Nobody knows exactly how President Donald Trump’s bid to end the war in Ukraine will work out, or whether he can fulfil his worthy ambition to save “millions of lives.” But here in Europe, one thing should be immediately clear. Trump’s direct overture to Russian President Vladimir Putin has exposed the irrelevance and impotence of the European Union, not only in wider global power politics, but in ending a bloody war on its own doorstep.

Trump’s call to Putin proposing that the two should work “very closely” together to achieve peace looks like an attempt to reassert America’s hegemony over international affairs. That will be tricky to achieve in an increasingly multi-polar world; as if to illustrate the point, when news broke of Trump’s overture to Putin, China was quick to throw its own hat in the ring as a potential peace-broker.

What Trump has already achieved, however, is to destroy the pretensions of the EU to be a major player. All of the big talk of Europe standing rock solid in support of Ukraine, and making no concessions to Putin’s Russia, has been revealed as empty political posturing. 

As this truth dawned, there was an obvious sense of panic in Brussels, where a meeting of NATO defence ministers is being held this week. The Weimar Group, a defence association that includes the European Commission and leading EU members Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Poland, alongside the UK, issued a hurried statement.