A remarkable thing has happened on the world’s battlefields. Ukraine — a nation that was supposed to dissolve within days of a Russian invasion — has fought Russia to a stalemate, revolutionizing land warfare in the process. It has become an indispensable security partner in the western alliance, including in the war against Iran.
Now, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, is taking the next step, one that would have been unthinkable even as recently as 2024. By word and deed, he’s showing Europe and the world how the post-American free world can preserve its liberty and independence. This is what happens when, as Phillips Payson O’Brien wrote in a piece for The Atlantic, “Kyiv appears to have given up on the United States.”
If that is true — and it looks as though it is — it may be worse news for the United States than it is for Ukraine.
Events on the ground and in world capitals are moving so quickly that it’s hard to keep up. First, the strategic situation in the Ukraine war seems to have changed. Last week, Mick Ryan, a retired Australian major general and one of the most astute analysts of the war, wrote that Ukraine has largely stabilized the frontline in eastern Ukraine, deepened its coalition, isolated Russia diplomatically and developed an indigenous arms industry that makes it less dependent on external support.
It’s no longer accurate to think of Ukraine as a desperate underdog; it’s becoming an independent power. Even as it fights for its life against Russia, it’s reportedly reaching defense deals with the Gulf states and with the United States — and this time it’s Ukraine that’s providing military assistance.
In February 2025, Donald Trump mocked Zelensky in the Oval Office. “You’re not in a good position. You don’t have the cards right now,” Trump said. In April 2026, Ukraine has enough cards left that it’s sharing them.
This might be difficult for many readers to grasp — given our nation’s longstanding military supremacy — but the largest and most battle-hardened land force in the western world may well be the Ukrainian Army. While the precise numbers are classified, the Atlantic Council estimated in 2025 that Ukraine had roughly a million men and women under arms, the vast majority of whom serve in the ground forces.
America’s total force is larger than Ukraine’s, but to put the size of Ukrainian land forces in perspective, the combined size of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps is around 620,000. It’s also worth noting that the U.S. forces have much less combat experience than Ukraine forces — especially when it comes to combat with a great power.
No one should minimize Ukraine’s manpower issues (more recent estimates place its total number of active troops well below the million-body peak) or the fact that it has no nuclear weapons and Russia has thousands. But its army is still vast, and its military is the only western force that has fully adapted to modern drone warfare. Indeed, Ukraine is arguably the world’s leader in drone warfare.
Rapid change isn’t just occurring in Ukraine. Other developments across the western alliance show that European nations are working with shocking speed to free themselves from dependence on America.
France is expanding its nuclear arsenal and increasing its defense spending. It has even changing its nuclear doctrine to allow it to deploy nuclear-armed aircraft outside France.
Germany has approved a plan to spend up to a trillion euros on defense and infrastructure. It has also set the goal of creating the strongest military in Europe by 2039 (ironically enough, the 100-year anniversary of the German invasion of Poland).
Canada is enacting its own defense budget increases — with the added twist that it will be spending far less money on American weapons.
This decision mirrors larger European and allied trends. Our allies are increasing their defense budgets and decreasing their dependence on American technology. Just last week, for example, NATO procurement officials decided to replace aging American-made early warning aircraft with newer designs from Saab, a Swedish manufacturer, and Bombardier of Canada. Ukraine has signed deals and letters of intent to purchase potentially hundreds of advanced fighters from Sweden and France.
All of this is taking place after news reports that Denmark had been prepared to blow up airfields in Greenland if its fellow NATO member, the United States, attempted to invade.
Given these developments, is it any wonder that Zelensky has proposed a new defense arrangement for Europe if America keeps stepping back — an alliance between E.U. nations, plus non-E.U. powers like the United Kingdom, Norway, Turkey and Ukraine?
There are readers who will welcome these developments. Good, you might think. Europe should take primary responsibility for its own defense. But there is an immense difference between allies who step up to contribute their fair share to a cooperative alliance and nations who engage in a military buildup to replace American power, which they no longer trust.
I don’t think Americans fully appreciate the extraordinary cost of Trump’s bluster and blunders. It should go without saying, but once you threaten to invade an allied country, you don’t just place the existence of the alliance in jeopardy; you raise the possibility of allies turning into mortal enemies. You can also trigger the kind of insecurity and scramble for power that contributed to the start of World War I.
In practical terms, it’s hard to see how alienating American allies puts America first.
There’s certainly no military benefit. Americans have spent the last several weeks watching our president dismiss our European allies as irrelevant then rage at them for not helping American forces reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
By launching the war against Iran without seeking the help of (or even consulting) our European allies, we lost potential access to their advanced fighters and frigates, as well as to France’s carrier battle group. In this context, there is no such thing as addition by subtraction. We are not stronger when there are fewer forces that will deploy to our aid.
There’s no fiscal benefit, either. This may sound overly basic, but it needs to be said: If you break faith with your allies, you can’t count on them to come to your defense. And that means you have to spend more money to maintain the same level of deterrence.
That’s exactly what Trump is planning to do; he has submitted a roughly $1.5 trillion dollar budget request for the U.S. military, a staggering 40 percent increase from this fiscal year.
And where is the economic benefit? On Friday, Fareed Zakaria published a piece in The Washington Post observing that European and other allied governments aren’t just attempting to achieve greater military independence from the United States; they’re also attempting to gain more financial independence. And even though they have serious differences with China, the primary beneficiary of a rift in European and American relations may well be … China.
Zakaria quotes a Chinese businessman who puts Trump’s catastrophic diplomatic blunders in perspective. “For us, Trump’s attack on Iran is less consequential than his threat to attack Greenland,” he said. “When he did that, to America’s oldest allies, I knew that Europe would not follow America’s approach to China.”
History has its hinge points, and here is one: On Friday night, Feb. 25, 2022, Volodymyr Zelensky released a brief video from Kyiv. He told the people of Ukraine that the government has not fled to safety in the west and that it intended to stand and fight.
“We are here,” Zelensky said. “We are in Kyiv. We are protecting Ukraine.”
When I visited Ukraine in 2023, I spoke to Ukrainian soldiers who told me that statement sent a jolt of electricity through Ukrainian lines. From that moment, they knew they would not surrender; they would stand.
In hindsight, that decision hasn’t just changed the course of Ukrainian history. Its ripple effects are extending across the globe.
Here’s another hinge point: the night of Nov. 5, 2024, when the American people returned Donald Trump to the White House. It’s now clear that Trump’s second term will cause generational damage to American alliances.
Given that Americans saw how Trump behaved in his first term and put him back in power anyway, it’s fair for Europeans to conclude that the rift isn’t with Trump alone; its also with a critical mass of Americans.
The European nations don’t have the luxury of blaming Trump’s re-election on inflation and the border — or presuming that the western alliance will be safe once Trump is gone. One of Trump’s most likely heirs, JD Vance, is arguably even more hostile to the western alliance and Ukraine than Trump is. After all, Vance recently said that one of the things he’s “proudest” of is the administration’s decision to stop buying weapons for Ukraine. How can we be trusted as an ally if only one political party is committed to fulfilling our commitments?
For the foreseeable future, America’s allies will reasonably fear that they may be one election away from abandonment and betrayal.
Politics abhors a vacuum. When America stepped back, other nations were bound to step forward.
While America is still the world’s most powerful nation and it remains (for now) in NATO, it is rapidly forfeiting its role as the leader of the free world. And while we have certainly made mistakes in that role, we did lead the NATO alliance to victory in its generations-long confrontation with the Soviet Union. And we did so without treading into another catastrophic world war.
But you cannot threaten the free world and lead it at the same time. No nation can match American might, but for the first time in my adult life, the moral and strategic heart of the defense of liberal democracy doesn’t beat in Washington. It doesn’t beat in London or Paris or Berlin or Ottawa, either. It’s in Kyiv, where a courageous leader and a courageous people have picked up the torch America has dropped.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post Ukraine Has Picked Up the Torch America Dropped appeared first on New York Times.
