Trump's about-face on Ukraine leaves European leaders scrambling

Impotent fury. European leaders are frothing.

U.S. President Donald Trump sparked the fury with a menu of insults and lies about Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. 

Take your pick: He is an unelected dictator. Ukraine started the bloody war with Russia. Zelenskyy had better act fast or lose his country.

"It's our security he's putting at risk," Jean-Yves Drian, a former French foreign minister, told France-Info radio, referring to Trump and Europe more broadly. "Since arriving in power, all his swipes have been aimed uniquely at the historical friends of the U.S."

Even more fury spilled onto social media from the Czech minister of the interior, Vit Rakusan; "I fear we have never been this close to Orwell's 'war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.'"

A major blow was to refuse to invite Ukraine and the Europeans to talks with Russia about Ukraine held in Saudi Arabia this week.

The Czechs have bitter experience of closed-door diplomacy. In Munich in 1938, Hitler bullied the leaders of Britain and France into agreeing to carve up Czechoslovakia, while the Czechoslovak representative was forced to sit outside in an anteroom.

"O nas, bez nas" — about us, without us. It became a Czech slogan for big-power bullying, now finding an echo in the comments of European leaders, as well as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, on Trump and the Russians.

But all this fury is impotent — and for that impotence, the Europeans must take the entire blame themselves. 

There were plenty of warnings, starting with Russian President Vladimir Putin's furious speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007. He accused the U.S. of the uncontained use of force and said NATO expansion was a serious provocation to Russia. Seven years later, his soldiers seized Crimea from Ukraine. And in 2022, he ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 

The Europeans reacted, first with sanctions, then more sanctions and, finally, money and arms. But always far less than the Ukrainians pleaded for.

Now, with Trump seemingly to side openly with Putin against Ukraine, European leaders have met again around a table in the Élysée Palace in Paris at the request of France.  

"France has said since the 1960s that Europe needs to stand on its own feet and not bow to the U.S.," Phillips P. O'Brien said in a recent podcast. He's a historian and professor of strategic studies at Saint Andrew's University in Scotland. 

"But it turns out French leaders never actually believed it, because they didn't prepare for it. Macron made a couple of speeches in the last year and a half. But they couldn't convince themselves or the rest of Europe to join them."