Is an Independent Europe post Trump possible?

Does the 'London plan' lead Europe out from the Primrose Path?

Trump and Zelensky met in the Oval Office last week. The meeting ended in rancour. The minerals agreement, for what it’s worth, was not signed. Trump made it clear that he would not support Zelensky if that simply meant Zelensky would use American support to continue the war. Trump continues to shape the rhetorical terrain to blame the war on Zelensky and Europe, and use Zelensky's alleged lack of gratitude and refusal to countenance peace as the rationale to pull American support out. A flurry of reactions across the Atlantic and amongst the commentariat has erupted alleging an ‘ambush’ or decrying Zelensky’s lack of diplomatic acumen.

We can leave the analysis of the spectacle to others. Let’s look at the wider dynamics.

The Russians have successfully destroyed the cream of western military hardware.

The Americans want out

The message from Washington is crystal clear. The Americans, under Trump, want out. They see the war in Ukraine as a lost cause, and in any case, have ‘other fish to fry’. The U.S. sees the world through great power rivalry lenses, in which its primary adversary is China. Ukraine, as proxy, is being abandoned, and the vassals discarded. Being bogged down in Europe is a distraction and a drain on resources. Obama’s pivot to Asia was a warm-up act for what Trump and his team are focused upon.

The U.S. speaks of wanting a peace in Ukraine, but in brutal Realpolitik terms, whether there’s a peace or not is largely immaterial provided that the U.S. has successfully extricated itself from the mire; and in doing so, ensures that blame is levelled at anyone else but the Trump administration. Biden is blamed for his incompetence. Zelensky is now positioned as the ungrateful fall guy, having squandered military support and financial largesse. The U.S. is ultimately indifferent to whether there’s peace on the ground because, as it seeks to manoeuvre out of Ukraine, it tells the Europeans that they need to muscle up.

The U.S. has historical form in this modus operandi. One just needs to look at the experiences of Vietnam and Afghanistan to see the contours of this pattern of foreign policy.

Repeating Pattern

The United States’ military involvements in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine share common threads that can be traced to strategic missteps, miscalculations, and the eventual unraveling of the U.S.’s aspirations in each region. Donald Trump’s efforts to extricate the U.S. from the ongoing war in Ukraine, while seeking to avoid blame, resonate with the U.S. experience in both Vietnam and Afghanistan. The three cases reveal recurring patterns of hubris, military overreach, and attempts to pivot away from failure without accepting responsibility.

Preparing to depart Saigon.

The Vietnam Parallel: Strategic Missteps and Blame-Shifting

The Vietnam War, often cited as a prime example of U.S. military failure, is foundational in understanding the subsequent struggles in Afghanistan and Ukraine. America's deep involvement in Vietnam began under President Dwight Eisenhower and escalated through the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, before culminating in Richard Nixon’s attempts to extricate the U.S. Nixon’s “peace with honor” strategy was an effort to pull American forces out of Vietnam while avoiding the stigma of defeat. He sought to make it appear that the U.S. was leaving the region on its own terms, a narrative that would help mitigate political fallout at home.

Trump's approach to the Ukraine conflict shares some notable similarities with Nixon’s desire to end the war in Vietnam while preserving the illusion of American strength. Just as Nixon blamed the failure of the Vietnam War on previous administrations—particularly the Kennedy and Johnson administrations—Trump has sought to shift blame for the Ukraine crisis onto Joe Biden. Trump’s rhetoric suggests that the U.S. military involvement, from its early support of Ukrainian sovereignty to the current provision of military aid, is a result of misguided decisions made by others. He has repeatedly framed the war in Ukraine as a failure instigated by Biden’s policies, positioning himself as the alternative to an escalation that could lead to U.S. involvement in a broader conflict with Russia.

In both cases, there is a reluctance to acknowledge the U.S.’s role in provoking or escalating the conflict. The Pentagon Papers, released in 1971, revealed how successive administrations had manipulated public perception of the war and how they concealed the true extent of the U.S.’s involvement in Vietnam. The disillusionment with U.S. military policy in Vietnam, and the eventual withdrawal, was driven by a desire to avoid further military and political casualties, without confronting the moral and strategic failures that led to the debacle. Trump’s approach mirrors this, presenting himself as the pragmatic leader who can end conflicts, without confronting the long history of U.S. intervention in the region or the broader geopolitical consequences of such a withdrawal.

US retreats from Kabul.

Afghanistan: A Recent Echo of Vietnam's Lessons

The parallels between the situation in Ukraine and the U.S. experience in Afghanistan are perhaps even more striking. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, launched in 2001 following the 9/11 attacks, was supposed to be a swift and decisive effort to dismantle al-Qaeda and remove the Taliban from power. But, like Vietnam, the war in Afghanistan became a long, drawn-out conflict with no clear resolution. The U.S. military spent nearly two decades in Afghanistan, attempting to establish a new government while fighting a resurgent Taliban. As time wore on, the mission became increasingly unpopular both domestically and internationally.

When Trump took office, he inherited a war that had already seen a great deal of failure, but his approach to Afghanistan mirrored his political style—he promised to bring American troops home. While he initially escalated the conflict with additional forces, his later efforts to extricate the U.S. through negotiations with the Taliban signalled his desire to avoid responsibility for the war’s outcome. In 2021, under President Joe Biden, the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan took place, with the U.S. rapidly retreating and leaving behind a Taliban takeover that led to an embarrassing collapse of the Afghan government. The withdrawal was a humiliating moment for the Biden administration, but it also underscored the failure of U.S. strategy in the region.

Trump, like many before him, sought to distance himself from the failures of Afghanistan, despite his administration’s role in the peace talks and his public advocacy for a rapid exit.

Biden wanted to avoid the ignominy of being responsible for defeat in Kabul and Kiev, and extended military support sufficiently to carry the conflict well into Trump’s second term. Similar to his stance on Ukraine, Trump blamed the ultimate collapse in Afghanistan on Biden’s mishandling of the withdrawal, casting himself as the leader who could have negotiated a better deal. Much like the Vietnam experience, Trump’s political maneuvering sought to create a narrative where he was not held accountable for the longer-term implications of the war. His focus on withdrawing troops, without fully confronting the structural problems that led to failure, mirrors the strategic deficiencies of the U.S. in Vietnam.

Ukraine: Trump’s Desire for Distance

Trump’s rhetoric on Ukraine, especially regarding his role in the early stages of the war, aligns with his broader tendency to claim credit for successes and shift blame for failures. He has boasted of providing Ukraine with Javelin anti-tank missiles during his presidency, a symbolic gesture that links him to Ukrainian military preparedness. However, now that the war has proven disastrous for U.S. interests and the West, Trump’s posture is one of detachment. He presents the situation in Ukraine as a miscalculation by Biden, framing the issue as one that could have been avoided had Trump remained in office.

In this way, Trump echoes the behavior of past administrations, particularly in their attempts to abandon responsibility for prolonged military entanglements. Much like the Nixon administration, which sought to secure a soft exit from Vietnam without accepting the full consequences of its actions, Trump’s statements about Ukraine reflect a desire to salvage his political image without confronting the moral and strategic blunders that have led to the current crisis. The parallels with Vietnam and Afghanistan are clear—Trump’s desire to extricate the U.S. from a foreign conflict while avoiding personal or political accountability mirrors the strategic retreat seen in these earlier wars.

In each of these conflicts—Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Ukraine—the U.S. faced the consequences of military overreach, poorly defined objectives, and an inability to extricate itself from entrenched geopolitical struggles. The efforts of Trump to distance himself from the failures in Ukraine reflect a pattern seen in previous U.S. military disasters. Like Nixon’s attempts to distance himself from Vietnam’s collapse and Trump’s approach to Afghanistan, the current moment in Ukraine reveals the difficulty of withdrawing from a conflict that the U.S. played a significant role in inflaming.

That’s the difficulty of accepting defeat with honour.

Ultimately, the American experience in these three conflicts underscores the complexity of interventionist foreign policy and the challenges of navigating the political fallout when those interventions fail. This is an American pattern, as ably described by scholars such as Monica Duffy Toft and Sidita Kushi in their 2023 book, Dying by the Sword, in which they describe America as a “nation addicted to military intervention". Trump’s efforts to extricate the U.S. from the Ukraine conflict, while blaming others, are just the latest chapter in a long history of U.S. military misadventures and strategic miscalculations, which have resulted in death and destruction in other countries. This is a recurring American pattern.

European leaders met in London to agree an alternative Ukraine peace proposal.

Europe Responds

The Europeans (or at least 18 of them) have now convened in London, a couple of days after the Oval Office blowup. They agreed to their own proposal for a ‘peace settlement’, which includes four key points:

• Europe will keep the military aid flowing to Ukraine and increase economic pressure on Russia;

• Any future settlement must include Ukraine at the negotiation table, whereby Ukrainian sovereignty and security are paramount;

• Ukraine’s defence capacity will be boosted (by the Europeans) so as to deter future Russian aggression and invasion and; and

• The UK and others will commit troops on the ground and planes in the air to secure the peace, provided that there is strong US backing for this.

Much of this resembles a broken record, almost as if the messages emanating from Washington have had no impact whatsoever. Without America’s ‘strong backing’ none of this is meaningful over the medium term. This goes to the heart of the European response, which in essence aims to prolong the war in the hope that somehow Ukraine’s negotiation position improves.

Battle Lost

Trump knows a loss when he sees it. It’s one of the reasons he is exiting post haste. The Europeans appear to be committed to a strategic approach described by Einstein as the definition of insanity: persisting in doing the same thing over and over again, hoping that somehow things will be different the next time around. The war in Ukraine has been a military disaster. It is lost. Russia is now in a position where its capacity to wage a modern-day war of attrition is unassailable. The collective west - and that includes the Americans, who’ve supplied abundant hardware, intelligence support, training and doctrine knowhow - has been defeated.

The economic war against Russia only strengthened the Russian economy, while causing economic havoc across Europe and to a lesser extent the U.S. More of the same, after levelling the most extensive sanctions campaign against Russia, is unlikely to make a dent in the Russian economy.

The Europeans are proposing to continue to provide Ukraine with armaments, when the evidence is clear that this does not and cannot deliver on the stated aims of turning or at the very least, stemming the tide. Europe will barely be able to defend itself. Its own defence industrial base is fragmented, and capacity chronically limited. And Europe won’t be able to rely on the U.S. whose own limited production capacity will be directed elsewhere. The UK’s own army would be exhausted within six months in the face of a major conflict, admitted a defence minister.

The effect of Europe’s agreed 4-point proposal is that the war on the ground will be prolonged for a while yet. On the face of it, this runs contrary to Trump’s stated aims. At a level of rhetorical positioning at the very least, this leaves Trump with little room to move to accede to any of the other proposals being advanced by the Europeans, the principal one of which is US ‘backing’ for European ‘boots on the ground’.

But Trump won’t be particularly detained by this European proposition. Whether the war is prolonged or not is immaterial provided that the US isn’t blamed for the ongoing debacle. Trump’s mind seems to be well and truly made up; the US have written Ukraine off as a bad experience and are turning their attention and resources elsewhere. Trump needs to get out sooner rather than later, because the longer the Americans remain ensnared the more likely they are to be held responsible, in part at least, for the debacle. In any case, Trump is constrained by a domestic electoral timetable, which sees mid-term elections in 2 years at which his majority in Congress would be again at risk.

If the Europeans keep fighting Russia, then so be it.

Boosting Deterrence

The Europeans propose to boost Ukrainian deterrence capacity for the future. Clearly, their memories are short. The western powers spent the best part of the years since 2014 building up the Armed Forces of Ukraine to be Europe’s largest land army. None of this deterred Russia. In fact, arguably, it provoked Russia. Talk of Ukrainian membership of NATO as the principal deterrence mechanism would only add fuel to the fire; after all, this is one of the root causes of the conflict as far as the Russians are concerned.

In any case, the Europeans are in no state materially to deliver on such ‘deterrence’ promises, even if one took at face value the potential deterrence capabilities of doing so. The Russians have made it clear that one of their objectives of the Special Military Operation is to demilitarise Ukraine; the initialed Istanbul Accord spoke of a Ukrainian defence force reduced to a cap of about 85,000 troops with missile systems that could deliver no more than 40km. When the Europeans talk of boosting Ukrainian deterrence as part of a peace settlement, they are clearly detached from these realities. The Russians have no need to accede to any watering down of their principal objectives, given the state of the war on the ground.

If the Europeans and Ukrainians aren’t ready for peace negotiations, the Russians will fight on.

Foreign troops?

Lastly, the Europeans speak of UK and European troops on the ground and planes in the air securing the peace, in reference to some notion of a peace keeping force. There are two principal reasons why this simply won’t fly, notwithstanding the Europeans’ lack of material capabilities as noted.

Firstly, the Russians have made it clear that they will not agree to any foreign troops in Ukraine. Any peace keeping force that complies with international law would need to be sanctioned by the UN Security Council. There, Russia holds a veto right. Second, the European proposal presupposes strong American ‘backing’. Words like ‘backstop’ have been used, and over the past week or so, French President Macron and UK Prime Minister Starmer have variously tried to cajole the Americans into offering this kind of backstop. Trump has so far deftly demurred. Without American guarantees, it’s highly unlikely the Europeans will send any of their own troops to the front line.

Unless Trump changes his mind, there will be no American-backed security guarantee, regardless of whose troops are on the ground, and whose planes are in the air. Recall Hegseth’s words at the pre-Munich Security Conference gathering in which he made clear that any European forces committed to Ukraine would be done so in their own name, and not under the banner of NATO. Put plainly, the US will not - de facto or de jure - offer any ‘backstop’ to the Europeans should they seek to go down this path. There will be no ‘Article 5’ protection.

Much of the European plan is a non-starter.

Effects and Outlook

Short Term

As things stand, the state of play looks defined by (a) a clear desire by the Americans to cut and run, and (b) by the Europeans to prolong the war and keep the Americans entangled in Ukraine, even if only by way of a ‘backstop’.

The Americans are unlikely to change course; their priorities are China and what the Europeans end up doing will ultimately be a matter for the Europeans. If the war is prolonged, the US is unlikely to care that much. Rhetorically, it can talk about how it tried to bring peace but Zelensky and the Europeans weren’t ready for it. In practical terms, if the Russians continue to be engaged in a war, absorbing resources, then so be it. Whether this is an intentional ‘division of labour’ plan is immaterial, when the effect is just that: the Europeans will keep the Russians occupied, and the Americans can turn their attention to China.

None of this helps in securing a lasting peace, certainly not in the short term. Whatever agreement the Americans reach with the Russians, if any, won’t mean much ‘on the ground’ as far as the war is concerned, without the Europeans and the Ukrainians being willing to also accept terms. Any peace settlement would require agreements with both the Americans and NATO and Ukraine. An agreement with the Americans but not with NATO, and without buy-in from the Ukrainians, is insufficient to achieve a settlement of the root causes of the conflict, as far as the Russians are concerned.

If the American path is clear, and its objectives clearer still, the problem for the Europeans is that their proposed course of action is unlikely to bear fruit. At some point in the not too distant future, more and more of Ukraine will be taken by Russia. The resolution of the conflict, to the extent that root causes can be addressed, will only come after a further period of warfare. For now, the European path is a recipe for more bloodshed. Is this another six months? Twelve months? Two years? Or is this being set up as a ‘forever war’, but with the Europeans footing the bill?

Prolonging the Ukraine war won’t help address de-industrialisation in Europe.

Medium Term

Trump clearly wants to withdraw the U.S. from Ukraine. It’s less clear whether over the medium term he sees the U.S. fully extricated from Europe or not. For now, whatever disdain he has for both, he more than likely sees the EU and NATO as useful vassals provided that they foot the bill. Trump doesn't really care what happens to Ukraine now, whatever he may say in public. He now has every reason to abandon it and plausibly justify it. The spectacle in the Oval Office is sufficient.

The balancing act challenge for the Europeans is to do enough to keep Trump ensnared in Europe while they begin to build up their own capabilities to 'go it alone'. They’re trying that now, but Trump is wise to this objective, so won’t be easily cornered. We have seen this already, as he dealt with Macron and Starmer with short shrift. However, without making a clean break with the Americans the Europeans are at risk of being permanent vassals with a security master whose commitment to unconditional support has wavered.

The Europeans need to prepare for a post-Trump world.

At some point, Europe will need to resolve the Ukraine war, and that means entering an agreement with Russia, despite not wanting to. Ukraine will have to accept this as well. At the same time, Europe - if it can be described in singular terms at all - will need to reconfigure its overall sense of its own geo-economic future not as a ‘fag end’ of a transatlantic power, but as an enduring bulwark of a Eurasian economic mass.

To do this, European powers will need to address three core barriers:

1. The longstanding and chronic Russophobia must be addressed. Without doing so, it will be hard to deal sensibly with geographic realities. Russia is a neighbour, the Americans are not;

2. Military realities trump morality aggrandisement. The bitter pill of defeat will need to be swallowed. This may be hard, but look no further than Trump for lessons in how this can be done; and

3. Longstanding Eurocentric primacy as a civilisation disposition needs to be addressed, so that Europe can address the conditions needed for its economic revitalisation. This means coming to terms with the rise of Asia, and China principally, and embracing the opportunities this brings. The U.S. has no interest in bolstering the Eurozone; for Trump, the EU was created to ‘screw over’ the U.S.. Trump’s America will continue to strip-mine European industry and labour markets for successful companies and talented people. Vance’s speech at the Munich conference was a clear shot across the bow. The 25% tariffs are clearly aimed at hastening the hollowing out of European industry, even as Europe prepares to retaliate.

These are major burdens that constrain the present ‘agency envelope’, limiting the field of possibilities for Europe as a whole, and for European nations individually. Those that succeed in addressing these barriers are likely to, at the very least, expand the array of policy options available to them. Those that don’t will be marooned in fighting a war that is debilitating and which, ultimately, drains the economic lifeblood from western Europe.

An independent Europe post Trump is possible. The path laid out in London is unlikely to lead there.