As the Trump administration downplays the United States’ global role in war by forcing a peace deal in Ukraine, European leaders wrestle between balancing the continent’s diplomatic ties with the U.S. and buttressing their own security.
February has been ripe with conferences, summits and meetings in which Euro-American statesmen clashed over Europe’s security and the path to ensuring a just peace for Ukraine. However, European politicians remain largely wary amidst the Trump administration’s benign tone toward Vladimir Putin’s Russia, raising concerns of a deal that will ultimately be skewed towards the conflict’s aggressors.
At the Feb. 14 Munich Security Conference, which gravitated around the ongoing war in Ukraine, Vice President JD Vance treated European attendees to a scathing repudiation of Europe’s supposed “woke, liberal political regression.”
“The threat that I worry most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, not China, it’s not any other external actor,” Vance said. “What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values.”
Vance’s speech, which further signaled a possible bifurcation in Euro-American security interests, was largely ill-received, with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz subsequently stating, “Only one person would benefit from this: President Putin.”
Vance further irked members of the German political gamut when he refused to meet with Scholz one-on-one at Munich.
“It is disrespectful toward Germany,” lamented a German official outside of Scholz’s Social Democratic Party. “I can't stand Scholz but he is still our chancellor… [T]he Trump administration doesn't care about its allies.”
Vance’s remonstration of Europe amidst cultural battles and security debates was coupled with his meeting with the leader of the alt-right party Alternative für Deutschland, Alice Weidel, ahead of his Munich speech. The AfD, a Eurosceptic coalition and Germany’s most successful nationalist, right-wing party since the end of World War II, emerged as second-place in the nation’s 2025 elections to the Bundestag, earning 20% of the vote.
“If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk,” Vance wryly quipped at Munich to an indignant audience, alluding to the Trump administration’s alleged meddling in European electoral politics and an endorsement the AfD received from Elon Musk, the billionaire head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency.
Presumptive German Chancellor Friederich Merz’s center-right Conservative Democratic Union — in union with the Christian Social Union in Bavaria — eased to a 28% plurality in the recent election. Merz, a former BlackRock manager and political rival of former Chancellor Angela Merkel, pledged to position Germany at the helm of Europe’s goals towards security independence from the U.S. and a stable, commiserate peace in Ukraine.
Merz pledged to continue support of Ukraine as chancellor and pursue European independence from the American penumbra as a third-pillar against Russia — and, potentially, the U.S. — under Trump. He has further warned against the U.S. boxing out European and Ukrainian delegations from peace negotiations with Russia, decrying that the outcome would be “a deal with Russia over the heads of the Europeans, over the heads of Ukraine.”
Neither European nor Ukrainian delegations were present at the Jan. 15 peace summit held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, between Russia and the U.S. to discuss the war’s conclusion.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy went a step further in his Munich address than Merz by calling for an “army of Europe” to counterbalance the Trump administration’s indifference to European affairs.
Zelenskyy continued by emphasizing that Ukraine — over 20% of which remains under Russian occupation since the latter launched a full-scale invasion in 2022 under the guise of what the Kremlin dubbed “a special military operation” — will not accept any deal without Ukraine having diplomatic involvement.
Other European heads of state are less reproachful in calling out Washington’s skepticism of continuing support for Ukraine and backing Europe’s military security against Russia’s three-year invasion. At the Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 22, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni rushed to Vance’s defense for his castigation of Europe, herself criticizing the continent’s political culture of “wokeness, bureaucracy, and mercantilism.” However, Melloni practices tactful silence on any prospective outcomes of peace talks for the war.
French President Emmanuel Macron remains noticeably terse on the subject of Europe decoupling from its American allies. Rather, Macron opted for a more amicable approach when brokering with U.S. President Donald Trump, with the pair engaging in a conspicuous, 15-second-long corps-à-corps on Feb. 24 upon Macron’s arrival to the White House to discuss the conflict.
The French leader interjected during the pair’s press appearance later that day in the Oval Office to clarify that Europe’s contributions to Ukraine were a combination of loans, guarantees and grants, accompanied by a chummy pat on Trump’s leg. Trump had incorrectly stated just prior that European contributions to the war effort came solely in the form of loans.
Trump assumed office for the second time on Jan. 20 after promising to pressure the nations into a ceasefire within 24 hours of his inauguration.
While meeting with Macron, the President hesitated to call Putin a dictator, though he quickly fixed the title onto Zelenskyy a few days prior. Democratically elected in 2019, Zelenskyy vowed to lift martial law in his country, restricting standard parliamentary elections upon the war’s end. Since being ensconced to Russia’s presidency in 2000, Putin achieved landslide victories against his opponents, often incarcerated or electorally negligible, in the succession of elections that international observers characterize as a sham.
The Trump administration’s attempt to dissociate from its geopolitical commitments to Europe and steamroll an end to the war in Ukraine have caused disarray across the fragmentary continent. Discordantly, European leaders grapple with questions over tightening collective security goals and economic interests, and either appeasing or disassociating altogether with the U.S. under Trump’s leadership.
In its America First policy, the Trump administration risks a reality of an America alone, with Europe compelled to realign into a bloc of its own against the looming interests of the U.S., Russia and China. Trump’s objectives for post-war Ukraine and Europe as a whole indicate a premature and unjust peace. The President’s attempt at “peace in our time,” vaguely Chamberlain-like in its rhetoric, forebodes a series of exclusively bilateral negotiations with Putin’s government that circumvent European input, abandon the latter’s eastern oblasts lost to occupation and open the door to future Russian encroachment.
Ostensibly against NATO and a united Europe, Putin and his allies will continue to assert its claims to an arbitrary sphere of influence — a mere echo of the erstwhile empire’s curtain across the continent’s eastern frontier.
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