Trump's talks with Putin stir fears of US abandonment in Europe

Donald Trump’s sudden shift on Ukraine has shaken the transatlantic alliance to its core. Now European leaders are crossing that same ocean in a desperate bid to shore it up.

French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer will meet Trump separately at the White House this week to try to convince him to stick by Kyiv.

But fears are growing in European capitals that the bond forged from the ruins of World War II is on the verge of collapse as Trump pursues talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In Trump, many see a president who has abandoned the traditional US view of a rules-based world order in favour of a nationalist, great power game with Moscow and Beijing.

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That has caused panic on a continent that has relied on US security assurance for 80 years.

“The Europeans are running around with their hair on fire,” Max Bergmann, director of the Europe, Russia and Eurasia program at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, told AFP.

‘Other side of the ocean’

For his part, Trump insists that he is just seeking peace in Ukraine.

“I think that President Putin and President Zelensky are going to have to get together. Because you know what? We want to stop killing millions of people,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Friday.

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But Trump’s embrace of Kremlin talking points on Ukraine – calling President Volodymyr Zelensky a “dictator without elections” and blaming Ukraine for Russia’s 2022 invasion – has caused alarm in Europe.

It has also reinforced suspicions that Trump is effectively pulling the plug on decades of US support for Europe. In Trump’s view, European officials fear, the United States, Russia and China will instead look after their own spheres of influence closer to home.

“You know, it doesn’t affect the United States very much. It’s on the other side of the ocean,” Trump added on Friday about the Ukraine war.

Even in his first term he threatened to pull out of the NATO military alliance and questioned why the United States spends huge amounts on keeping troops in Europe.

Trump’s meetings with Macron on Monday and Starmer on Thursday could therefore be testy.

Macron said he would tell Trump not to be “weak” on Ukraine. Britain and France have both offered to send peacekeepers in the event of a deal to end the war, but Starmer has pushed for a US “backstop”.

Trump for his part accused both leaders of doing “nothing” to end the Ukraine war over the past three years.

‘Dangerous moment’

Many Europeans are also realizing that the writing could be on the wall.

“We experience now quite a difficult and very dangerous moment when both parts of the transatlantic community, so to say, are getting more and more away from each other,” Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki told AFP at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) near Washington.

For Nigel Gould-Davies, Senior Fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, it was an “unprecedented transatlantic crisis.”

“By negotiating with Russia over European heads and intervening in European politics, the United States is not only decoupling from, but deciding for and disrupting Europe,” he said in a commentary.

The question now is whether Europe – after years of talking about how they need to take more responsibility for their security umbrella in case of a rainy day – will do so now that day has come.

Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen told AFP on Wednesday that Europe “has to do much more in order to defend ourselves, but also in order to support Ukraine. Because we are in a very, very critical period in world history.”

The European Union’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas on Tuesday separately urged the United States not to walk into “traps” set by Russia as it attempts to divide the West.

But for analyst Bergmann, it could also be a wake-up call for Europe.

“I think what is being asked of Europe now is not just to simply do a bit more – but is for Europe to effectively take actions that would make it emerge, frankly, as a superpower,” he said.