CNN: US relations with Europe will never be the same after Trump’s call with Putin

Europe’s American century is over, CNN stresses.

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, meanwhile, went to Brussels and told European allies to “take ownership of conventional security on the continent.”

The watershed highlights Trump’s “America First” ideology and his tendency to see every issue or alliance as a dollars and cents value proposition. It also underscores his freedom from establishment advisors steeped in the foreign policy mythology of the West, who he thinks thwarted his first term.

Although Hegseth recommitted to NATO, something fundamental has changed.

Trump is returning to the rationale used by many presidents wary of foreign entanglements from the start of the republic, saying Wednesday, “We have a little thing called an ocean in between.”

It’s long been clear that the second Trump administration would place new demands on America’s European partners, which will now lead to agonized choices for governments that have chosen social spending over defense. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte told the European Parliament last month that Europeans must come up with more cash for their militaries. “If you don’t do it, get your Russian language courses or go to New Zealand,” he said.

But Hegseth was still jarring. He formalized Trump’s demand for alliance members to spend 5% of GDP on defense and said the US would prioritize its growing clash with China and the security of its borders over Europe’s. “The United States will no longer tolerate an imbalanced relationship which encourages dependency,” said the new Pentagon chief, who was wearing a stars-and-stripes pocket square.

The Greatest Generation that fought World War II and produced presidents who understood the dangers of a power vacuum in Europe is gone. Any American who has an adult memory of the Cold War against the Soviet Union is in their mid 50s at least. And the most powerful competitor to the United States is in Asia not Europe. So, it’s fair for Trump to ask why the continent has still not taken over its own self-defense 80 years after the defeat of the Nazis.

Successive American presidents and European leaders have failed to rethink NATO for the 21st century. In retrospect, the transatlantic alliance left itself badly exposed to the most transactional and nationalist American president since the 19th century.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested in a recent interview on “The Megyn Kelly Show” on Sirius XM that the US should not be the “front end” of European security but rather the “back stop.” And he rebuked big European powers. “When you ask those guys, why can’t you spend more on national security, their argument is because it would require us to make cuts to welfare programs, to unemployment benefits, to being able to retire at 59 and all these other things,” Rubio said. “That’s a choice they made. But we’re subsidizing that?”

“Trump’s agenda isn’t about European security: it’s that he thinks the USA shouldn’t pay for European security,” said Nicholas Dungan, founder and CEO of CogitoPraxis, a strategic consultancy in The Hague. “This isn’t a new era of transatlantic relations, it’s a new era of global big-power relations replacing the deliberately institutional structures of the liberal international order.”

The first test of this new US-Europe reality will come over Ukraine.

Trump said that negotiations to end the Ukraine war will start “immediately” after his call with Putin, who has been frozen out by the West since his illegal invasion of Ukraine, a sovereign democracy, three years ago.

Ukrainian Zelensky was not included, in an alarming sign for the government in Kyiv...

The US-Russia call and a future summit with Putin in Saudi Arabia, which Trump said would happen soon, may be a hint that he’s not just cutting Zelensky out of the deal – but Europe too.

In a statement, France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Spain, the European Union, the European Commission, plus the United Kingdom and Ukraine, warned “Ukraine and Europe must be part of any negotiations.” And they warned Trump, who seems to want a peace deal at any cost, that “a just and lasting peace in Ukraine is a necessary condition for a strong transatlantic security.”

As Hegseth made clear, Ukraine’s hopes of regaining all its lost land is unrealistic. What may emerge is a solution along the lines of the partition of Germany after World War II, with Russian-occupied territory frozen under its control with the rest of Ukraine — on the other side of a hard border – remaining a democracy. Perhaps the western edge would be allowed to join the European Union, like the old West Germany. But this time, US troops won’t make it safe for freedom.

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