{"id":126515,"date":"2025-02-14T19:53:04","date_gmt":"2025-02-14T19:53:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/trumps-whirlwind-now-blows-through-europe-the-new-york-times\/"},"modified":"2025-02-14T19:53:04","modified_gmt":"2025-02-14T19:53:04","slug":"trumps-whirlwind-now-blows-through-europe-the-new-york-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/trumps-whirlwind-now-blows-through-europe-the-new-york-times\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s Whirlwind Now Blows Through Europe – The New York Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Trump<\/span> Administration<\/span><\/span><\/span>
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news analysis
The new Trump foreign policy team has brought a dizzying message to European allies on A.I., Ukraine and more. It has already left many angered and chagrined.
By <\/span>David E. Sanger<\/a>
David E. Sanger has covered six American presidencies for The Times and writes frequently on the revived confrontation among superpowers. This article was reported from Paris and Munich.
The great collision has begun.
As President Trump\u2019s national security team arrived in Europe this week, very little about their hard-line message came as a surprise. But to the political and diplomatic leaders arriving in Munich on Friday for an annual security conference where fault lines in the Western alliance are always on display, it was the size and suddenness of the breach with the Trump administration that was shocking.
In sharp contrast to his first term, Mr. Trump began imposing tariffs<\/a> before he began even cursory diplomatic negotiations, hitting allies and adversaries alike and wiping out years of trade agreements.
While Mr. Trump was signing executive orders, his vice president, JD Vance, arrived in Paris<\/a> and told an assemblage of leaders debating the future of artificial intelligence that America would dominate the industry, make the most advanced chips on American soil, write the software there and set the rules. Europe could either get on board or get out of the way.
Then came Ukraine. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump\u2019s new defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, told a meeting of allies in Brussels<\/a> that Ukraine must give up its objective of recapturing all its lost territory in the war with Russia. Within hours, Mr. Trump was on the phone<\/a> with the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, promising negotiations but having already conceded territory Russia occupies and an assurance to the Russian leader that Ukraine would never be in NATO. Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is in Kyiv<\/a> to begin negotiating American rights to Ukraine\u2019s untapped rare earth metals.
The declarations of unilateral concessions left European leaders, and of course President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, effectively sidelined, bystanders to the negotiations about the fate of Ukraine\u2019s boundaries and, to some degree, Europe\u2019s future. On Thursday they began pushing back against the new administration\u2019s message, delicately, recognizing that to trigger Mr. Trump\u2019s wrath could leave them in a deeper freeze.
\u201cIt is crucial that Ukraine is closely involved in all talks on its future,\u201d Mark Rutte, the NATO secretary general, said ahead of a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels, sounding like a man who could not believe he had to state the obvious. John Healey, Britain\u2019s defense secretary, said, \u201cThere can be no negotiation about Ukraine without Ukraine, and Ukraine\u2019s voice must be at the heart of any talks.\u201d
Mr. Zelensky, after initially thanking Mr. Trump on social media for pursuing a peace deal, said on Thursday that he would not accept any agreement negotiated without him participating. It is \u201cimportant that everything does not go according to Putin\u2019s plan,\u201d he said. \u201cThere can be no talk about Ukraine without Ukraine,\u201d he insisted.
It remains to be seen whether the Trump administration heeds the warning, ignores it, or tries to weave a middle path, giving Europe and Ukraine a sort of backbench role in the negotiations. But by Thursday, Mr. Hegseth\u2019s comments had created such an uproar among European leaders that he seemed to backtrack on whether pre-emptive concessions would be made to Mr. Putin.
\u201cEverything is on the table,\u201d Mr. Hegseth said, making clear that it was Mr. Trump who was leading the negotiations and adding: \u201cSo I\u2019m not going to stand and declare what President Trump will do or won\u2019t do, what will be in or what will be out, what concessions will be made, or what concessions are not made.\u201d
The first indications of which direction the administration will go may come on Friday, when Mr. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and a raft of Mr. Trump\u2019s other newly minted national security officials will jam into the quaint Bayerischer Hof, a luxury hotel that has been host to the conference since the Cold War. There is talk of a meeting with Mr. Zelensky.
But the fact is that Mr. Trump and his team have already laid out the new American agenda, demands up front. And in this new era of coercive diplomacy, there are many.
In interviews in the past few days, American officials indicated they plan to press upon European nations that when it comes to defending Ukraine after a peace agreement, the burden will be almost entirely on Europe\u2019s own forces, with America supporting with intelligence and consultations, but no troops.
And they will insist that Mr. Trump is not kidding when he demands that NATO nations double to triple their military spending, raising the goal from the current 2 percent of their gross domestic product to 5 percent. (The U.S. spends 3.5 percent and the White House will not say whether the U.S. would also comply with new target.)
The shift in tone from the United States and clash of objectives with its allies was dizzying and certain to be on display in Munich.
While the public pronouncements will grab the headlines, as usual, the most interesting conversations will take place behind closed doors.
Among the most fraught may be the meeting of the newly sworn-in director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, whose embrace of Russian talking points alarmed European officials, and the C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe, with the intelligence chiefs of the major allies, who have been deeply engaged in countering Mr. Putin\u2019s sabotage campaign around Europe.
The British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand spy chiefs \u2014 the so called \u201cFive Eyes\u201d who make up the tightest intelligence partnership, an outgrowth of the victors of World War II \u2014 will be looking for any signs that Mr. Trump is easing pressure on Russia.
Three years ago, the Europeans at Munich publicly doubted<\/a> the American and British assessment that Russia was about to invade; four days after the 2022 conference ended, Mr. Putin did exactly that. For the past two years, the Munich gathering has been filled with talk about how his illegal invasion strengthened NATO and expanded its ranks.
In private meetings and on the main stages, American officials would reassure the world that Washington would stick with the war \u201cas long as it takes\u201d and vow \u201cnothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.\u201d In side sessions, they would haggle over the wording of promises that, one day, Ukraine would become a full NATO ally, if there was disagreement about what someday meant.
Mr. Hegseth effectively dismissed those conversations as a fantasy, empty principles that he insisted European leaders and Mr. Zelensky should give up. When President Trump held his 90-minute call on Wednesday with Mr. Putin, it was the first direct conversation between an American president and his Russian counterpart in more than three years.
But there were few celebrations that a peace deal could finally be seen in the distance. It was lost on no one here in Munich that Mr. Trump\u2019s phone call was conducted by himself \u2014 and that he named a negotiating team of four aides without saying a word about the involvement of the Europeans or the Ukrainians.
Mr. Hegseth\u2019s message this week was that recapturing lost lands by Ukraine was \u201can unrealistic objective.\u201d And the new timeline for Ukraine\u2019s NATO membership is, he argued, so far into the future it might as well be never.
But it was not just the blunt tone that jarred and angered European officials. It was also the fact that Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth seemed to tell Mr. Putin just what he wanted to hear about the shape of a deal.
\u201cTrump has already made public concessions to Putin before negotiations have even begun,\u201d Boris Pistorius, Germany\u2019s defense minister, said on Thursday at a meeting in Brussels. \u201cIt would have been better to talk about Ukraine\u2019s possible NATO membership at the negotiating table.\u201d
And he warned that any peace could be a false one. \u201cPutin is constantly provoking the West,\u201d he said, \u201cit would be na\u00efve to believe the threat would actually diminish after such a peace agreement.\u201d
In fact, the outlines of a cease-fire have been clear for some time, and it looks, not coincidentally, a lot like the armistice that brought the Korean War to a halt. Russia would effectively claim the lands its troops occupy, about 20 percent of Ukraine.
The big question is who would police the new lines, and there Mr. Trump is insisting Europe must stand up, and that if European troops were attacked, it would not constitute an attack on NATO forces that would require a response.
Mr. Zelensky has already dismissed the idea that Europe has the firepower, or the will, to stand up to Mr. Putin without American help. But what he and European leaders are really having a hard time getting used to, one senior European diplomat said as he arrived on a plane to the conference, is that there is no longer agreement on the basic principle of assuring that Russia does not gain from its illegal invasion.
\u201cIt\u2019s back to Thucydides,\u201d he said, referring to the famous Greek chronicler of the Peloponnesian War who wrote, \u201cThe strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must.\u201d
David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges. More about David E. Sanger<\/a><\/span>
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