From left: President-elect Donald Trump, President Emmanuel Macron of France and President Volodomy Zelensky of Ukraine together for a meeting at the Elysee Palace in Paris, Dec 7, 2024. With Germany and France both in political turmoil, the new administration of Trump will begin at a time of instability for Europe. — ©2024 New York Times Company
WHEN President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine met European leaders for dinner in Brussels last Wednesday, the shadow of President-elect Donald Trump hung over the gathering. But it is not just Trump’s return to the White House that has scrambled Europe’s response to the war in Ukraine.
It is also the political disarray across the continent – a wave of instability that is depriving Europe of robust leadership at the very moment that Trump is challenging its deeply felt support for Ukraine and its hard-fought resistance of Russian aggression.
From Germany, where the government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz just collapsed, to France, where President Emmanuel Macron has been gravely weakened by months of domestic political turmoil, Europe’s big powers are on the back foot as they confront a resurgent Trump.
“We’re not well equipped, that’s for sure,” said Wolfgang Ischinger, who served as Germany’s ambassador to the United States during the Iraq War. “It is a horribly bad moment for my own country to be in the midst of an election campaign, with a rather polarising political debate.”
Germany’s role in the Western alliance on Ukraine is so central that US diplomats say any Trump plan for ending the war has to include it. But a fresh election, expected on Feb 23, and coalition negotiations that will follow it, suggest Germany’s direction may not be clear until April or May.
Macron, for all his domestic travails, appears determined still to play an energetic role in shaping Europe’s response to the war. He recently floated the idea of sending a European peacekeeping force to Ukraine, although it found little immediate support from other European officials.
Still, he and other leaders are preoccupied by other issues, from economic troubles to the surge of far-right populist parties. That leaves them poorly placed to respond in any concerted fashion to what may well be politically unpalatable proposals by Trump about how to end the war.
Just this past week, reports surfaced that Trump’s aides were discussing a plan to create a buffer zone between Ukrainian and Russian troops that would be patrolled by 40,000 European soldiers. Such a proposal would cause an outcry in Berlin and London, where the refusal to send troops has been an article of faith since the early days of the war.
“The 800-mile buffer zone between Ukraine and Russia is not going to happen,” said Jeremy Shapiro, research director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank based in Berlin. “Europe couldn’t do this without US support. But it is a very good bit of political theatre.”
Ukrainian soldiers prepare to fire at advancing Russian troops in the Pokrovsk area in eastern Ukraine in November. — ©2024 New York Times Company
Political theatre is one of Trump’s specialties, of course, and he is likely to throw out other ideas for ending the conflict after he takes office. The challenge, Shapiro said, is for European leaders not to be provoked or divided by Trump but to make sure that Europe has a seat in any diplomatic negotiation involving the US, Ukraine and Russia.
That is easier said than done, given the political crosscurrents at home. Germany is caught up in a heated debate over the economy, with its export-led model at risk because of Trump’s threatened tariffs.
France has fallen into paralysis since Macron called an ill-advised parliamentary election last summer. Even in Britain, where voters elected a Labour government with a thumping majority in July, the country is bogged down in economic problems, as well as an insurgent threat from an anti-immigrant party, Reform UK, whose leader, Nigel Farage, has links to Trump.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has expressed a desire to draw Britain closer to the rest of Europe, but Brexit handicaps any British leader from playing the kind of statesman’s role that his Labour predecessor, Tony Blair, did in the late 1990s.
That leaves Italy and Poland as unlikely standard-bearers for Europe. Italy’s right-wing prime minister, Georgia Meloni, has gained influence as diplomats wager, she will be able to build bridges to Trump. Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, a seasoned hand, will take a visible role when Poland assumes the presidency of the Council of the European Union next year.
The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, wants to play an active role under its president, Ursula von der Leyen. But the lack of strong leaders in Europe’s capitals will “certainly further strengthen Trump’s dismissive, contemptuous attitude toward the EU, which we remember from Trump I,” said Peter Ricketts, a former British national security adviser.
Some analysts argue that the focus on Europe’s faltering leaders distracts from a deeper structural problem laid bare by Trump: its continuing strategic reliance on the US. Merely by suggesting that the US is not committed to extending President Joe Biden’s support for Ukraine, they said, Trump has thrown the European debate into disarray.
“All the Europeans who want to stick to their position won’t have the ability to do that if the Americans move to the other end of the field,” Shapiro said. “My prediction is that they will reconstitute themselves around the new American position.” — ©2024 New York Times Company
