If progress in ending the war in Ukraine requires cohesion between allies, there seems to be little or none for now.
A flurry of diplomatic talks this week did less to advance a truce, let alone a peace, than to illustrate the uneasy discord growing between Europe and the United States.
As they huddled in Paris, European leaders made clear that their priority is a free, democratic and stable Ukraine able to withstand any further Russian aggression. “We must place Ukraine in the strongest position to negotiate a solid and durable peace,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said on Thursday.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, pursued its rush to end the three-year-old war fast and on favorable economic terms for the United States. Those terms include a revived relationship with Russia and substantial recompense from a Ukraine seen as insufficiently grateful for American support.
As a result, the allies, if they are still that, resembled ships passing in the night, with President Trump on course to reward President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, while Europeans anchored themselves to a refusal to do so.
A U.S.-brokered deal to stop fighting in the Black Sea was reached in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, without a European presence. But it immediately became unclear whether the agreement would be enforced soon — if at all.
The Trump administration and the Kremlin offered three versions of its terms, as Moscow conditioned the deal on the removal of economic sanctions, a move that requires European support and faces stiff European opposition.
In Paris, where European leaders gathered without American officials, the discussion was about how to dispatch an eventual “reassurance force” to bolster any Ukrainian truce. But the so-called coalition of the willing began to look more like a coalition of the reluctant. It was unclear which countries would participate and where the troops would deploy. Moscow warned of a direct Russia-NATO military clash if they did.
After the meeting, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who attended the talks, declared that “nobody is going to give our territory to Putin.” This, he added, “is our common position — at least those present today.” The United States believes peace without territorial concessions from Ukraine is impossible.
The disagreements between Europe and Washington go much deeper than disputes over Ukraine. Europe is afflicted with vertigo. It is unsure whether Mr. Trump now regards it as a strategic and ideological rival, which would be a world-changing shift, or merely wants Europe to assume its own defense responsibilities. The latter would be a brutal shock, but perhaps an inevitable and manageable one.
“The reconfiguration of the alliance demanded by Trump can feel more like the end of the alliance,” said Michel Duclos, a special adviser to the Institut Montaigne, a research organization in Paris. “There is no longer even the pretense of a relationship of equals.”
The linchpin of the alliance has long been Article 5 of NATO’s founding treaty, which promises that “an armed attack against one or more” of the alliance’s member states “shall be considered an attack against them all” and met, if necessary, “by the use of armed force.” But that vow seems shakier than a few months ago.
Mr. Trump has long complained that the United States spends too much on Europe’s security and promised to force European nations to increase their military budgets, which has begun to happen but not to his satisfaction. With the Cold War long gone, he has threatened not to defend NATO allies that don’t pay up. Such threats have escalated in his second term.
This has led to widespread unease. France is preparing to distribute a “resilience manual” to every household to help citizens prepare for threats, including armed conflict on French soil.
At the same time, Mr. Macron announced a $2.1 billion plan to modernize an air base and equip it to host next-generation Rafale fighter jets able to deliver hypersonic nuclear missiles.
“What has become increasingly clear is that Trump’s team sees Europe as a parasitic freeloading ally and its liberal democracies as political and ideological adversaries,” said Célia Belin, the head of the Paris office of the European Council on Foreign relations. “But this is so contradictory to everything the United States has stood for that we are bound to ask: Can America really tilt this way?”
The United States has long been an idea as well as a nation. It would be a spectacular inversion of its alliances and values for Mr. Trump’s America to not only set about unraveling the European Union, an alliance he has described as created to “screw” the United States, but also to celebrate illiberal, nationalist states like Hungary.
Yet, with Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, calling European freeloading “PATHETIC” in a leaked conversation on the Signal messaging app among top Trump administration officials, and with a tone of dismissive contempt for Europe coming from Washington, such an American strategic objective no longer seems far-fetched.
Mr. Putin’s nationalism and conservative values appear to hold significant appeal for the Trump administration, perhaps more than the liberal democracies Vice President JD Vance assailed during a visit to Europe last month for allegedly refusing to listen to voters.
“It seems there has been a seismic change,” Sir David Manning, the former British ambassador to the United States, told the House of Lords this month, alluding to the difficulties of intelligence sharing when there are people in the Trump administration who are “looking for ways to appease Russia.”
These, he said, “are not our values.”
The Trump administration argues that it has a mandate to push back against what it views as the left’s political correctness and to seek through re-engagement with Moscow an end to a bloody war started by Russia.
It will not be easy, given European divisions and budgetary constraints, for the continent to end its reliance on U.S. military might and pursue a program of aggressive rearmament, but over a five- to 10-year period it is conceivable. German rearmament would change the face of Europe; it would certainly cause Moscow to take note.
What feels inconceivable to many Europeans, however, is dealing with an America that has become an adversary, whether in the short-term goal of reaching a peace settlement in Ukraine or the longer-term aim of limiting the power and influence of autocrats from Beijing to Ankara.
In the view of Stephen Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard University, the Trump administration is following a familiar playbook toward strongman rule. “First the judges, then the universities, then the press, then the lawyers — there are no rules Trump is not willing to break,” he said.
Nobody, of course, knows what Mr. Trump’s ultimate intentions are, but alarm is widespread in Europe. Ms. Belin said that just as Mr. Trump appears determined to weaken checks and balances at home, he is seeking to replicate that externally, dispensing with any rules-based or values-based order.
“Anything that is a check on whatever he wants to do on whatever day, including Article 5, is something he may tear up,” she said. “What counts in Trump world are power and interests. For Europe the choice may come down to this: Show teeth or give him what he wants.”
For now, on Ukraine, Europe seems determined to show teeth rather than offer Mr. Putin a victory perceived as threatening the entire continent. Beyond that, a great European disorientation is apparent.
“The only hope is the American people,” Mr. Duclos said.
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