Impotent fury. European leaders are frothing.

U.S. President Donald Trump sparked the fury with a menu of insults and lies about Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. 

Take your pick: He is an unelected dictator. Ukraine started the bloody war with Russia. Zelenskyy had better act fast or lose his country.

“It’s our security he’s putting at risk,” Jean-Yves Drian, a former French foreign minister, told France-Info radio, referring to Trump and Europe more broadly. “Since arriving in power, all his swipes have been aimed uniquely at the historical friends of the U.S.”

Even more fury spilled onto social media from the Czech minister of the interior, Vit Rakusan; “I fear we have never been this close to Orwell’s ‘war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.'”

A major blow was to refuse to invite Ukraine and the Europeans to talks with Russia about Ukraine held in Saudi Arabia this week.

The Czechs have bitter experience of closed-door diplomacy. In Munich in 1938, Hitler bullied the leaders of Britain and France into agreeing to carve up Czechoslovakia, while the Czechoslovak representative was forced to sit outside in an anteroom.

“O nas, bez nas” — about us, without us. It became a Czech slogan for big-power bullying, now finding an echo in the comments of European leaders, as well as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, on Trump and the Russians.

But all this fury is impotent — and for that impotence, the Europeans must take the entire blame themselves. 

European inaction

There were plenty of warnings, starting with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s furious speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007. He accused the U.S. of the uncontained use of force and said NATO expansion was a serious provocation to Russia. Seven years later, his soldiers seized Crimea from Ukraine. And in 2022, he ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 

The Europeans reacted, first with sanctions, then more sanctions and, finally, money and arms. But always far less than the Ukrainians pleaded for.

Now, with Trump seemingly to side openly with Putin against Ukraine, European leaders have met again around a table in the Élysée Palace in Paris at the request of France.  

“France has said since the 1960s that Europe needs to stand on its own feet and not bow to the U.S.,” Phillips P. O’Brien said in a recent podcast. He’s a historian and professor of strategic studies at Saint Andrew’s University in Scotland. 

“But it turns out French leaders never actually believed it, because they didn’t prepare for it. Macron made a couple of speeches in the last year and a half. But they couldn’t convince themselves or the rest of Europe to join them.”

In the wake of the Élysée Palace meeting, one country announced it was doubling its defence budget in the next two years. But that was small Denmark. 

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said his country was willing to send peacekeeping troops to Ukraine in the event of a deal. But he was alone. Even Macron said the time wasn’t right.

WATCH | European leaders scramble to respond to Trump’s stance on Ukraine:

EU leaders hold emergency talks on Ukraine ahead of U.S.-Russia meeting

European leaders met Monday in Paris for emergency talks about the ongoing Ukraine war as the U.S. forges ahead on peace talks with Russia.

Instead the response would be…. more money.  The Europeans would loosen the tight European Union rules on deficit spending to buy more weapons and send more aid to Ukraine.

As for French actions to match Macron’s words, the government’s defence spending is barely 2.1 per cent of GDP. And its government is pushing not an expansionary budget but a belt-tightening one through the French National Assembly right now.

Germany, Europe’s biggest country, spends just 1.5 per cent of GDP on the military, barely more than Canada. Its leaders are busy in an election campaign, and the man widely expected to be the next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, wants to cut the equivalent of $150 billion Cdn from the government budget. The Ukraine war isn’t his priority.

Or that of most of Europe, according to former French president François Hollande.  

“The great misunderstanding between Europe and Putin is that Europe doesn’t want to go to war,” he said in the recent CBC documentary Putin’s Journey. “For Europe, war has a terrible history in the 20th century and there is no reason to think in terms of war today. We are peaceful nations which don’t like death. For Putin, death is part of the action.”

Trump’s ‘disinformation bubble’

The major exception is Poland. It fears Putin and Russia, with good historical reason — the Soviet Union carved it up with the Nazis in 1939. As a result, its armed forces are the biggest in Western Europe and defence accounts for 3.8 per cent of GDP.

Even before Trump’s most recent incendiary comments, Poland’s foreign minister, Radoslav Sikorski, had a stark message for the U.S. president, delivered at the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 15. 

“If you allow Putin to vassalize Ukraine, that will send a message to China that you can recover what you regard as a renegade province. And that would also have direct consequences for the Americans’ grand strategy and system of alliances.”

Yet Poland’s prime minister also refused any idea of sending troops to Ukraine. Instead, Sikorski will soon go to Washington to try to persuade the U.S. government to keep all its troops in Poland and the rest of Europe.

The anger and unhappiness of the Ukrainians and Europeans scarcely resonates within the Trump administration. They know who’s at fault: it’s Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, for having said that Trump might be a prisoner of a Russian disinformation bubble.

Trump was also angry that Zelenskyy had refused to sign a huge deal allowing the U.S. unfettered access to Ukrainian mineral resources as repayment for U.S. weapons used in Ukraine’s defence. So U.S. National Security Adviser Mike Waltz had a message for Zelenskyy: “Tone it down, take a hard look and sign the deal.”

Words that the Canadian government and others might soon be hearing as well.