Transatlantic rift deepens as Trump administration sidelines Europe on Ukraine

The Munich Security Conference has long served as the annual ritual where the transatlantic alliance rehearses its unity. This year it became the stage for its most public fracture in decades. On 14 February, Vice President JD Vance stood beneath the NATO logo and delivered a speech that bypassed Russia entirely to accuse European governments of suppressing free speech, cancelling elections and hiding behind Soviet-era concepts of misinformation. The address was not a complaint about burden-sharing. It was a rejection of the political consensus that binds the alliance together.

Vance breaks with diplomatic precedent in Munich

Vance's remarks departed from every convention of U.S. vice-presidential rhetoric at Munich. He did not mention Russian aggression against Ukraine. Instead he told the assembled European leaders that "to many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old, entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like 'misinformation' and 'disinformation,' who simply don't like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion, or, God forbid, vote a different way." The speech was calibrated for a domestic American audience as much as for the room in Bavaria. It signalled that the new administration views the European political mainstream, not the Kremlin, as the primary ideological adversary.

The symbolism was reinforced hours later when Vance met Alice Weidel, co-leader of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a party under surveillance by Germany's domestic intelligence service for extremist tendencies and whose leading figures have repeatedly minimised Nazi crimes. No senior U.S. official had previously granted such legitimacy to the AfD. The meeting occurred days before the German federal election in which the AfD secured 20.8% of the vote, becoming the second-largest party in the Bundestag. German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius responded directly: "This democracy was called into question by the U.S. vice president earlier, not just in Germany but in Europe as a whole. If I understood him correctly, he compares conditions in parts of Europe to those under authoritarian regimes. That is not acceptable."

Zelenskyy proposes a European army as insurance

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, attending the conference the following day, drew his own conclusion. Without Ukraine's army, he said, European forces alone would not be sufficient to counter Russian aggression. He called for the creation of an "armed forces of Europe", a phrase that recalls the failed European Defence Community of the 1950s but now carries the weight of existential necessity. The proposal is less a practical military plan than a political signal: Kyiv no longer assumes the American security umbrella is permanent. Zelenskyy's intervention reflected a calculation made across European capitals since November. The question is no longer whether the United States will lead, but whether it will obstruct.

Saudi talks exclude Ukraine and Europe

Four days after Munich, Secretary of State Marco Rubio sat down with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Riyadh. No Ukrainian officials were invited. No European representatives were present. The meeting, the first high-level U.S.-Russia contact since the invasion began, was framed by the State Department as a preliminary discussion on ending the war. In Kyiv and European capitals it was read as a decision to negotiate over Ukraine's head. President Trump later told Fox News Radio that Zelenskyy held "no cards" and dismissed the Ukrainian leader with the phrase "you get sick of it." The language was deliberate. It reframed the victim of an unprovoked invasion as a nuisance to be managed.

The Riyadh talks followed a pattern established in the administration's first weeks. The United States has appropriated just under $175 billion in military, financial and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine since February 2022, according to congressional appropriations data. That flow gave Washington leverage. The decision to open a direct channel to Moscow without consulting the primary recipient of that aid suggests a shift from leverage to leverage-renunciation. European foreign ministers meeting in Paris on 17 February issued a joint statement insisting that "Ukraine and Europe must be part of any negotiations." The statement was signed by France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. It carried no enforcement mechanism.

The UN vote that realigned Washington

On 24 February, the third anniversary of the full-scale invasion, the United Nations General Assembly voted on a Ukrainian-sponsored resolution condemning Russia's aggression and demanding withdrawal. The United States voted against it. The U.S. chargé d'affaires ad interim, Dorothy Shea, said the resolution only perpetuated "a war of words rather than an end to the war." Washington found itself in a voting bloc with North Korea, Iran, Belarus, Syria, Nicaragua, Eritrea, Mali, Sudan, the Central African Republic, Burundi, Equatorial Guinea, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Cuba and Haiti. China abstained alongside 63 other states. The European Union member states voted almost unanimously in favour. The vote was symbolic, General Assembly resolutions are non-binding, but symbols are the currency of alliance politics. The United States had effectively switched sides on the defining security question of the European continent.

Merz breaks the taboo on Article 5

Friedrich Merz, the CDU leader who is expected to become Germany's next chancellor after the 23 February election, articulated what European leaders have whispered since 2016. "We must prepare for the possibility that Donald Trump will no longer uphold NATO's mutual defense commitment unconditionally," he told a German broadcaster on 21 February. "That is why, in my view, it is crucial that Europeans make the greatest possible efforts to ensure that we are at least capable of defending the European continent on our own." The statement is unprecedented. Since 1949, the credibility of NATO has rested on the assumption that the American nuclear guarantee is absolute. A prospective German chancellor stating publicly that this assumption may no longer hold is a strategic rupture. Merz did not call for leaving NATO. He called for European capacity to operate without the United States, a distinction that preserves the alliance's form while hollowing out its substance.

The arithmetic of European rearmament

The numbers behind Merz's statement are daunting. A recent analysis by the Brussels-based think tank Bruegel calculated that Europe would need approximately 300,000 additional troops and an estimated $262 billion in annual expenditure to replace the U.S. contribution to European defence fully. The report concluded that "the numbers are small enough for Europe to replace the U.S. fully", a judgement that assumes political unity, industrial coordination and fiscal discipline that do not currently exist. NATO members agreed in 2014 to spend 2% of GDP on defence by 2024. As of 2023, only eleven of thirty-two allies met the target. The Trump administration now demands 5%. In 2023 the United States itself spent 3.4% of GDP on its military. Michael Cox of the London School of Economics called the 5% goal "impossible" but added that Europeans "are genuinely feeling that they need to do more ... not just to placate Trump, but also to make a greater contribution to their own security." He acknowledged that Europe will continue to rely on the United States for logistics, intelligence and subsidies, the enablers that turn national forces into a coherent military machine.

A security architecture built on assumptions that no longer hold

The transatlantic bargain was always asymmetrical. The United States provided the nuclear umbrella, the command-and-control infrastructure, the strategic airlift and the intelligence apparatus. Europe provided forward bases, host-nation support and a political legitimising framework. That bargain survived the Suez crisis, the Euromissile crisis, the Iraq war and the first Trump term. It survived because both sides believed the alternative, a Europe responsible for its own defence against Russia without American backing, was worse. The events of February 2025 suggest the American side no longer shares that belief. The European side has not yet decided what to do about it.