‘The New Statement’: Europe faces its fate as an American colony

Pic.: ‘The New Statement’

From Trump’s Ukraine proposals to JD Vance’s Munich speech, it’s clear that the US wants to rule like an empire, stresses ‘The New Statesman’.

Donald Trump and his Secretary of Defence, former Fox News television presenter Pete Hegseth, have offered Vladimir Putin exactly what he wants when it comes to Ukraine: no Ukrainian membership of NATO, no American boots on the ground, and Russia gets to keep all the Ukrainian land it has had so far.

Under these terms, which Trump suggested had been discussed with Putin in a phone call on 12 February, there may even be a deal to end the war. Ukraine will be disinclined to accept it, since there is nothing on the table for Kyiv, but then Trump also suggested this was to be a deal hammered out between Russians and Americans.

Trump thinks in imperial terms. And empires are not primarily concerned with other empires but with their own. The end goal is to create the right framework to extract a maximum amount of resources from Europe rather than a framework to confront Russia. The latter, it seems, only made sense in a world where different empires had been subsumed under the post-1989 genuinely global order, something Trump does not believe in.

In Washington we have returned to a tripartite nature of politics that every British observer will easily recognise. A century ago, British officials used to think of three circles of policy: domestic, imperial and foreign. Trump on Ukraine is imperial policy, not foreign policy. It concerns Europe, not Russia. How should the wealthy European domains be ruled? First goal: get them to pay for the border wars.

From this perspective, the way many European officials have reacted to the terms Trump has set out remain ambiguous. When they agree that Europe has to “do more”, are they agreeing that Europeans must transfer greater wealth to the imperial core? Are they suggesting greater purchases of American weapons, something that can only increase Europe’s dependence? Or, on the contrary, are they saying that Europe must break with America because the logic presented by the Trump administration is a logic with which no European can agree, as its inevitable conclusion is a deep social and economic crisis threatening the very survival of European democracy?

In his speech at the Munich Security Conference on 14 February, Vice President JD Vance announced a programme of ideological realignment between the ruling dispensation in Washington and Europe. To many in the audience, it sounded like a programme of regime change in Europe. “What I worry about is the threat from within,” Vance said, after castigating European leaders for policies he said amounted to censorship, unchecked immigration and anti-democratic positions.

For countries such as Poland, the Baltic states, Sweden and Finland, Czechia and even Britain, we are still in 1989. To these nations, America still appears in the guise of a higher divinity credited with the bloodless and miraculous liberation of half of Europe and the defeat of the Soviet “evil empire”. The worst that a god can inflict on mere mortals is to abandon them. Isolationism is thus regarded as the only danger. Others regard this worldview as in need of revision. Western Europe, for whom 1989 does not carry the same weight, never took it very seriously to begin with.

The moment could not be more critical because Europe has to lay the foundations of its independence at the moment when it feels more in need of American power. It must thread a narrow and dangerous path and do it alone. It must save Ukraine from destruction when it feels incapable of preserving itself from danger.

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