EXPERT INTERVIEW – As the United States makes a sudden and profound shift away from western Europe and towards Russia, global leaders, policymakers, and analysts are scrambling to understand the changes and trying to craft a response. During the past week alone, senior Trump administration officials have criticized Europe, frozen the Europeans out of talks to end the war against Ukraine, and warmed up to Russia in a variety of ways – a Trump-Putin conversation, public statements that Ukraine will not be admitted to NATO nor regain Russian occupied territory, and Trump’s own comments referring to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “a dictator” and blaming him for Russia’s war against his country.
Several Cipher Brief experts have weighed in on these tumultuous events, including former senior British Foreign Service official Nick Fishwick, who wrote a piece for us this week assessing these developments and their broader ramifications. As a follow-up to his piece, Fishwick spoke with Cipher Brief CEO Suzanne Kelly. Fishwick said that whatever the Trump administration may think, European trust of Putin is almost nonexistent, and that no U.S.-Russian peace deal will change that. “We are effectively at war with Russia,” Fishwick said of the rest of Europe, “and I don't think this deal is going to end that war."
Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity. You can watch it in full at our YouTube channel.
Kelly: I want to start out by talking about this excellent column that you wrote that's published in The Cipher Brief. The title is Trump Is Handing Europe Its Turn to Lead. You say in the piece, “If the U.S. is stepping down from Ukraine, we Europeans have to step up.” Talk to me about what that looks like for you.
Fishwick: There's two elements to it. Number one is what looks like the Trump administration saying, We want an end to the war [in Ukraine], and that means that more weight is going to have to be borne by the Europeans. Two is, can Europe respond to that implicit challenge?
I can't imagine how anybody in Europe can be surprised by what's happened. Trump was president for four years, just over four years ago. We knew what to expect and we've had lots of time to prepare for this. To be fair, some of the European reaction to the latest developments over Ukraine over the last week to 10 days suggest they actually have been thinking about this, but it should not be a great shock. You've got the U.S. taking what looks like a “We're out of here” and “We've got other strategic interests” position, which to me doesn't mean that they're going to wash their hands of Europe. I don't panic and think that they're just going to leave us and leave Russia to have a good time threatening us. I don't think it's going to be as simple as that, but it is going to be a different equation from what it was in the post-1945 days.
Then there's a big challenge for Europe, which is that we've been lucky since 1945, when NATO was formed shortly after, in that the U.S. is the bedrock of NATO. Particularly in the Cold War days, but since then as well, the U.S. has given us a kind of security reinsurance. We've been very lucky to have it with America's amazing economic and military resources. We had no reason necessarily to assume that it would be considered by every U.S. president to be in America's strategic interest to keep propping us up. And let's remember that at the same time the U.S. was providing that support for Europe, a lot of European countries weren't pulling their weight. They weren't even spending the 2% they're supposed to be spending — I think some countries even now still have not managed to hit that. So I can imagine the United States being unhappy with that.
It looks to me as if we've now got to not only think about what a post-U.S. NATO in Europe would look like, but what a different type of U.S. support for NATO in Europe would look like, and then do it. There’s evidence that some of the thinking actually has been going on in Britain, in France, in Germany, in other countries. But the tricky thing after doing the thinking and agreeing what it's going to look like — is doing it. You can't just build a defense industry or resource an army in three weeks. It does take a bit of time, and there's a slightly scary gap between what the U.S. is doing now and what the Europeans might be capable of doing to deter Russia. What is that gap going to look like and how can we make that as unthreatening to us as possible?
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Kelly: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is calling for an army of Europe. What does that mean to you and do you think it's feasible?
Fishwick: I can understand why President Zelensky, who is, I think, a fantastically admirable and brave European leader, is going to be unhappy about the way things look to be developing. But it looks to me as if what could be an acceptable, if challenging, outcome would be the Russians get what they've stolen for the time being, there's a ceasefire, and then we work to integrate Ukraine into a European defense system.
Ukraine is not going to go into NATO, but it's been made quite clear by the Russians, interestingly, that they can envisage Ukraine going into the European Union, which I thought had been a red line, but now it doesn't seem to be. But if that's not a spoiler, that's actually very encouraging as long as pro-Russian European Union states can be persuaded to let Ukraine in.
Now on the military side, we're looking at — I hope, although it will be a stretch — some European boots on the ground in Ukraine, strengthening the message to Putin that he doesn't go any further and if he does he's facing big trouble. European forces, and maybe other support for Ukraine to develop its indigenous military industrial capacity, and basically building a fortress Ukraine, so that even if Putin is tempted to push further west than the ceasefire lines are, he can't do it. It'll be too much of a risk for him. And we need something like that in the Baltics and Poland as well. Think of the parts of Europe that are most threatened by Russian unpredictability and aggression.
So somehow that deterrent line, a bit like the Warsaw Pact-NATO line before 1989, but obviously in slightly different places, has to be built and reinforced and solid. And the Russians must know it's a red line beyond which they must not go.
Kelly: We know the threat Russia is posing to Ukraine, but you've written several pieces in The Cipher Brief over the last year or so that detail why Russia is seen as a potential threat to Europe. The Baltics, which you've mentioned, there are gray-zone operations going on there all the time, efforts at disinformation, concerns about election interference in European countries. Why is Russia so concerning to European leaders?
Fishwick: I think you listed quite a lot of nasty things that they're doing. We [in Europe] are effectively at war with Russia, and I don't think this deal is going to end that war. It's not a legal war — [British Prime Minister] Keir Starmer and his predecessors did not make a formal declaration of war with Russia. But in practice, diplomatic relations are basically care and maintenance. Trade is down — there may be sanctions lifted as a result of this deal, but trade is not going to recover to where it was in the 90s, or the ‘00s, I don't think. Trust is zero. [If you ask] any Western leader or any Western person who's thought about Putin, How do they rate Putin as a trustworthy partner now compared to 20 years ago? Absolutely, incomparably lower. The [Russians] are interfering in elections. They're trying to kill people. They still have an essentially zero-sum view of European relations — I wouldn't dignify it with the term international relations — i.e. anything bad that happens to our values has got to be good for their values.
This is a dying regime at loggerheads with us and our values. I can't see that ceasing to be anything other than a conflict. I don't want that to be a military conflict, but because Russia is basically fighting these battles with us in the space of legal and constitutional freedoms, using criminal tactics to murder people, in terms of cyberattacks and cyber pressure on us, this to me amounts to not a Cold War, but a kind of non-military war. And if they want to fight it, we've got to fight back. Although it's an uncomfortable position for us now, if we're looking at an American presidency that wants to withdraw its commitments in Europe, we've got to do that. And we are capable of doing it. We're much richer than Russia. We're much more creative. We're technologically ahead of them. If we have the political willpower on a sustained basis to gear up for this conflict, we can't lose it.
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Kelly: Is Europe politically and militarily capable of building a continental army?
Fishwick: How you build an army, I don't know. Nobody's ever asked me to establish an army — that's very good news for European security. So, I don't know how you'd actually do that, and I don't know how NATO or the military related to NATO would do that.
Kelly: But do you think the political will might be there in order to do it?
Fishwick: It's never been more difficult for us. You could say that before 1989, we didn't worry about Hungary because they were on the other side and they were actually a worry for the Russians at that point. Now they're a worry for us. Slovakia is a worry for us. Potentially, electoral outcomes in other countries could be a worry for us as well, because I would never have expected 15 years ago that there'd be the degree of pro-Russian sentiment in European democracies as there is today. On the other side, elections happen, and it may well be that pro-Russian regimes in some of these countries can get democratically overthrown at the ballot box.
It could also be, I hope, that regardless of that, there is the imperative to protect the Baltic States, the imperative to protect Poland. Let's remember that if the Russians really want to threaten them, they are threatening countries that are already in NATO. That would be a pretty wacky thing to do and it would automatically trigger a response. They have that NATO umbrella. It’s a question of making sure that our own indigenous European capabilities are strong enough to make that umbrella watertight.
Kelly: The relationship between Beijing and Moscow has only gotten closer. You say in your piece, “If the deal that the U.S. does with Russia on Ukraine is a sellout of the latter – and it may not be – that is great news for China as potential leader of the new world order.” Why should the U.S. and Europe not take their eye off China in all of this?
Fishwick: I mean China is a way more powerful and interesting global power than Russia. China, as we've discussed before, it's here to stay and the West has got to think of a way of living with China. There are entirely conceivable outcomes in that, which are fine for us, fine for the Chinese people, fine for the world, fine for global trade, fine for global peace. That's entirely achievable in a way that I just can't see being achievable for the Putin regime. But it's been pretty clear that, while I don't think President Xi is noted for his sense of humor, I think he has probably been enjoying the pain that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has caused us, number one. And number two, I think he's enjoyed this moving of Russia to a state of dependency on him. I think he's enjoyed both of these things, and if he had a sense of humor, he'd be having quite a laugh about both things.
If an outcome of this illegal and bloodthirsty Russian invasion is to give Russia quite a lot of what it wants and, more importantly, in a way to signal that America's not prepared to go that far, and America is becoming an isolationist power and transactional in its approach, that's got to be good for the global power of China. I think America's got to ask itself, does it really think that it can be the same sort of hitter in global geopolitics if it takes an isolationist approach? I just don't see how it can.
I think China will assume, OK, our reading of American reactions suggests that perhaps they're not going to be quite so keen on defending Taiwan as, say, President Biden's statement suggested a couple of years ago. Perhaps Trump is completely different and they'll be quite tolerant about that, and we can keep pressing into the South China Sea. And if America is going isolationist, and all excited about tariffs and protectionists, that's going to be good news for China in terms of running a global economic system that's in their interest. So I can see lots of things that President Xi is going to think are great. I don't think it's sensible to see China as a kind of black and white bad actor, but its values are fundamentally not those of the West, and I don't like the values that President Xi has, and I think increased Chinese global influence is going to be no good for anybody. It won't be good for the U.S. and it won't be sustainable for the U.S. just to be isolationist.
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