I’ve just returned from an extraordinary and clarifying few days in Munich. This was the 61st meeting of the famed security conference, where security leaders from both sides of the transatlantic family gathered, but this meeting was like no other.
The famous Bayerischer Hof Hotel, once a palace for Bavaria’s King Ludvig I, was filled with heads of state and other senior leaders to hear a declaration by the US administration of a new order. It’s one where there’s no place for Europe.
Everyone attending knew something big was coming, even if they weren’t sure what. When you entered the main hall where Vice President JD Vance was about to speak, the anxiety was heavy in the air. In the lead up, rumors had been circulating about what he might say in his debut as VP in Europe.
The auguries suggested more controversy. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had made comments on February 12 that the US would take NATO membership off the table for Ukraine and require territorial concessions. That caused a backlash, including from the Republican Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker, who said the speech sounded as though it had been written by Tucker Carlson. Back in Munich, some began to fear the worst — that the US would announce a major pullout of US forces and effectively rip up NATO’s Article 5.
Instead, the vice president chose this stage to deliver a fiery speech that identified the main threat to Europe as coming from within. He went after European leaders for censoring Christian values and not doing enough on migration, singling out the UK, Romania, and Germany. There was no question that he had de facto aligned himself with Europe’s nationalist right-wing political parties, most notably the German AfD — a week before Germany is to have federal elections. Speaking after the US vice president, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who is expected to lose his job, categorically ruled out any cooperation with the far right in the German government and received a loud round of applause.
When Vance finished his Munich speech, he left the hall without taking part in a short moderated discussion, as is the norm. You could hear a penny drop. Participants began to file out, with a seeming consensus emerging among many European colleagues that the continent’s democracies now faced a “two-front war,” as one person put it: under attack from both Russia and the US.
When news broke that the US would meet senior Russian officials in Saudi Arabia to negotiate a “peace deal” on Ukraine — and that Europe wasn’t invited — that anxiety turned to panic, followed by a sinking feeling that the international order, which the US and Europe had built together during eight decades of joint action, was simply unraveling. It’s worth noting that these people are not political naïfs; they include politicians and military and intelligence officers. They are not easy to shock, and yet shocked they were.
In one day, the European position had to shift from “Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine” to “Nothing about Europe without Europe.” The difficulty of making good on that slogan was only underlined by the summit of European leaders in Paris on February 17, while the main action was about to take place between the US and Russia thousands of miles away in Saudi Arabia.
The US approach won’t lead to anything good for Ukraine or Europe. Ultimately, if a deal is struck that leaves Ukraine insecure and Europe vulnerable, the US, which has profited and prospered on the basis of the transatlantic alliance, will also suffer economically. And its security will worsen.
Indeed there is a potentially grim scenario that could emerge, and Europeans are right to worry. But that bad outcome is not inevitable, it depends on what Europe does now.
The bad scenario is very bad indeed. It involves the US and Russia negotiating a deal that will favor Russia, effectively making Ukraine a vassal state and thereby rewrite Europe’s security architecture. This would mean ending NATO’s open door policy to Ukraine and presumably other new members (like Georgia and Moldova), forcing territorial concessions on Ukraine without real security guarantees that might effectively deter Russia for the long-term.
Such a deal would, of course, be rejected by both Ukraine and Europe (and President Zelenskyy said as much in his speech at Munich.) The US, in turn, would then blame Kyiv and Europeans for “rejecting peace.” After that, things could get very ugly indeed, with US military and security disengagement from the continent. Europe would then be left deeply vulnerable to Russia’s desire to march on and restore the Warsaw Pact of “fraternal” allies led by puppet leaders who take their orders and inspiration from the Kremlin. There are, of course, risks that this could trigger World War Three.
As dangerous as this sounds, such a future is not foreordained. Everything now depends on what Europe does next.
Rather than sitting back and letting history unfold without them, Europeans must act with extreme urgency to put together a plan for what they will do to secure Ukraine and all of the continent, an approach that was very much the message from President Zelenskyy in Munich, and one that I have also been sending to European allies since Trump’s reelection.
There are signs of positive movement. The UK, whose commitment to transatlanticism defines its security strategy, announced it would send troops to any implementation force deployed in Ukraine. Press reports said Prime Minister Keir Starmer also planned to increase defense spending, a key Trump demand. Sweden said it too could consider sending military personnel, though others like Germany were hesitant and said the discussions were premature.
The leaders’ summit in Paris has put the key issues on the table: a massive opening of the faucet for defense investment and removal of the straitjacket of debt-ratio requirements in national budgets. But much more must be done at a speed that Europe is not familiar with.
But if Europe really does want a seat at the table, it has to deliver a united and coherent plan of its own.
This should have come earlier. Europe had three years of war to take the tough decisions on defense budgets, preparedness, and defense industrial base investment. Now, with uncertainty as to whether the US will be there as a backstop, the urgency is underlined.
This moment demands what Winston Churchill would scrawl on his wartime memos: “Action this day.” This is the time to think and act big and fast – and to try to engage rather than assume we are all locked into an inevitable cycle of doom.
It’s also the time to avoid the temptation to respond to every contradictory statement from the Trump administration, and to focus on the very considerable power in this rich and intellectually blessed continent to design its own future, so that it is not designed by others.
Dr. Alina Polyakova is President and CEO of the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) as well as the Donald Marron Senior Fellow at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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