Trumps neue Außenpolitik ist eine Schande – aber eines macht er richtig

When [Volodymyr Zelensky](https://inews.co.uk/topic/volodymyr-zelensky?ico=in-line_link) met Sir Keir Starmer and the leaders of France and Germany in Downing Street yesterday, the Trump administration’s new national security strategy will have loomed large in their conversation.

A transcript leaked last week of a call among the leaders quoted Emmanuel Macron warning Ukraine that the United States may “betray” them in talks with Russia, while Friedrich Merz told the Ukrainian leader that the Americans “are playing games with both you and us”.

The White House’s new strategy won’t have calmed those fears. Alongside [denunciations of Europe’s governments for supposedly blocking peace](https://inews.co.uk/opinion/make-no-mistake-trump-declared-war-on-europe-4085898?ico=in-line_link), and predicting that “within a few decades … certain Nato members will become majority non-European”, the paper recklessly calls into question [Nato](https://inews.co.uk/topic/nato?ico=in-line_link), the most successful and effective defensive alliance in human history, and fails to even identify the clear and present danger posed by [Russia](https://inews.co.uk/topic/russia?ico=in-line_link).

That said, the document is uncomfortably correct about one thing: the free countries of Europe continue to fail to take their own defence sufficiently seriously.

This is a long-standing American frustration, with good reason. Sure, things have improved in most (but not all) European Nato members since Donald Trump’s first-term speech in Brussels when he lambasted them for failing to meet their defence spending obligations, but the continent is still far short of being self-sufficient in security terms.

That isn’t a uniform failing. The further east you go, and the closer you get to Russia, the more urgent governments find it to rearm. Poland in particular is taking the threat of [Russian aggression](https://inews.co.uk/opinion/putin-war-threats-desperation-europe-4081484?ico=in-line_link) extremely seriously.

Overall, though, the picture is frustrating. Domestic defence manufacturing capacity continues to lag. Spending on European militaries overall, and the military aid that Ukraine desperately needs in its fight for survival, is sluggish. The only thing in plentiful supply is rhetoric about the importance of European defence – tragically, it is not backed by serious action.

Take two examples of this failure of seriousness. I’ve written before for this newspaper about the [huge opportunity presented by the hundreds of billions of dollars of frozen Russian state assets](https://inews.co.uk/opinion/in-trumps-game-of-cards-ukraine-still-has-an-ace-to-play-3589757?ico=in-line_link) held in Europe. These are under European control – a card that we, not the Americans, hold. This money could and should be deployed to support Ukraine’s survival and, in time, reconstruction.

This idea has been on the table since Vladimir Putin’s war began. It has now been discussed at the very highest levels in EU summits and beyond for much of this year. And yet still, nothing has been done.

The latest obstacle is the Prime Minister of Belgium, Bart De Wever, who claims the proposal would be “a nice idea, stealing from the bad guy to give to the good guy”, but had never been attempted before and was therefore somehow improper. Mr De Wever’s sense of propriety appears to outweigh his concern about what would happen if Russia prevails in the greatest land war in Europe since 1945. So Europe gabs on, while Ukrainians continue to bleed and die.

Further farcical scenes can be found in the short-sighted obstructionism on display in UK-EU defence co-operation over the last year.