Alone at last

A new Europe is born and it's not the EU

It’s unoriginal but true: Donald Trump should win next year’s Charlemagne Prize – the oldest award for action in the service of European unification.

Frankly, it’s a travesty that the prize didn’t go to Vladimir Putin in 2022, SARS-CoV-2 in 2020, and the bond market in 2012. Crisis coheres Europe. Given time to reflect and negotiate, governments reflect and negotiate … forever. As Jean-Claude Juncker—a man who spent 30 straight years at the highest levels of EU decision-making—once confessed: “We all know what to do, but we just don't know how to get re-elected once we’ve done it.”

Only when the choice is discomfort or disaster will they choose option one, and Trump is a level-seven disaster. This should be a shock to no one who pays any attention to politics. A year before his re-election, I wrote that we were suffering a collective failure of imagination about a second term. “European leaders show no sign whatsoever of readiness for what may be coming in 14 months: the cascading security and budgetary consequences of the collapse of NATO and a rapidly thawing relationship between Washington and Moscow, clarification for any aggressor that the US will never respond to the aggression, a 10% across-the-board tariff on goods exported to the US, and a severe destabilisation of American democracy”. While I’m always happy to take a victory lap, there was nothing remotely clever about this prediction. Trump, his horrified first-term staff, Vice President Littlefinger, and the America Firsters selected for the second-term cabinet all said it out loud. Again and again, for years, and on the record.

The US hasn’t left NATO yet, but Yanxit has happened in all but name. And, just like Brexit, the inmates have gone for the hard version. A cautious policy of managed retreat has been hijacked by America’s most vengeful, relativist and ignorant to ensure maximum self-harm. It wasn’t enough to pressure Canadians into trade concessions; Trump had to threaten their national security and turn them into the unlikeliest of enemies. It wasn’t enough to force the Ukrainian government to admit the loss of Crimea and eastern Donbas in return for a fast-track into European security and economic structures. It wasn’t enough to arm-twist rich European nations into taking responsibility for their own security after 80 years. Instead, in the tanty heard around the world, Trump and his courtiers chose to dress down Ukraine’s president on live television. But, even then, Kyiv and its European allies still didn’t feel sufficiently “owned.” So, Washington suspended its own and “Five Eyes” intelligence support to degrade Ukraine’s long-range targeting and missile-defence capabilities, then spelt out how it could hobble any high-end weapons sold to its allies. Take that Ukraine, Europe, Saudi Arabia, and the US defence and aerospace industry.

For anyone still in doubt about the Trump administration’s commitment to the security of liberal democracies in Europe, watch Tucker Carlson’s interview with Steve Witkoff, the president’s most trusted amateur diplomat. Putinversteher doesn’t come close to doing him justice. Yet Witkoff is supposed to be one of the good guys.

Getting and staying angry about this has become self-indulgent - like pressing on a bruise for entertainment. It is what it is. Trump has many faults, but he doesn’t hide who he is, the tyrants he admires, and the elected democrats he hates. He escaped two impeachments and four criminal cases, bent Congress to his will, filled his cabinet with sycophants, and packed the Supreme Court. Rightly, he feels and behaves like Henry VIII. Americans knew exactly who he was and chose him again anyway. Even if 800,000 people in three swing states change their minds in 2028, the North Atlantic alliance is over.

Coalitions of the relevant

For Europe, at least, the destruction Americans have chosen for us will be creative, but it can’t be more of the same, which is an obsession with process over outcome. For an example of what I mean, take the response of Italy’s established centre-left Democratic Party to the European Commission’s €150-billion loans-for-arms facility and invitation to governments to spend more on defence. "Europe needs common defence, not an arms race of individual states,” said Elly Schlein, the PD’s leader. The EU must “increase industrial capacity and coordination, with the federalist horizon of a common army at the service of a common foreign policy and a peace project”. A response to the Trump emergency can wait for an unobtainable agreement between all member states of the EU. Only then – with a 27-way strategic doctrine, a common defence budget financed by joint borrowing, and the formation of a European army – should we rearm. This is unserious but sadly not atypical.

Unsurprisingly, parliaments in Poland and the EU’s six Baltic and Nordic states haven’t spent the last three years debating the nature of euro-federalism and the Community Method. They dropped everything, got as many weapons as possible into Ukraine, and rearmed as quickly as they could. To her credit, Ursula von der Leyen, the commission president, is doing her best to keep the EU relevant in this upended environment. But it isn’t. The combined effect of the Russian-Ukrainian war and Washington’s withdrawal from the western alliance has been to create “coalitions of the willing” at high speed. There is no time for pretence. A remilitarised Europe will be led by the UK, Poland, and France with Germany’s new grand coalition racing to catch up. Europe’s frontline ground and air forces will be the Baltic and Nordic states, including non-EU members Norway and Iceland. As long as Moscow’s allies run Hungary and Slovakia, they are out. So are Italy and Spain, whose prime ministers are discovering the difference between hugging the Ukrainian head of state for the cameras and a willingness to spend and fight.

Breaking with the precedents of the 2010-15 sovereign-debt and 2020-22 public health crises, Europe’s response has been predominantly national. In the first, the EU set up new bailout funds and the European Central Bank underwrote the government-bond market. In the second, the ECB made space for governments to borrow more than €1.5 trillion while Germany gave the green light to joint union-level borrowing. This time, the fiscal “bazooka” is Germany’s alone.

Club Europe is the future. Once Witkoff has arm-twisted the Ukrainians into freezing the war at the line of contact, one European club will have a settlement to police. Another without troops to spare will provide the front line against Russian expansion beyond Ukraine. Awash with weapons and demobilised veterans and owed a European future, Ukraine itself will need containment. It cannot wait a decade for EU membership and needs goodies well before that – a halfway house short of union membership for Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Albania, Bosnia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia. A Russian-Ukrainian settlement – even a five-year ceasefire to prepare for the next war – could even unlock the Serbia-Kosovo dispute and allow them into an EU-lite. All this will need the kind of tight coordination between open-minded elements of the EU’s institutions that applied during the UK’s withdrawal negotiations but cannot be subject to Hungary’s routine extortions or foot-dragging by the French, German, and Polish agriculture ministries. This needs a union within the union to get done. The security guarantees will have to come from a combination of clubs, pending the formation of “RiNATO”© minus the Americans.

The union will live on with the single market—extended, so far, to three outside countries by the European Economic Area (EEA)—at its core. This market, its associated social freedoms, and liberal-democratic norms will continue to exert magnetic power over the EU’s near-abroad. However, the bill for 80 years of outsourced security has come due, and the union is too big, too disparate, and too slow to respond.