(This article was written by Derk Jan Eppink and appeared in Wynia’s Week. Donald Trump gooit de Europese NAVO-landen in het diepe)
This weekend all the leading figures of the Western defence world are gathered in Munich for the annual Munich Security Conference (MSC). The conference, founded in 1963 as the Münchner Wehrkundetagung by the former Wehrmacht officer Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist (1922-2013), has become a tradition. Von Kleist, incidentally, was part of the 1944 plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.
On the programme are the usual subjects: defence, global order, sustainability and technology. But another theme dominates: the American attempt to reach a peace settlement in Ukraine. The words of the new American secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, spoken in Brussels on Wednesday, will reverberate in Munich.
Hegseth spoke in Brussels to the defence ministers of the NATO member states; it seemed as if every word had been dictated from the White House. President Trump had spoken for an hour by telephone with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin and drew the outlines for a peace plan. The impact went far beyond Ukraine alone. Never before has an American president thrown the European NATO allies so ceremoniously into the deep water. It was the ‘disengagement’ that European defence experts have feared for decades. The European allies have to get to work. They must raise their defence spending drastically, and Ukraine is their ‘European problem’.
Trump wants to be rid of the war in Ukraine as quickly as possible, in order to stop the ‘bloodshed’. That is why he argues for a swift deal, with the ‘realities on the battlefield’ as the point of departure. So no drawn-out tug of war at conference venues; a process that would put a peace settlement on the Greek calendar. And so he let it be known through Hegseth: ‘We must start by recognizing that returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective. Chasing this illusionary goal will only prolong the war and cause more suffering.’
The criticism from Europe was that Trump recognises the current ceasefire lines without any negotiation at all. According to the British author Timothy Garton Ash this was a ‘senseless capitulation’ to Putin. In The Guardian he wrote: ‘Donald Trump’s appeasement of Vladimir Putin makes Neville Chamberlain look like a principled, courageous realist’. Garton Ash argues that Chamberlain was trying ‘to prevent a major European war, whereas Trump is acting in the middle of one’.
Fortunately the British know everything better where foreign countries are concerned. Trump wants a peace settlement quickly, because Ukraine is exhausted after many losses. That is a reality of the battlefield. In addition he wants to throw the Ukraine question into Europe’s lap as fast as possible. Because, as Hegseth says, the United States is also being challenged by China. That is why the European NATO member states must take responsibility themselves on their own continent
The German defence minister, Boris Pistorius, holds that the United States should not have made concessions before the start of negotiations by giving up parts of Ukraine and ruling out Ukrainian membership of NATO. His French colleague Sébastien Lecornu supports him in this. Alongside the criticism from Germany and France, Italy, Poland and Spain also have objections. In a statement they say they are ‘ready to increase support for Ukraine’.
These declarations come as mustard after the meal. The United States has provided support to Ukraine over the past years to the tune of 175 billion dollars, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. European NATO countries lagged far behind. France, Spain and Italy were strong in ‘parole parole’, weak in deeds. Germany was in self-therapy over whether or not to deliver long-range missiles. The Netherlands supplied 3.76 billion euros in military aid to Ukraine (as of 29 September 2024) and sits in the leading group of supporters.
The United States is number one by a distance and Trump has had enough of the European torrent of words without deeds. Where critics do have a point is that Trump, with his speed, puts Russia in a strategically favourable position. In negotiations with the West, and above all with America, the Soviet Union used the adage: ‘what is ours is ours, and what is yours, that is what we are going to talk about’. That is the advantage Trump is now giving Putin. Russia can keep the occupied territories because Trump assumes that Putin will never give them up again. Holding on to that ‘prolongs the war’. And that is what Trump does not want.
Why? The European NATO countries have to organise themselves and pay more. The secretary-general of NATO, Mark Rutte, was also in the hall and heard Hegseth’s lashing words. Every NATO secretary-general knows the division of tasks: the European is the secretary and the American president is the general. With Trump that division of labour is literally so. Rutte had just preached the new 5 percent norm, on American instructions, with a little fabric softener added. He then heard from the American secretary of defense, until recently co-presenter of the morning programme Fox & Friends on Fox News, that Europe has to stand on its own feet.
The first steps concern the ‘security guarantee’ for Ukraine, which must be underpinned by capable ‘European and non-European troops’, according to Hegseth. Next: ‘If these troops are deployed as peacekeepers to Ukraine at any point, they should be deployed as part of a non-NATO mission. And they should not be covered under Article 5 [which guarantees NATO support in the event of an attack]. To be clear, as part of any security guarantee, there will not be U.S. troops deployed to Ukraine’. So Europe has to fill in the ‘security guarantee’ itself, on its own. Moreover the military support (both lethal and non-lethal) to Ukraine must be paid for by the European NATO countries. As a closing note the American secretary recalls that defence spending must rise from 2 percent of GDP to 5 percent of GDP.
It is not surprising that the hall stayed silent and that the words of Trump and Hegseth echo on in the Hotel Bayerischer Hof. For further explanation there is an American delegation, consisting of Vice-President James David Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Lieutenant General (ret.) Keith Kellogg, special envoy for the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
Fair is fair: the European NATO countries have brought this ‘tough love’ from Washington D.C. upon themselves. During the Iraq war, then President George W. Bush had had so much of the European bickering that he described the European allies as a ‘bag of fleas’, because the opinions of European countries jumped in all directions.
As soon as there is a disaster in the world, Europe asks itself: where is America? If America then does something, the refrain is: that is no good, typical Yankees. But when Europe then has to do something itself, it goes wrong and America has to step in, as during the Balkan wars in the nineteen nineties. The Netherlands too has bad memories of that, after the government of the day handled the protection of the Srebrenica enclave badly, with equipment that was too light. A tragedy unfolded that was wrongly pinned on commander Thom Karremans. The conflict was settled with American bombardments of Belgrade.
The conflict in Ukraine is even more dangerous because an unpredictable nuclear power is involved in it. Europe by itself can enforce nothing. Of all people it is Trump who is forcing Europe to grow up militarily. Coming from the ‘bag of fleas’, that will be quite a circus.
The only thing Europe can do is to accelerate Ukraine’s EU membership. On 23 June 2022 Ukraine became a candidate member state. The country is not an ‘anonymous region’ as the Kremlin sees it, but a self-aware nation state whose birth has been signed in blood. That is the ultimate effect of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, with which he wanted to redraw Russia within the borders of the tsarist empire or else of a Stalinist empire. As a ‘buffer state’ Ukraine is exposed to the whims of the Kremlin. A European anchoring is therefore the only alternative.
Derk Jan Eppink is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.