Henry Kissinger once remarked how “it is dangerous to be an enemy of the United States, but it can be fatal to be its friend”.
Richard Nixon’s foreign policy guru was admitting that the Pentagon could dish out enormous damage to any state that wasn’t a nuclear superpower and which challenged Washington, but weaker states who leveraged their defence on the back of American power could find themselves fatally exposed if, or when, the White House left them in the lurch.
The ignominious collapse of South Vietnam in 1975 haunted Kissinger. Friday night’s Oval Office “great television” row between Donald Trump and Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky is a generational wake-up call to the West, in particular, as well as a signal to a world of potential predators that America’s primary concerns don’t have its allies’ interests at heart.
European policy elites are shell-shocked by the Oval Office row. EU leaders have long assumed their countries’ wealth would buy Brussels influence in the world without getting down and dirty in power politics. Donald Trump’s second term has shattered those illusions within six weeks.
It is not just that their Ukraine commitments risk being shown to be hollow if Trump switches off US aid; it is that the EU’s security dependence on the Americans is now in question itself.
Americans will have to decide whether dumping Ukraine and snubbing the Europeans will “make America great again” – but Europeans don’t have the luxury of time to mull over what to do.
The harsh reality is that the Europeans cannot put an alternative defence strategy into effect overnight – even if they can agree on one tomorrow. Probably the best that can be hoped for in the immediate future is Sir Keir Starmer doesn’t just manage an agreement to paper over their cracks but actually gets a strategic plan agreed with real commitments.
Remember, an American president very different from Trump, Barack Obama, was frustrated by their European allies’ repeated vocal commitments to raise their defence spending and their subsequent backsliding.
Even as EU leaders proclaimed their continued aid to Ukraine whatever Trump does, figures have come out showing that the Europeans spent $3bn more on buying energy from Russia than they gave Zelensky in aid.
Even much of the military aid sent from the EU and the UK to Ukraine is actually US-manufactured weapons, munitions and machinery – albeit paid for by European taxpayers, whatever Trump claims. Nonetheless, the ability of “Europe” to sustain the Ukrainian war effort without US participation and chart our future course will require sacrifices here in the West.
Keir Starmer’s slashing of the aid budget will be small beer compared with the tax rises and extra borrowing needed to rearm ourselves quickly, at the same time as boosting the volume of aid to Ukraine.
Meanwhile, in Ukraine, there are alarming symptoms of emerging political divisions. The mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko, gave lukewarm support to Zelensky after the White House row. But Ukrainian hawks, like the Odesa MP Oleksiy Goncharenko, have sniffed that EU statements don’t destroy Russian tanks and that Zelensky misjudged his comments in the White House.
The tragedy facing Zelensky is that a Russian victory could seal his fate. But even without falling into Putin’s hands, the Ukrainian president could be, quite literally, stabbed in the back.
At the start of his term in 2019, Zelensky was threatened by military hardliners with a coup if he made a deal with Putin to calm the undeclared war in Ukraine’s southeast. They could try to topple him now for antagonising Trump by refusing to deal with Putin on America’s terms. That mix of extremism and cynicism could reproduce the kind of internal civil war which led to the Spanish republic’s collapse in 1939 as different factions fought each other rather than Franco.
Zelensky refused a flight out of Kyiv when Putin launched his invasion three years ago, but Britain and her European allies ought to have a contingency plan to rescue him from a coup at home or seizure by the Russians in the worst-case scenario.
America is super-powerful enough for its credibility to survive abandoning its allies, as it has in the past. Britain and the Europeans will have to pay the necessary price for their credibility in the new world disorder. Standing by allied leaders even when you can’t save their countries – as Winston Churchill did with exiled European governments after 1940 – is a downpayment on the long-term chances of the world turning in our favour if we put in the effort to stop the rot.
Mark Almond is director of the Crisis Research Institute, Oxford
