EXPERT INTERVIEWS – In its first six weeks, the new Trump administration has made statements and taken actions that suggest a profound and perhaps generational shift in American foreign policy – in particular, a willingness to break with European allies and engage with Russia. Few actions symbolize the shift more than this week's U.S. refusal to support a United Nations resolution that condemned Russia’s aggression in Ukraine and supported Ukraine’s territorial integrity; the resolution had been drafted by U.S. allies and Europe, and the U.S. rejection put it in the company of Russia, Belarus and North Korea.
To some experts, these developments suggest a re-ordering of the U.S.–European relationship, unlike any since the period that followed World War II, when the transatlantic alliance and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) were created. Others caution that for all the drama of the past several weeks, most of it has involved statements rather than concrete actions. There is still no deal or even a draft deal, for example, to end the war in Ukraine.
This week The Cipher Brief spoke with two longtime experts and analysts of the U.S.-Europe relationship – Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow and Washington Post columnist Max Boot, and Kori Schake, Director of Foreign and Defense Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. They shared their views on what the Trump administration statements and actions may portend, for the U.S. and Europe, and in particular for the critical next phase of Russia's war against Ukraine.
Boot and Schake spoke with Cipher Brief Managing Editor Tom Nagorski. Their conversations have been edited for length and clarity. You can also watch the interviews at our YouTube channel.
Cipher Brief: Do you believe that we will look back at this moment as one when the nearly eight-decade-long transatlantic alliance started to unravel?
Boot: It certainly feels like it. It's hard to know the exact significance of these events because we're still in the moment. It's an overwhelming amount of change that we're experiencing just in the last month or so. But it certainly seems like the end of the American-led world order, a testing of American alliances and relationships, the kind we've never seen since 1945. And it certainly is putting at risk the transatlantic relationship, which has been the basis of international security ever since the end of World War II.
Schake: It has the potential to be a tectonic change. But this is five weeks of mostly talking, not action. The speed of these developments has been shocking, and we’re probably not done with the shameful conceding to the aggressor of Ukraine's interests and Europe's broader security. It's genuinely shocking. I don't think any American president in the last 80 years would have thought about this conflict in the way Donald Trump is thinking about this conflict, which is completely neutral between the aggressor, Russia, and the victim, Ukraine.
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Cipher Brief: In the wake of all these developments, or as they're unfolding, we see and we hear a lot from the Europeans and their leaders – they're having meetings, they're making speeches, they're making pledges – all focused on going it alone from a security standpoint. The soon-to-be Chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz spoke after his election of moving towards “real independence” from the United States. How do you gauge the ability of the major powers in Europe to go it alone from a security standpoint?
Boot: I think it'll be very hard in the short term, because the U.S. and Europe are so closely interlinked from a security standpoint and the U.S. military remains the most powerful in the world. It'll be very hard for the Europeans to guarantee their own security, especially in the face of this growing Russian threat, without the American backstop.
I hope that the U.S. is not abandoning Europe altogether, but it's clear that Europeans are realizing they have to make provisions for their own security. You see Keir Starmer, the prime minister of the UK, talking about substantially raising UK defense spending. You're seeing across Europe increases in defense spending – it’s been going on nonstop for the last nine years, but it’s accelerating now, because of the Russian threat and with Trump in the White House.
I think you're also going to see a greater debate about independent nuclear deterrence. You're already starting to see some of that in Germany, and you've already seen some of that in South Korea. I think that's going to be a more widespread response from American allies, because they have relied on the U.S. for our nuclear umbrella for many decades, and in the current climate, they're not sure they can continue to rely on us. So it makes sense that countries would have to make provisions for their own security, and that includes the ultimate provision, nuclear deterrence. And that's not something that the U.S. has traditionally wanted to see; we have not wanted to see nuclear proliferation, but it may happen if we continue to send signals that we are not a trustworthy ally.
Schake: What our allies give us is strategic depth — the ability to see threats at a distance as they are gathering and growing in strength, and to be able to deal with them where they are growing before they become a problem for American citizens. That's an enormous advantage that the United States has had for the last 80 years.
A second major advantage is the prosperity that comes with peace in Europe. Europeans are the largest investors in the American economy, and vice versa. So our prosperity is inextricably linked to that of Europeans.
But the third thing is, these are our actual friends. These are the people who likewise constitute governments that are responsive to their people, that are respectful of human dignity and freedom. And we actually should care a lot more than President Trump is sounding like he cares about that.
Cipher Brief: How do the developments of the last couple of weeks and a potential erosion of American support impact the battlefield and the war zone from a Ukrainian standpoint?
Schake: If the United States ceases to support Ukraine's war effort, politically, economically and militarily, I do not think Ukraine will stop fighting, but they won't be able to protect their civilian populations. The air defenses that Germany and the United States are providing have been essential for the protection of Ukraine's major cities. So, there will be more Ukrainian civilian deaths, if the United States ceases to supply. And there will be a lot less Ukrainian weapons on the battlefield.
I don't think that will prevent Ukraine from continuing to fight, because they've seen what life under Russian occupation is like in the areas Russia has conquered, the deportations and the war crimes. I just don't see Ukrainians voluntarily subjecting themselves to that. What I think will happen is that you'll see either a rush to greater support from European countries, from South Korea, from Japan, from Australia, to try and get them weapons to continue to fight.
Another consequence will be that everything will get more difficult for the United States, because our European allies will be focused solely on trying to salvage their own security and protect Ukraine. And that means they will not be willing or able to help the United States for anything we're interested in doing in the world.
Boot: Even though the Europeans have committed more overall aid than the U.S., the U.S. has been the single largest donor of military aid to Ukraine, and it'll be very hard for Ukraine to survive without any contribution at all from the U.S.
I compared [in a Washington Post article] the situation in Afghanistan to the situation in Ukraine. In Afghanistan, the U.S. pulled all of our troops out pursuant to a Trump-negotiated deal. The result was a very rapid collapse of the government in Kabul, which had very little popular support and which also did not have weapons manufacturing capacity of its own.
I think the situation is quite different in Ukraine, where President Zelensky has the solid support of more than 50% of the population. And the vast majority of the people of Ukraine want to be an independent country. They don't want to be under Kremlin domination. And so they have been willing to fight for three years now, and they will, by every indication, continue to fight. And they've also built up a substantial homegrown armaments industry. So Ukraine does have some capacity to defend itself — by some estimates, they produce domestically about 40% of the weapons they need.
The Europeans also provide quite a bit of weaponry. In fact, last year, the Europeans provided more in the way of military aid than the U.S. did. And Europe has very rapidly ramped up its production of artillery shells and other vital components; I think the Europeans are expecting to produce something like 2.5 million artillery shells this year.
All of that combines to mean that Ukraine is not going to collapse within a handful of months as Afghanistan did, even if U.S. aid is cut off. But certainly, over the medium term, it's going to become a very close-run thing because Ukraine does depend on the U.S. for things like Patriot missile interceptors, which are not manufactured anywhere else. It also depends on the Starlink satellite Internet service, which could easily be cut off by Elon Musk. So there are a lot of risks and dangers here.
One wild card is the $300 billion or so in frozen Russian assets that the Europeans control. In theory, the Europeans could just turn that over to Ukraine, and perhaps that money could be used to buy weapons from the United States. These are all worst-case scenarios, but I think we need to be thinking about worst-case scenarios right now.
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Cipher Brief: Why do you think Donald Trump is doing this? Yes, he's volatile. Yes, he's unpredictable. We also know that he styles himself as a dealmaker. And he's talked a lot about wanting a Nobel Prize, whether for this or the Middle East. But there's also a lot of potential here for a really bad deal that goes south under his watch. What do you believe his game is here?
Boot: Well, I think you spelled it out. He wants to do a deal to end the Ukraine war. And quite honestly, I think everybody would love to see a deal that ends the Ukraine war — as long as it does not compromise Ukrainian sovereignty or subject Ukraine to Russian domination. Most of all, the Ukrainians want a deal to end the war because they're the ones who are suffering and dying. So, if he can actually pull off an equitable end to the war that does not undermine Ukrainian freedom or democracy, I think he deserves that Nobel Peace Prize. But we're a long way from here to there.
I have not seen strong signals from Putin that he is willing to stop his war of aggression, because he has been making some gains on the ground. And it's going to be much easier for Trump to coerce Ukraine, our ally, than it will be for him to coerce Putin, an adversarial power. What does he say or do to convince Putin to stop fighting? I think that's going to be the major challenge.
I will say that Trump is capable of walking away from a bad deal. It's not necessarily preordained that he will agree to something awful. Remember when he was negotiating with [North Korean leader] Kim Jong-un, and Kim offered a so-called denuclearization deal that didn't actually denuclearize, but would have resulted in the lifting of U.S. sanctions — this was at the Hanoi summit in 2019 — Trump walked away from the table. It wasn't a good deal and he didn't take it. So it's quite possible that he could still walk away.
Schake: To the extent there is a strategy, and I'm not persuaded that there actually is – but if I were trying to grab a strategy out of the president's actions, what I would say is that he is trying to bully the Ukrainians into making concessions that Russia would accept. The problem is, of course, I can't think of terms that any Ukrainian government, not just the Zelensky government, could offer that would slake Russia's thirst, because what Russia is fearful of, what Putin is fearful of, is positive change in Ukraine, a desire by Ukrainians for accountable government and freedom and prosperity that Vladimir Putin fears Russians will begin to demand for themselves. So what he is asking for is the extermination of Ukraine as a separate entity, as a culture, as a history, in any way distinct from Russia's.
Cipher Brief: Some have alluded to the possibility that President Trump may change his tune – that he might, for instance, veer back towards Ukraine, given that he is often volatile and unpredictable. What scenario do you foresee under which he might make a shift like that?
Boot: I think the big scenario would be if Washington and Kyiv can reach a final agreement on a minerals deal that Ukraine can live with. That will give Trump the sense that the U.S. has a financial investment in Ukraine's future, because he is obviously an extremely transactional guy. Appealing to him based on transatlantic unity or common security or the need to protect freedom and democracy, that's not going to get you very far. But if he feels like there's money to be made in it, perhaps he will see that as being something that's worth protecting.
Trump is nothing if not unpredictable. He may look like he's veering towards Russia one day, maybe the next day we'll see something else. But certainly the recent actions that we're seeing, which are calling into question U.S. backing for Ukraine, I think are very concerning. I think Ukrainians are very worried about that, and rightly so.
Schake: I think generational damage has already been done by what the president has said. He has called into question whether the United States is a reliable security partner for countries whose independence relies on that. And that's going to take a generation to rebuild, if in fact we can even rebuild it.
But statements aren't as damaging as actions. The forced surrender of Ukraine or an agreement the United States makes over Ukraine's head that surrenders its liberty, that would be devastating, and not just for Ukraine and not just for the security of Europe. Singapore's prime minister is already publicly talking about the different landscape in Asia, now that the United States is no longer a reliable security partner. So boats are rocking just from the statements.
I'm a little bit — hopeful is too strong a word — but anticipating that there won't be a Ukraine deal because Vladimir Putin won't make one. I think he actually wants the extinction of Ukraine, not just the surrender while he repairs his army to conquer it further at a later date. With tragic irony, we may be saved from the bad choices of our own government by the bad choices of one of the worst governments in the world.
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