It’s Time For a New European Alliance
Here’s how to help Ukraine during the second Trump administration.
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For all the talk about Donald Trump’s unpredictability, one has a good sense of the U.S. policy toward Ukraine after January 20. There is no “appetite” in Congress, as the speaker of the House said in October, for further aid to Kyiv—a baseline fact that has hardly been altered by the election in November. The plan articulated by the president-elect’s envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, involves denying NATO membership to Ukraine, as well as making territorial concessions to Russia and providing Moscow with sanctions relief. In December, Kellogg criticized Ukraine’s killing of General Igor Kirillov—and Trump weighed in against Ukrainian strikes deep inside Russia.
True, Vladimir Putin may still anger Trump by refusing to negotiate or by setting his asking price too high, as seems to be the case. In December, Trump vowed not to “abandon” Ukraine. Perhaps he will continue to arm Ukraine or will lift restrictions on its strike capabilities to project strength. Such glimmers of hope, however, do not amount to a sound basis for policy, either for Ukraine or the rest of Europe. Despite putting on a brave face, Ukrainians are surely contemplating the less-than-ideal scenarios that may materialize in the early months of the next Trump presidency.
Given the stakes, one would expect Ukraine’s European partners to do the same. Yet there is woefully little evidence that a significant amount of effort is going toward setting Ukraine up for success in the looming absence of U.S. leadership.
Yes, the EU continues to support Ukraine financially and remains committed to its membership in the block. The G7-organized $50 billion loan to Kyiv, which used Russian frozen assets as collateral, has now been finalized and there are signs that the EU would step up if the United States reneged on its end of the bargain.
There is, however, little indication that Europeans are ready to fill the void left by the eventual end of U.S. weapons deliveries. Even Poland, the most heavily militarized among major EU countries, cannot “give everything” to Ukraine, as Prime Minister Donald Tusk warns.
Meanwhile, Slovakia has now joined ranks with Hungary in an explicitly anti-Ukrainian coalition. The prime minister, Robert Fico, visited Moscow just before Christmas, and the Slovak foreign ministry has launched a full frontal information campaign against Ukraine, accusing President Zelenskyy of spreading “fabulations” about the impact of Russia’s energy policies on the Ukrainian war effort. In neither Budapest nor Bratislava has the anticipated abandoning of Europe by the United States induced the two governments to get serious about helping Ukraine and deterring future Russian aggression. Rather, it has accelerated a turn away from the two countries’ Western allies toward Russia, seeking a privileged position within what Fico and Viktor Orbán expect to become a post-American Europe—one in which Russia will be appeased, accommodated, and reintegrated within the European economy.
The ongoing splintering as well as the continued paralysis of Germany and France due to their own fractured politics may be understandable. Yet that does not change the fact that the stakes are extremely high. Even if Trump succeeds in negotiating a formal peace agreement or a ceasefire, it remains unclear how such a deal is to be enforced. President Emmanuel Macron is the only one willing to muse openly about what may soon become a necessity: namely, sending European troops to Ukraine to police Ukraine’s new borders.
Back in 2014, Timothy Snyder wrote presciently that not only does “Ukraine [have] no future without Europe, but Europe also has no future without Ukraine.” Gargantuan as the task may seem, stopping Russian aggression and preventing its recurrence are only two items on a much longer list of challenges facing the EU.
If the EU had one geopolitical aspiration, it consisted of remodeling its neighborhood to its image. Membership in the bloc helped consolidate democracy in Greece, Spain, and Portugal, and turned post-communist transitions in Eastern Europe into a success story. To be sure, the technique does not work everywhere—Turkey’s aspirations have gone nowhere and enlargements in Western Balkans have stalled.
The underlying fundamentals of Ukraine’s situation, alongside those of Moldova and Georgia, are complex but largely in line with the EU’s earlier successes. All three have populations that see themselves overwhelmingly as European and are keen to part ways with post-Soviet practices. Neither their corruption and rule-of-law deficiencies are without precedent, nor is Ukraine’s size an insurmountable obstacle. Sadly, because of the war, Poland’s population when it joined the EU exceeded that of Ukraine today.
What does make a difference is the geopolitical climate. Earlier successes of folding the EU’s neighborhood into the integration project happened under benign circumstances, under America’s security umbrella. Making sure the EU’s acquis communautaire, the single market, and its structural funds do their magic in Ukraine will require confronting the bleak reality of Russian imperialism head on.
Otherwise, instead of embedding a successful and democratic Ukraine in the EU, the bloc risks witnessing its collapse at the hands of Russian military aggression or political interference, turning the integration project into a hollow, meaningless shell—and thus confirming Orbán’s and Fico’s priors.
It has become a tired cliché to say that the EU is at a turning point or in need of a “Hamiltonian Moment.” Yet with a land war at the EU’s doorstep the stakes are truly existential. The EU’s penchant for incrementalism and technocracy is not going to cut it. Meanwhile, action that could save the continent—most importantly, a military build-up and tangible security guarantees to Ukraine—is unlikely to emerge from the confederal, consensus-driven deliberations of the European Council, always favoring lowest common denominator solutions.
This should be a moment of clarity for European governments. They can either commit politically, financially, and security-wise to Ukraine’s success, or they can choose not to, tanking both Ukraine and the European project. Success requires moving beyond the confines of the EU to build a new, different political structure—an alliance—to raise money for Ukraine, to deter Russia through ironclad security guarantees (including by relying on France’s nuclear umbrella), and to shepherd Ukraine’s eventual way into the EU.
The Weimar Triangle (France, Germany, Poland) is the minimal viable coalition needed to solve the Ukrainian problem, though the final coalition could encompass many others, including EU non-members such as Norway or the UK. At its core, however, a coalition of the willing—let’s call it the European Alliance, for lack of a better term—will need Poland’s strategic clarity, Germany’s industrial and financial base, and France’s nukes to do its job effectively.
Given the tenuous politics in Paris and Berlin, this is a tall order. But the alternative is not European and transatlantic business as usual. Nor is this a call for European “strategic autonomy,” displacing or duplicating U.S. action. It is a recognition that the best way for Europeans to engage with the Trump administration is by knowing what their own interests are and by resourcing those ambitions accordingly. Some European governments have already failed that test miserably. Yet there may still be some residual courage and moral clarity left on the continent to save it from failure and irrelevance.
Dalibor Rohac is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. Twitter: @DaliborRohac.
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I would say that at the moment the confederal structure is a weak point and a minus. A plus and stronger point would be a federal government and institutions that can handle the challenge and negotiate with Ukraine instead of 27 governments doing that
Yes Fico and Orban want a communist type of economy. That is where Russia is heading with so much state control