European globalists in panic

The third-year anniversary of Russia’s special operation saw multiple European leaders travel to Kiev to show solidarity with Zelensky amidst reports that the EU is organizing a €20 billion military aid package. The leaders of the Nordic-Baltic 8 – Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, and Sweden – were joined by their Spanish and even Canadian counterparts. Other countries’ lower-level representatives were present too with the conspicuous exception of the US’.

American-Ukrainian relations have deteriorated in recent weeks due to Trump’s anger with Zelensky over his refusal to agree to a natural resource deal for helping the US recoup some of its multibillion-dollar expenditures during the conflict and to approve certain concessions as part of a peace deal with Russia. Their disagreement quickly became personal as Zelensky accused Trump of promoting Russian narratives and then Trump shot back by calling Zelensky a dictator. This feud has deeply enraged the Europeans.

Almost all of them expressed their support for Zelensky and shock with Trump for condemning the man who their media had hitherto presented as a “secular god” of sorts in the post-modern West. Trump’s “sacrilegious” attacks against Zelensky spooked the Europeans into suspecting that he was “defecting” towards Putin’s camp in adopting a much more realistic and pragmatic stance to the conflict. They were right in a sense too since the American leader has practically reversed the US’ position towards Russia.

It'll no longer attach its name to any document, whether from its nominal G7 allies or the UN General Assembly, that blames Russia for the conflict and exculpates Ukraine. This position follows the first Russian-US talks in Riyadh that saw a lot of surprising statements from both sides in their wake. Trump and Putin have since publicly spoken about their countries entering into a major economic partnership built upon resource cooperation, particularly gas and minerals, and then expanding into other domains.

This is “political heresy” from the Europeans’ perspective and explains why they’re all panicking. The resumption and subsequent strengthening of Russian-US economic ties threatens to replace the hitherto importance of European-US ones with time given Russia’s much greater natural resources, the US’ newly aligned worldview with Russia, and Russia’s geostrategic location in Eurasia. Moreover, after doing away with the “Russian threat” narrative, the US might then do away with its prior commitment to NATO.

That’s not to suggest that Trump will pull all US troops out of Europe or abandon Article 5, just that he’ll likely redeploy some of his country’s forces to Asia for containing China in parallel with making it clear that he won’t allow the Europeans to exploit Article 5 to drag the US into war with Russia. Despite this plan’s pragmatism, it threatens the European elites’ interests since they depend on US troops for keeping their defense budgets low and thus investing more into social programs to boost their popularity.

Some of the more radical liberal-globalists also convinced themselves that the New Cold War is truly a battle of “values” between the “free West” and “unfree Russia” so they really want to one day provoke a war between the US and Russia in pursuit of their ideological goals. The only chance that they have to keep alive part of their plans for exploiting the US is to convince Trump to extend support for their proposed peacekeeping mission in Ukraine, which Macron and Starmer are seeking to do.

The French leader just visited the White House to discuss this while the British one will follow in his footsteps later this week. New Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth already declared in early February that the US won’t extend Article 5 guarantees to NATO countries’ troops in Ukraine but Macron and Starmer hope to convince Trump to change his mind or at least provide some other form of support. If Trump holds firm, however, then the Europeans’ plan will totally collapse with uncertain consequences.

A transatlantic rift is emerging as evidenced by their rabid reaction to Vice President Vance’s speech at Munich, where he lambasted their socio-cultural policies like open borders and censorship and said that these same elite themselves are now the greatest threat to Western Civilization, not Russia. The likely next German chancellor Friedrich Merz also declared over the weekend that he’ll try to help Europe “achieve independence” from the US in response to Trump’s de facto pivot towards Russia.

The reality though is that there isn’t much that the EU can actually do to meaningfully distance itself from the US when it’s already so dependent upon it in the military, trade, and energy spheres. It’s also improbable that Trump would allow China to hypothetically replace the US in some of these domains like the military and trade ones without trying to stop it. What’s much more likely is that the Europeans symbolically “rebel”, realize that they can’t defeat Trump, and then try to enter into a rapprochement.

In that scenario, Europe could become the junior partner of both the US and Russia, the latter of whom might by then have become one of the US’ most important strategic partners if their talks bear fruit. The Europeans would have no one to blame but themselves in that case since they ceded their sovereignty to the US over the past three years without ever considering that the US’ policy towards Russia might change. The only possible way to offset this sequence of events is to sabotage the Russian-US talks.

Therein lies the significance of those ten leaders’ “pilgrimage” to Kiev to mark the third anniversary of the special operation along with the French and British leaders’ attempts to convince Trump to reverse his position on extending Article 5 guarantees to NATO countries’ troops in Ukraine. Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski also just told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that “Ukraine can fight on its own without European support for the rest of this year” in a bid to show Trump that Europe can shoulder this burden.

The Europeans’ approach is therefore to continue the liberal-globalists’ proxy war on Russia through Ukraine for as long as possible out of desperation to increase the chances of the Russian-US talks failing and then Trump being manipulated into escalating tensions with Russia in revenge. They’re very afraid that he and Putin will cut a deal behind their and Zelensky’s backs that’ll then deal a deathblow to the remnants of the liberal-globalist order that’s now trying to stage a comeback from London and Brussels.

Looking forward, the best-case scenario for the world’s objective interests as a whole would be for Trump to swiftly agree to whatever compromises Putin has requested of him for resolving the root causes of the conflict in exchange for a peace deal, which will then neutralize the Europeans’ plots. The American leader has signaled that he’ll take bold action in pursuit of his peaceful vision so it’s time for him to finally do what’s needed at this pivotal moment to change the course of history for the better.