President Donald Trump speaks to reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., on Feb. 18.AL DRAGO/The New York Times News Service
Shortly after Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea in early 2014 in a brazen display of imperialist aggression, then-U.S. president Barack Obama took a dig at America’s former Cold War rival and played down the danger Mr. Putin posed to Europe and the world.
“Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbours not out of strength, but out of weakness,” Mr. Obama insisted then.
During the 2012 U.S. election campaign, Mr. Obama had ridiculed Republican rival Mitt Romney’s depiction of Russia as America’s biggest geopolitical foe as an outdated notion, quipping in one debate: “The 1980s, they’re now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.”
His early-2014 comment showed he had not changed his mind, despite Russia’s invasion of Crimea and backing of pro-Russian militias in Ukraine’s Donbas region.
In her recent autobiography, former German chancellor Angela Merkel writes that she considered Mr. Obama’s “regional power” barb at Russia “unfortunate.” At the time, she had been furiously engaged in shuttle diplomacy with Mr. Putin and Western leaders to end the war in the Donbas. She knew Mr. Obama’s baiting of the Russian President would only make her job harder.
The efforts of Ms. Merkel and her Western counterparts eventually led to the Minsk II accord, which sought to implement a ceasefire in the Donbas and required Ukraine to change its constitution to give more autonomy to the largely Russian-speaking region. But as the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War noted in a recent report, “Minsk II was a weak deal. It demanded nothing of the invader – Russia. It strengthened the Kremlin’s aggressive worldview that had driven the conflict to begin with. It masked Russian military weakness. It gave the Kremlin time and space to prepare for a larger invasion.”
This bit of history is important to keep in mind amid the outrage at U.S. President Donald Trump’s vow to end the conflict in Ukraine by striking a deal with Mr. Putin that might or might not favour Russia. The truth is, we would not have found ourselves in this situation had it not been for three years of dithering by European leaders and former U.S. president Joe Biden, who did little to prevent Mr. Putin from invading Ukraine in 2022 or to secure a peace deal before Mr. Trump returned to the White House.
This week’s meeting in Saudi Arabia between U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov, who has been under U.S. sanctions since 2022, sent chills down the spines of European leaders who fear they, along with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, could be shut out of peace negotiations. They are afraid Mr. Trump will appease Mr. Putin just to claim bragging rights for ending the war.
After all, U.S. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth did appear to cede ground to Russia last week by calling a restoration of Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders “an unrealistic objective” and ruling out Ukraine’s membership in NATO.
Still, Mr. Hegseth was merely stating the obvious. The real question now facing the West is whether a peace deal can be reached that recognizes some of Russia’s territorial gains without encouraging Mr. Putin to resume his aggression down the road. But to earn a seat at the table, European leaders will need to put a lot more skin in the game.
It was no coincidence that, only a few days after Mr. Trump revealed that he had spoken to Mr. Putin about ending the war, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer promised to commit thousands of troops to a peacekeeping force in Ukraine once the fighting stops – as long as the United States provides its own security guarantees to protect Ukraine. Yet, at a hastily called meeting of eight European leaders in Paris on Monday, only French President Emmanuel Macron backed up Mr. Starmer by pledging French troops.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who may be out of a job soon after Sunday’s national elections, called the discussion “completely premature.” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk ruled out sending Polish peacekeepers to Ukraine. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni poured cold water on the idea, reportedly calling it “the most complex [option] and least likely to be effective.”
While conditionally promising British troops poses no near-term domestic political risk for Mr. Starmer, who leads a new majority government, the same cannot be said of his counterparts. Most are on shaky ground domestically; their voters are unlikely to back deploying as many as 200,000 troops in Ukraine for what could be years to come.
Europe’s failure to take more responsibility for its own security before now, and Mr. Biden’s inaction while he was in office, has created the leadership void on Ukraine that Mr. Trump is now filling. In that sense, the outrage toward him does seem somewhat misplaced.