Europe's best move would be to stop resisting Trump, admit it can't shoulder Ukraine alone, and push for a bitter but necessary negotiated peace over endless war.
By Rafael Pinto BORGES
On Ukraine, the Europeans are once again doing a lot of talking. United in their determination to sabotage U.S. President Trump's efforts to put an end to the continent's bloodiest conflict in 80 years, the French, British, and Germans now want to convince the world that they will act as 'guarantors' of whatever peace deal Washington and Moscow end up negotiating by placing 'deterrence' military forces in the embattled country. That is a lie-there will be no European armies in Ukraine after the war, and keeping up the pretense is doing more harm than good.
Ever since Paris, London, and Berlin first announced the 'Coalition of the Willing,' a group of countries supposedly ready to deploy their military to Ukrainian territory, the idea has never quite left the public discourse. France's Macron and Britain's Starmer have been particularly adamant that it should-that it will-happen; Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky, meanwhile, has invested heavily in the proposition, selling it to his people as perhaps the main concession given to Ukraine in exchange for its recognition of the loss of the territories annexed by Russia. Given how exorbitant Zelensky's previous assurances to his people have been-he has promised them victory, NATO, the EU, the 'borders of 1991,' and Crimea for years-it is comprehensible that he may now try to sell them the illusion of a magical European shield against future Russian appetites.
Why Europe's leaders are playing that card isn't difficult to understand. One is an uncontrollable thirst for protagonism-though increasingly irrelevant, they still want to pretend to matter. The main one, however, is that the European leadership itself knows none of it will ever happen. They are, in essence, passing a blank check. Russia has repeatedly and explicitly made clear that it will not, in any circumstances, accept NATO personnel within Ukraine. Preventing what it calls the North Atlantic Alliance's 'infrastructure' from ever penetrating Ukrainian territory has always been the Kremlin's clearest, brightest war goal; to tolerate it would be to admit defeat, even if Russia were to absorb far more Ukrainian territory than it already occupies. With Moscow utterly dominant in the field of battle, holding the strategic initiative, and with the ultimate, nuclear, argument ever on the table, the fact of the matter is that Putin commands the strength to impose peace on his terms-and that means a peace deal without NATO ground forces in Ukraine.
The Kremlin will simply not give the idea its green light-and, if the Europeans were to try doing it without Putin's express permission, the risk exists that Moscow could simply call their bluff by striking forces deployed by the Europeans on Ukrainian soil. If that were to occur, what would they do? As long as the confrontation remained limited to Ukrainian territory, begging the U.S. to come and save the day would not suffice. As explained by Article 6 of the Washington Treaty, which elaborates on the preconditions for Article 5, NATO's principle of mutual defense applies only to the territory of the member states or to
occupation forces of any of the Parties [that] were stationed on the date when the Treaty entered into force or the Mediterranean Sea or the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer.
Whatever contingent the Europeans sent to Ukraine would, therefore, be outside the NATO-i.e., American-security umbrella, meaning Europe would have to fend for itself.
Unfortunately for Macron, Starmer, Merz, and their dilettante colleagues in the European Commission, the idea of Europe 'fending for itself' in such circumstances is laughable. As things stand, the European Union simply does not hold the military and industrial resources to pose a credible deterrent to the Russian president. Being himself a European, the author feels no joy to admit this unpalatable truth-and yet, if politics is indeed the art of the possible, as a far greater German chancellor than Mr. Merz portended, it follows that there can be no sound policy unless grounded in reality, however bitter.
The fact of European fragility cannot be ignored by European policymakers. British power is an empty shell. Decades of bipartisan misrule have left the nation toothless: according to some reports, Britain commands no more than 40 working, fighting tanks; Russia, according to French intelligence, currently has a force of 4,000 and is well on its way to reaching 7,000 by 2030. The Royal Air Force's woke purges have left it bereft of pilots-and, for all his posturing, Starmer has radicalized these policies rather than drop them. It seems wholly unlikely that the British state currently holds the capability to keep a fighting conventional force of more than 10,000 men. Russia, meanwhile, currently has some 700,000 on the front-that's 70 times what London can muster.
Of course, France-or Poland, a country that has already ruled out any ground deployment to Ukraine-has a substantially more credible military. But, likewise, Germany's is doubtless inferior to both Paris' and London's. And that's only a part of the equation. Without a majority in parliament and with new legislative-and, perhaps, presidential-elections looming, Macron is a lame duck president. How long would he last in office if Putin decided to pressure the French and their European allies in the circumstances described above? Even now, there is strong opposition, on both the Left and the Right, to any Ukrainian adventure. The Left's Jean-Luc Mélenchon is no friend of Mr. Zelensky, whom he considers to be a democratically illegitimate head of state. Le Pen, Bardella, and their Rassemblement National can barely be imagined supporting any deployment of French troops to Ukraine.
Could the weakened Europeans develop the capabilities to make themselves relevant-and, therefore, to make both Putin and Trump listen to them? Nominally they could. In effect, they cannot. Lofty proclamations that Europe will massively boost its defense spending might impress the pundits, but where will the money be coming from? The French are stuck in a financial storm; Paris' public debt now stands at over 3.5 trillion dollars, or about 112% of GDP; the deficit is still at about 6% of GDP, and, with political chaos showing no sign of abating, there is no reason to believe that France will be recovering any time soon.
Macron certainly lacks the political capital for either internal reforms or foreign escapades- his approval rating stands at 21%. To think he could cut social spending to fund mass troop deployments in Ukraine is simply unserious. The same goes for Starmer. The British Prime Minister is loathed by the public-he is currently facing a Faragite insurrection-and leads a country facing a yearly budget deficit of over 150 billion GBP. The situation is so dire, in fact, that The Telegraph is now openly warning that London might soon be forced to require a bailout from the International Monetary Fund. And, as Germany's Merz complains that the public healthcare and pensions enjoyed by Germans can ' no longer be financed', can anyone imagine him telling the electorate that closing hospitals at home is a small price to pay for the Donbass? With the AfD having now surpassed the Christian Democrats to become Germany's largest party, that would be playing with political, regime-ending fire. Indeed, many will think, now with reason to do so rather literally, Pourquoi mourir pour Pokrovsk?
Europe is feeble. America is tired of a war that scarcely concerns it and cannot be expected to keep subsidising Europe's toxic mix of weakness and delusion. Today, the best European leaders could do for Ukraine-and for themselves and their peoples-is to stop trying to obstruct Trump, frankly admit to the Ukrainians that Europe cannot carry them on its already exhausted shoulders, and that even a bitter negotiated peace is better than endless confrontation. Meanwhile, if the likes of Macron are serious about 'European strategic autonomy' and geopolitical relevance in the 21st century, they could start by using the immense and irreplaceable resources they wish to allocate to Ukraine to put the continent at the forefront of the fourth industrial revolution, seriously invest in automation and AI, and free the continent from the heavy burden of debt. This is what genuine statesmen would do-if Europe still had them.
Original article: europeanconservative.com