Ukraine and Europe should not rely on the USA

From Bloomberg:

"Marc Champion, Columnist 

 Ukraine and Europe Are on Their Own Now

The US president had the means to pressure Putin on Ukraine and didn’t. Now it’s the Old World’s time to choose.

May 20, 2025

 

It’s reasonable to be disappointed or worried — even disgusted — by the outcome of Donald Trump’s phone call with Vladimir Putin this week but not surprised. The US president didn’t fail to end this war, because he never tried.

His focus was from day one to achieve a reset with Russia that would deliver an economic bounty to the US. American participation in the war was an obstacle to be removed before that could happen, and doing so via a peace settlement — rather than Ukraine’s abandonment — was a better look. It wasn’t, however, essential.

“This was a European situation, and should have remained a European situation,” Trump said on Monday. So, with that cleared up, what now? 

 

First, unless Congress forces Trump’s hand, he can leave the long, thankless task of mediating a peace settlement to the pope, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan or whomever wants to take it on. In the meantime, he can focus on making money.

From Moscow’s point of view, this could hardly have ended better. Putin has made a vague new offer to begin direct talks with Ukraine and set his demands out in a memorandum. We can take a good guess at what that will include, because the Kremlin has repeated its conditions for peace many times. Now that Trump has left the building, Putin has less incentive than ever to reduce them: Ukraine would have to hand over unconquered as well as occupied areas of territory that Russia has formally annexed, forswear any ties to NATO and demobilize most of its armed forces.

 

This is why the Ukrainians have little choice but to fight on. Without the future ability to defend itself, their country will no longer exist as a sovereign state. As far as Moscow is concerned, Ukraine is a Frankenstein nation, patched together from others, with Kyiv and most of the lands it rules rightfully part of the so-called “Russian World.” The country’s distinct language, culture and history are, in this view, fake.

 

“How can this heritage be divided between Russia and Ukraine? And why do it?” Putin wrote in a 6,900-word essay, On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, in 2021. A few months later, that treatise was put in the hands of officers sent to lead his invasion. It set out his true casus belli.

To foreign policy “realists,” this is fate, because Russia is a great power and Ukraine isn’t. Continuing the war with or without US support would, at best, involve Ukraine’s continued daily sacrifice of lives and territory, possibly for several more years, so why do it? Whether the Ukrainians can sustain even this level of defense, rather than suffer a catastrophic breakthrough for lack of arms and ammunition, is now up to Europe.

Will this wealthy, yet atomized continent have the political will and industrial capacity to supply Kyiv’s forces with what they need? Ukrainians know their fate should they surrender from what already was done in Russian-occupied territories: torture, executions, show trials, transformed school curricula and the abduction and brainwashing of their children. Italians and Spaniards don’t feel that imperative.

The easy answer to both questions is no. Europe’s leaders have known since Trump’s election that US withdrawal was likely. They have said all the right words but — apart from frontline states such as Poland and the tiny Baltics — their actions have fallen far behind... Just look at the new UK-EU security and defense policy agreement, which tied supposedly vital defense measures to disputes over unrelated issues such as youth mobility, ending as little more than blather...

Ukraine’s defense can and should viewed as a catalyst to accelerate European security, not a hurdle. It takes an optimist to think the continent’s leaders will look beyond parochial debates to make that happen, but no more so than to believe that Ukrainians would be able to defeat Russia’s initial assault on Kyiv in February 2022.

There’s nothing inevitable about allowing Russia to subjugate Ukraine. Trump had the resources to ramp up financial and military pressure on Putin until he sat down for genuine peace talks; he just opted not to use them. Now it’s Europe’s turn to choose."