Time to End ‘Pandemical Nervosity’ in Europe Over Trump

This has been an eventful political week for Europe. The German Social Democratic Party (SPD), as expected, the party of Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt, and Gerhard Schroeder, has been thrown out of office with only a sixth of the total vote, its worst performance since Bismarck’s time. Friedrich Merz is completely vindicated in his long disagreement with former four-term chancellor Angela Merkel and takes office as a declared disciple of Ronald Reagan, but is recoiling from what he thinks is a Trump policy of American estrangement from Western Europe. French President Emmanuel Macron had a very convivial visit in Washington and claims to have lobbied President Trump successfully to avoid a Ukraine peace without adequate security guarantees to deter further Russian aggression. (Trump didn’t need to learn this from Macron.) British Prime Minister Kier Starmer is about to make his first official visit to the United States, professing to be a bridge between Trump and Europe, arriving less than three days after the president of France has departed Washington, having declared that that bridge has already been opened. President Trump has declared that peace in the Ukraine war is very close.

There is, as always with any substantial change in Washington, pandemical nervosity in Western Europe about the reliability and worldliness of American perceptions of international issues. This week is the third anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and there has never, until the inauguration of the Trump administration five weeks ago, been any remotely plausible satisfactory exit strategy from the war. Trump has made it clear many times that the war was started by Russian aggression, which with considerable reason he thinks was the consequence of his predecessor’s weakness. He recognises that because Ukraine was part of Russia for 300 years and never existed as a jurisdiction until it was set up by Lenin as a Soviet Republic in 1919, and because approximately a sixth of Ukrainians are Russian-speaking, some attention has to be paid to Russian claims, but that these must not compromise the right of Ukraine to be conclusively guaranteed as a legitimate sovereign nation, albeit within slightly modified borders.

There is nothing in this that justifies these European flutters. Trump has said Ukraine must have adequate guarantees from the West, consisting of two elements. A number of prominent NATO European countries will produce a group guarantee and designate forces to support that guarantee though they will not be pre-positioned within Ukraine. Existing NATO arrangements assure that if those forces, likely led by Poland, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Italy, but including a number of smaller NATO countries, are attacked by the Russians, Article 5 of the NATO agreement will assure American support of its NATO allies. The second element is the arrangement proposed by Ukrainian President Zelinsky himself that Ukraine will buy sophisticated weaponry and ordnance from the United States and pay for it with strategic minerals which the United States will assist in extracting from Ukrainian soil. It need hardly be laboured that any such important commercial activity carried out by American personnel and equipment will constitute strong deterrence to renewed Russian aggression in Ukraine.