February 2025 may be remembered as a watershed in international political history. Trump’s invitation to Vladimir Putin to start talks on a ceasefire in Ukraine indicates that the new US president may have decided to cut through the tangle of the transatlantic alliance. He seems to be ready to reap personal glory as a peacemaker – independently of European NATO allies, and perhaps even Zelensky’s Ukraine. This news sent Europeans reeling. One senior official confessed that ‘the EU institutions are still struggling to find the right person with direct access to Trump to talk to’. US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth met with NATO ministers in Brussels and Vice-President JD Vance attended the Munich Security Conference – a club of senior Atlanticists – to read the riot act to the Europeans. Their message is: European security is now entirely up to you, we need our resources and troops for a more important geopolitical theatre – the Asia-Pacific. The main threat to Europe, Vance said, is ‘within’ the EU itself: from a deficit of democracy and the exclusion of those who support the parties outside the liberal mainstream.

The media has already compared the shock caused by US statements to Putin’s defiant speech in Munich in 2007. Putin’s speech set in motion the developments that led to the war in Ukraine and made Russia a rogue state. One can only fathom how decisive a US pivot away from the European security affairs would be. But it becomes painfully obvious that American disengagement from Europe and a re-focus on the contest with China – the development that has been evident for years – has rocketed. This is a lasting shock to global geopolitics. The war in Ukraine could only stall this major trend – not stop it.

‘Disbelief and dismay’ are the words many commentators mention to describe the reaction of European leaders. President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen and her colleagues in the EU remain defiant: nothing about European security without Europeans and Ukraine, they say. She also implies that, in contrast to ‘some senior officials’ in Washington, Europeans stand on their values that remain ‘universal’. NATO officials and particularly defence ministers, in contrast, remain remarkably reticent and pensive. The overlap between NATO and the EU has never been seamless; today, it is under tremendous strain, and European militaries know that Article 5 would be hollowed out without America’s credible attachment to it.

European leadership speaks loudly but carries a very small stick. There were times when Europe was the power hub of the world, the trend-setter of modernity, the generator of global wealth and imperial conquest. Suddenly, between 1914 and 1945, Europe exploded in two genocidal wars and destroyed its supremacy and centrality with its own arms. And yet, Europe, humiliated by Hitler and partitioned between the West and Stalin, remained for decades central to world affairs. This was primarily because the US political elites decided in 1947 to contain the Soviet Union and create American ‘empire by invitation’. The primary theatre of US containment of communism was Europe. The two secondary theatres were in the Middle East and East Asia.

European countries took advantage of this. The United Kingdom immediately leaned on the United States in a ‘special relationship’ – and profited from this in keeping its waning geopolitical weight while gradually dissolving its untenable empire. Even small European countries such as Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and Portugal, retained their ‘centrality’ in international affairs as long as they band-wagoned to the new American hegemon and protector. West Germany under Konrad Adenauer rose from the ashes of the Third Reich as a fully-fledged member of NATO, because German troops were required to counterbalance the Soviet troops in the East.

It was this new centrality, viewed through Cold War lenses, that allowed European countries, such as France, West Germany, and others, to play a key role in Cold War international politics. The architects of European détente were Europeans, among them Pierre Harmel and Willy Brandt. Europeans, with a reluctant Washington, supported the idea of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) and insisted – over scepticism in the Kremlin and the White House  – on ‘human rights’ clauses in the Helsinki Final Act. And western European leaders, like Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand, were important players in the final chapters of Cold War history.

Europeans could even rebel against the US leadership. The best-known cases were the Suez Crisis of 1956, and France’s rebellion against NATO under Charles de Gaulle, among others. Yet every time the alliance recouped and grew stronger. The primary reason was the abiding Soviet threat, yet there were other crucial factors, such as the growth of the western European economy and its integration – encouraged and supported by American liberal philosophies of markets and trade – which boosted the economic and financial ties of the Old and the New Worlds. Institutions like the G7 reaffirmed the place of Europe: four of its members were ‘in Europe’, including the UK.

The post-Cold War reordering seemed to return Europe to its glorious centrality and autonomy in world affairs. The Maastricht Treaty was enacted in 1993, just at the time when the Clinton administration abruptly decided to ‘open doors’ to NATO expansion to the East, without setting any geographic limits to it.

If you were on the wrong side of the Cold War, it was always clear that Washington was the boss. When Mikhail Gorbachev tried to relaunch détente in Europe in 1985 over the head of Ronald Reagan, western European leaders told them it was impossible, and the Soviet reformer quickly adapted to reality. After the Berlin Wall came down, and the Soviet Union fell apart, all post-communist leaders knew that the keys that could open the doors for their countries ‘into Europe’ were in Washington, not in London or Brussels.

Russia’s first president, Boris Yeltsin, cultivated special relations with US presidents, as did, at first, his successor Vladimir Putin. The ‘new Europe’ of the former Soviet satellites and republics which joined NATO and EU – above all Poland and the Baltic states – has become the staunchest of Atlanticists, leaning on US power above all, even while working their way through the corridors of power in Brussels to define European international priorities.

Russia and its elites wanted to join as well, and Russian chauvinists and imperialists who objected were on the extreme margins of Russian politics. The prospect of Russia ‘in Europe,’ however, soured even in the 1990s, long before Putin became leader. The Russian political elites realised that the EU and NATO did not want them as full members of their ‘club’. They set on organising a club of their own, within what they regarded as their sphere of influence in Eurasia.

European ‘empire by invitation’ lasted 20 years, and then its lights began to dim. First came the financial crisis of 2009-10 that hit Greece and cast a pall over the ‘PIGS’ countries of the EU’s south. Then came mass migration from the Middle East and Africa, which triggered the rise of populist movements and parties. Then the trauma of COVID-19, and finally Putin’s belligerence and aggression. The EU leadership, now well into the second decade of ‘crisis management’, has no end in sight.

Institutionally, Europe adapted. It even developed a coordinating crisis centre in Brussels. Jose Manuel Barroso and particularly Ursula von der Leyen became recognisable world figures, active in international affairs. The EU was learning to act as an economic and trade giant, one of three or four in the world. And yet nothing prepared Europe for a crisis of transatlantic solidarity. Essentially, European leaders and the transatlantic establishment face the reckoning with history that had been avoided for 80 years. For the first time, Europe faces the prospect of managing its security affairs on its own – and it is manifestly not ready for it.

The countries of the EU and European NATO have a colossal demographic, economic, and financial predominance over ‘the rogue Russia’. So why, then, is there an outcry about an ‘existential threat’ to the Baltic states, Poland, and perhaps others? Can Putin’s armies really be compared to the Wehrmacht and the Red Army? In my view, the exaggerated fears of the external threat are rooted in the unspoken assumption of weakness. In the decades after the end of the Cold War, most European powers lost their martial culture and relied totally on US power and protection. Over 20 years ago Donald Rumsfeld, then US Secretary of Defense, scandalised European allies by telling them that they were ‘from Venus’ while Americans were ‘from Mars’. Yet European politicians continued to operate as if common values and trade alone would protect them from the dangerous world, when Russia and China were set on paths of geopolitical aggrandisement.

The response to Trump in Europe today is an optimistic rhetoric that covers a cacophony of conflicting views and reactions. Those who say that Europe is reliving ‘Munich 1938’ vis-à-vis Putin fail to explain why such a huge entity remains pitifully unprepared to deter the aggressor on its eastern borders on its own. Even today, after three years of the war in Ukraine, European militaries admit they would not be able to perform peacekeeping functions on their own, without American military-logistical support. Indeed, one speaks about the enormous dividing line from Estonia to southern Ukraine – a gargantuan task indeed.

Von der Leyen has already said that European states are now free to build up budget deficits to boost their defence expenses. She promised that the EU would ‘move mountains’ to meet new challenges. A strong message, but it needs to be backed by political ballots. Would the German electorate agree with her? How will French, Italian, and other technocrats and militaries respond to this injunction from Brussels? Whatever happens, it is a moment of truth for the European project. If Trump continues to negotiate the peace in Ukraine directly with Putin, and possibly with the involvement Xi Jinping, this would demonstrate clearly that Europe is again an object rather than a subject of international relations.

This time it will be a fundamentally different affair than during the Cold War. Some may say that what we witness now is a provincialisation of Europe on the global map. Many in the Global South, the leadership of China, and now the US administration no longer see European security as a central issue of international relations. If European leadership fails to pass from lofty rhetoric to a prudent and practical grand strategy, their provincialisation would no longer be just rhetorical. It would become a new geopolitical reality.