urgent. However distasteful it may be, once a peace deal is in place for Ukraine, that includes restoring European diplomatic ties with Moscow. Evidently, it is not something that can be left to the US.

For the moment, however, rekindling such ties remains the greatest of European taboos. Instead, the EU is occupying itself with the creation of a ‘Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression Against Ukraine’. Such tribunals are usually set up by the victors in war to hold the defeated to account. But Putin is not going to lose this war. Europe’s moment of justice and retribution is not going to come. Moscow will emerge buoyed from Trump’s peace deal, reintegrate into the world economy and benefit from close partnerships with Washington and Beijing. Its future relationship with Europe cannot be forged in tribunals and by (European) judges, but only by politics, summitry and great power diplomacy.

As the US withdraws its security umbrella from the continent, Europeans should learn to see the moment as an opportunity, for example to reforge their struggling China policy. This should start by grounding the policy in European strategic interests, not those of the United States or ‘the West’. During the Biden years, Europeans were persuaded – not to say goaded – into emulating US export controls and other forms of US economic statecraft aimed at Beijing. The need for such emulation has now gone. Should the US get embroiled in a war with China, it will not be the West’s or NATO’s war with China, it will be America’s war.

It will be hard for Europe to let go of 80 years (in the case of Western Europe) of trans-Atlanticism. We have known for some time that America’s commitment to the post-1945 order was in decline. Yet, Europeans have preferred to look the other way, clinging to the vestiges of that order. Hope, as they say, springs eternal. It was always going to take a US president of exceptional brutality to shatter Europe’s illusions. In the guise of Donald Trump, that president has arrived.