America walks away while Ukraine bleeds and Europe pretends nothing has changed

Trump set the tone in the morning. He complained that he was disappointed in Zelensky for not reading the latest peace proposal and hinted that Kyiv, not Moscow, was now the obstacle to peace. At the same moment inside Number Ten, European leaders were wrestling with another document, the recent strategy from Washington that quietly downgrades Europe from partner to client and treats the Ukraine war as a regional problem to be tidied away.

Europe performs unity while the floor gives way

The official summary of the Downing Street meeting was designed to reassure. Zelensky thanked the British, French and German leaders for their efforts. The British prime minister repeated that the United Kingdom would stand with Ukraine. The French and British pressed for firm security guarantees. The German chancellor reportedly expressed concern about details coming from the United States side. Then the motorcade moved on to Brussels for more statements and more photographs.

Read it against the wider context and the picture looks different. London and Paris demand guarantees they cannot deliver without United States backing. Berlin mistrusts the outlines of a process it does not control. All three know that the new United States strategy is written, that domestic patience in Washington is thin and that the real decisions will be taken there. They are actors reciting lines on a stage whose script has already been revised.

The later stops in Brussels followed the same pattern. The president of the European Commission spoke of a coalition of the willing, stronger ties than ever, and rising costs for Russia. Plans to use the revenue on frozen Russian assets were flagged as a way to increase pressure. Zelensky posted that unity between Europe, Ukraine and the United States was crucial. When a leader has to beg publicly for unity, and repeat it, it is because it is not there.

Washington has changed doctrine and written it down

The new United States strategy document is the real starting point for any serious analysis. It does three things at once.

• It removes democracy and human rights from the centre of United States foreign policy and accepts that many regimes will remain what they are.
• It reframes Europe as a region suffering civilisational erosion through immigration and weak governance, and as a bloc that must be pushed toward a different kind of leadership.
• It shifts the priority theatre away from Europe and toward China and the Indo Pacific, while demanding that allies shoulder more of the cost of their own defence.

In this view Europe is no longer the core partner in a shared project. It is an underperforming asset that consumes resources and attention which Washington believes it now needs at home and in Asia. The explicit commitment to cultivate patriotic parties inside European states is not a rhetorical accident. It signals an intention to work around existing elites, not through them.

The battlefield points in only one direction

On the ground, the logic is simple and brutal. Russia has chosen a long war of attrition. It is using its larger manpower base and industrial capacity to grind down Ukrainian forces and infrastructure. Ukraine is fighting with fewer people, fewer shells and a damaged grid. Europe is struggling to match its own promises on ammunition and air defence. None of this requires any moral assessment of Moscow. It is arithmetic.

The official rhetoric in European capitals still circles around victory for Ukraine. The capacity numbers do not. European Union plans for shell production have repeatedly slipped. Stockpiles which were never built for a long conventional war have been drawn down. The economy of key states is already under strain. At the same time, investors are quietly shifting money from Europe to the United States which offers cheaper energy and less political risk.

Put those pieces together and the outcome is hard to escape. If the war continues on its current trajectory, Ukraine will emerge with a smaller army, a damaged economy and a long front line that it cannot hold without outside funding. Russia will hold the initiative, whatever the map looks like at the margin. When negotiations finally come, that is the balance of leverage at the table.

NATO is intact on paper and oversized in reality

NATO remains the strongest military alliance in history. It also remains a structure built for a different kind of conflict. The treaty was designed for an all out confrontation with a nuclear superpower, not for a drawn out proxy war in which everyone insists that nuclear weapons must never be used.

This is why the discussion of guarantees for Ukraine keeps circling back to bilateral agreements rather than Alliance commitments. No one wants to extend an automatic mutual defence pledge to Kyiv while Russian troops are still on Ukrainian territory. The result is an awkward halfway house. Ukraine is told it is fighting for Europe, but the central instrument of European defence cannot be fully engaged on its behalf.

The new United States strategy does nothing to change the letter of the treaty, but it changes the political price that Washington is willing to pay to keep that treaty central. European leaders who talk about strategic autonomy while still assuming that the United States will do the heavy lifting are reading from an old script.

Europe has burned the bridges it now needs

There is a further problem that no one in Downing Street wanted to discuss in public. Serious diplomacy needs working channels and some base level of trust. Europe has spent the last decade eroding both with Russia. Sanctions, expulsions, frozen projects and the collapse of formats like the Normandy group have left a hollowed out landscape. The embassies that remain do not carry the weight they once did.

Now the same leaders who cheered that isolation are being told that they must help deliver a settlement. Many of them would prefer to pretend this is a technical workstream between Washington and Moscow. It is not. There will come a point when the European public sees the map, sees the terms and asks who agreed to what. At that moment leaders will face questions they cannot answer with slogans about unity.

The end of the old Atlantic story

For seventy years the Atlantic story was simple. Europe provided markets and legitimacy. The United States provided security and a narrative of shared democratic purpose. That story survived many abuses, from Vietnam to Iraq, because the basic bargain still made sense for both sides. The new strategy document marks the point at which Washington no longer believes that.

From now on Europe is one theatre among several, not the central project. The United States will invest where returns are highest. That may still include Europe when it suits, but not at the expense of domestic reconstruction or the contest with China. The language about patriotic parties and civilisational decline is not decoration. It is the ideological frame for treating the existing European order as something that can be reshaped from outside.

The reaction in European capitals is still denial. Officials insist that ties are stronger than ever. Commission statements declare that the coalition of the willing will hold. Zelensky repeats that unity is crucial. The more often that word is used, the less convincing it sounds. Unity is not a word. It is a set of aligned interests, shared costs and real capabilities. Those are not present.

What serious policy makers need to do now

A briefing for policy makers has to end with choices, not comfort.

First, European governments need to recognise that the war is moving toward a conclusion set by the balance of forces, not by their slogans. That means planning now for scenarios in which Ukrainian territory remains occupied, in which the United States pushes for a ceasefire that does not meet maximal aims, and in which Russia emerges with more leverage in the region than in 2021.

Second, they need to rebuild their own industrial and diplomatic base. That includes honest timelines for defence production rather than political targets, a realistic assessment of energy security, and a deliberate reopening of channels that can carry hard negotiations with Moscow. This will be politically costly. The alternative is to attempt serious diplomacy with theatre props instead of tools.

Third, they must stop telling their own voters that this war can be won with someone else’s money and someone else’s factories. The United States has told the truth in its own way. It will not underwrite European security at the old price. It has other priorities. That reality should have been clear years ago. Now it is printed in black and white.

Finally, Europe has to decide what it wants to be in the next twenty years. A fragmented market that follows United States and Chinese decisions. A junior partner that pays for strategies written elsewhere. Or a political actor that accepts the cost and risk of genuine autonomy. None of those options is painless. Only one treats European citizens as adults who can handle the truth.

The war in Ukraine will end on Russian terms because no one with power is prepared to pay the price to change those terms. The new United States strategy simply admits that and moves on. Europe can keep pretending that nothing has changed, or it can start to plan for the world that actually exists. The meetings in London and Brussels this week show how little time remains to choose.

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