A three-way summit between Presidents Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping has not as yet been confirmed, but it seems likely to take place on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit scheduled for Nov. 18-19 in Shenzhen, China. This is a cause for anxiety among some European leaders, who fear that they and their protégé, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, will be excluded from discussions on Ukraine’s future.
To forestall this possibility, the EU is trying to promote Finnish President Alexander Stubb as its own envoy to the future peace talks. This seems a doomed endeavor, since Stubb is a bland, boring Eurocrat with not a single original idea in his head. This makes him eminently qualified to be president of the European Commission, which he freely admits is his long-term ambition, but it does not qualify him to be a partner in the discussions among grown-ups.
In addition, at the EU summit in Brussels on Oct. 15, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz pointedly rebuffed a reported U.S. proposal for individual EU countries to unfreeze some Russian assets immobilized after the invasion of Ukraine. “These are assets that are frozen in Europe, and they should remain frozen in Europe,” Merz said. “This is our affair, and we are the ones who decide on it.”
Those were fighting words, but President Trump was not impressed. This is unsurprising, given his robust disregard for the assorted EU leaders’ opinions and pretensions. In the month of October alone, this was manifested on at least seven distinct occasions.
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