As the Trump administration announced late on 3 March that it was suspending military aid to Kyiv, and the US vice-president JD Vance was sneering at Europe’s ability to supply its own peacekeeping force on Fox News, Keir Starmer’s so-called bridge across the Atlantic was crumbling.
In their attempts to support Ukraine, both Starmer and France’s Emmanuel Macron are chasing a chimera: US security guarantees that no one believes are worth anything, even assuming they can be obtained from a momentarily distracted American president.
Friedrich Merz, the winner of Germany’s February elections, seems the most clear-eyed of the three main European leaders. His words on election night – that Europe must “achieve independence from the US” – were on-point, even when expressing doubts about whether Nato is still alive. After all, every legal text depends on a prior establishment of the facts. If Trump and his coterie of Europhobes think it was Ukraine that started the war, as they’ve said numerous times, where does that leave Nato? Which member of the alliance could possibly be reassured that triggering Article V – which states that an attack on one must be treated as an attack on all – would not be disputed? Better get used to the notion that Nato is now a matter of interpretation, and that Trump has a peculiar view of even the most elementary facts.
Starmer and Macron are not merely wrong, they are pursuing a strategy – lowering the temperature, mollifying Trump, avoiding even the hint of confrontation – that seems increasingly irresponsible. They intend to keep a number of illusions alive about contemporary America, illusions that can only delay Europe from standing fully on its own feet. Delay further and Europeans may quickly find themselves mired in catastrophe.
In the same interview in which he implicitly belittled Britain and France as “random countries”, Vance reaffirmed that the only security guarantee the Trump administration is willing to offer Ukraine is the infamous minerals deal. But the minerals deal is no security guarantee whatsoever, as the Trump administration must realise it would be easier to implement were Ukraine to become a diminished state, like Belarus, incapable of defending its own economic interests. In any case, Russia would be happy to take political control over Ukraine and offer American companies close to Trump whatever minerals – and protection – they request.
The biggest problem is that there is nothing in what Trump or Vance have said so far that would convince Ukrainians their sovereignty won’t be threatened by Russia again after a peace deal. Naturally, Volodymyr Zelensky has insisted that Ukrainian sovereignty, not just peace under Russian occupation, must be the goal of a peace agreement. That sovereignty could be guaranteed in different ways. At a minimum, Western weapons would have to continue flowing, but does anyone believe Trump will support Ukraine militarily after the ceasefire, when he has so often claimed Russia would never break any peace deal anyway?
A minerals deal may well be signed in the coming days. It would mean very little. But if Zelensky does refuse to sign it because he has no faith in the absurd notion of a minerals deal without security guarantees, the Trump administration will try to replace him at the Mariinsky Palace in Kyiv. “It should not be that hard a deal to make,” Trump said on 3 March. “It could be made very fast. If somebody doesn’t want to make a deal, I think that person won’t be around very long.”
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One person with deep knowledge of Ukrainian politics told me at a recent security conference in Switzerland that we should expect negative stories about the Ukrainian president to start appearing in the international media.
There are two paths. The process initiated by Trump will inevitably culminate in Ukraine’s disappearance as a sovereign country. That would always be a tragic outcome, but after the enormous sacrifices made by Ukrainians over three years of war, it is also intolerable. One hopes the large majority of European leaders will agree.
The alternative is not merely to supplement Trump’s plan, or to try to divert him on to a better path, but to design an alternative that, at this point, must be expressly presented as a different plan in opposition to Trump’s dangerous ideas.
Contrary to the widespread view, Europeans have a lot of cards they can play. They have, for a start, $200bn of frozen Russian reserves that could be seized immediately and transferred to Ukraine. That sum would go a long way into building the best drone industrial complex in history, something Ukraine is already close to possessing. Drones, as every visitor to Ukraine knows, have already replaced long-range fire as the most efficient weapon in the conflict. Eutelsat, a European rival to Elon Musk’s satellite communications operator Starlink, said on 4 March that it was “actively collaborating with European institutions and business partners”, stressing that it had equipment that could “enable the swift deployment of additional user terminals for critical missions and infrastructure” even if Musk was to disable Starlink in Ukraine.
Also on 4 March, Merz announced a deal with Germany’s Social Democratic Party, his likely coalition partner, to exempt defence spending above 1 per cent of GDP from the “debt brake” that caps government borrowing. Merz sounded like a geopolitical version of Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank during the eurozone crisis, when he pledged that Germany would do “whatever it takes” to fend off “threats to freedom and peace” in Europe. The announcement sent German borrowing costs soaring, but in time it could have a second and very welcome result: if joined with similar efforts in other capitals and in Brussels, the fiscal Zeitenwende, or turning point, would create a large and liquid pool of government bonds to topple the dollar from its pedestal at the centre of the global financial system.
If European governments fear the economic costs of supporting Ukraine on their own, they should quickly rethink old ideas. The mere suggestion that Europe will need to rearm itself has already given a significant boost to the ailing European economy. European stocks are leading the global markets this year, with double-digit gains of over 11 per cent. Why? So far in 2025, the seven stocks that make up the Aerospace and Defence Index in Europe have gained over 20 per cent, leaving America’s Magnificent Seven stocks – that is, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta and Tesla – behind. If mere speculation about European rearmament has done this, imagine the effect of a new “revolution in military affairs” made in Europe and Ukraine: a deliberate and coordinated effort to invest in the new generation of weapons systems, leapfrogging older systems from the Northern Virginia military-industrial complex.
The time has arrived to save Ukraine and, maybe, in the process save Europe too.
[See also: Can Starmer make Labour the security party?]
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