Donald Trump’s actions on Ukraine have seriously weakened NATO. What will happen to Europe?
Donald Trump’s actions on Ukraine have seriously weakened NATO. What will happen to Europe?
Opinion
George Brandis
Former high commissioner to the UK and federal attorney-general
February 23, 2025 — 6.30pm
February 23, 2025 — 6.30pm
Eighty-seven years ago, Neville Chamberlain went to Munich to sell out Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler. Ten days ago, Donald Trump sent his vice president to Munich to sell out Ukraine to Vladimir Putin.
Their objectives were different: Chamberlain’s aim was to prevent a war, Trump’s to end one. Chamberlain, unlike Trump, had no sympathy with the tyrant whom he was appeasing. But the message they sent to the aggressor was, in each case, the same.
The Munich Security Conference, held annually in the German city so freighted with historical resonance, has since its inception in 1963 become Europe’s most important annual diplomatic gathering, attended by presidents, prime ministers, foreign ministers and defence ministers. Since Putin’s invasion in 2022, the Ukraine War has, naturally, been its principal focus.
J.D. Vance’s speech touched on Ukraine in just half a sentence – “[t]he Trump administration … believes we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine”. It was the words that followed that sent shockwaves across Europe: “… the threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within. The retreat of Europe from its most fundamental values.” Vance went on to lecture European leaders on a range of domestic issues which are core to the Trump agenda, in particular immigration.
He told the astonished audience: “[T]he crisis this continent faces right now … is one of your own making.” Not the making of an authoritarian neighbour which has, for three years, prosecuted a war of aggression in flagrant violation of international law, that has unsettled the security of Europe like no other event in 80 years.
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Apart from Ukraine itself, the nations which gathered at Munich are all members of NATO, to which the security guarantee in Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty applies. Vance’s open scorn for the European democracies raised alarm about whether the United States would in future honour that guarantee.
The fear is most acutely felt by those which border Russia – in particular the three Baltic nations which were once part of the Soviet Union – for whom the threat is existential. Would a US administration whose policy is to throw Ukraine to the wolves go to war with Russia to defend Latvia? Yet if the United States were unwilling to honour the guarantee, even in the case of a small state, what purpose does NATO any longer serve?
Last week, the Financial Times reported that one item on the table in talks between America and Russia was the removal of the two US military units based in the Baltic states. Go figure.
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Two days before Vance’s speech, Trump’s defence secretary, former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, was even blunter when he met European defence ministers in Brussels. Describing the return of Ukraine to its pre-invasion borders as an “illusionary goal”, he made it clear that the United States does not regard the defence of Ukraine as a NATO priority.
On the future US relationship with Europe, he said: “[S]tark strategic realities prevent the United States of America being primarily focused on the security of Europe … The US is prioritising deterring war with China in the Pacific, recognising the reality of scarcity and making resourcing trade-offs. … As the United States prioritises its attention to these threats, European allies must lead from the front.”
The speeches of Vance and Hegseth upended, in 48 hours, the assumptions upon which the security of Europe has relied for decades. Yet they should have come as a surprise to no-one: there was nothing in their remarks that had not been foreshadowed – by Trump, by Vance, by numerous MAGA Republicans – during the election campaign.
As if to underline his contempt not just for Ukraine, but for America’s NATO allies, Trump then dispatched Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Riyadh to conduct negotiations with Russia from which Ukraine and Europe were excluded.
There is only one possible interpretation of America’s diplomacy over the past fortnight: that under the Trump administration, the US no longer regards Putin as an adversary. America is no longer on Ukraine’s side. If there were any remaining doubt about that, it was extinguished when, last week, Trump parroted the Kremlin’s line that Ukraine had started the war: a claim so preposterously untrue that it transcended even Trump’s customary mendacity. His casual reversal of objective fact was right out of the pages of Nineteen Eighty-Four (“We are at war with Oceania. We have always been at war with Oceania”).
America is now on a different page from Europe – and from the rest of the democratic world, including Australia – on the most important threat to European peace since 1945. Although both utter the usual pieties about wanting the war to end, the grim truth is that while Europe has remained steadfast in its support for Ukraine, America has abandoned it.
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Today marks the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion. The initial response of the democratic world was to galvanise NATO – indeed, with the accession of Finland and Sweden, to enlarge it. Zelensky – lauded in every Western capital for his inspirational leadership and personal courage – was compared, not implausibly, with Winston Churchill. But the return to the White House of Donald Trump has changed all that. Bizarrely, it is Zelensky, not Putin, whom Trump maligns as a dictator.
Last year, Kevin Rudd was embarrassed by the revelation that some years ago, when a private citizen, he had called Trump “a traitor to the West”. Obviously that put Rudd in an uncomfortable position given his current role. But, as events of the past fortnight have proven, he was right.
George Brandis is a former high commissioner to the UK and a former Liberal senator and federal attorney-general. He is now a professor at ANU.
George Brandis is a former high commissioner to the UK, and a former Liberal senator and federal attorney-general. He is now a professor at ANU.
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