The outlines of U.S. President Donald Trump's plan to reach a peace deal on Ukraine may still be faint, but the fault lines between Europe and Washington are beginning to show after a week of unprecedented rhetoric directed at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Friedrich Merz, the man poised to be the next German chancellor, is openly pessimistic about the NATO alliance continuing in its current form.
"After Donald Trump's statements in the last week, it is clear that the Americans are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe," he said in televised remarks following his party's win in parliamentary elections on February 23.
"I'm very curious to see how we head toward the NATO summit at the end of June -- whether we will still be talking about NATO in its current form or whether we will have to establish an independent European defense capability much more quickly," he added.
How quickly things have changed since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. On the eve of the invasion, then-U.S. President Joe Biden warned Russia would "pay a steep price" if Russian President Vladimir Putin were to send his armored columns into Ukraine.
"You know, there are many issues that divide our nation and our world, but standing up to Russian aggression is not one of them," Biden said. "The American people are united. Europe is united. The transatlantic community is united. Our political parties in this country are united. The entire free world is united."
Those assumptions about Western unity and resolve no longer seem to hold. Russia and the United States last week initiated a first round of communication that excluded Ukraine, raising concerns that Washington and Moscow would try to hammer out some sort of deal over the heads of both the Ukrainians and their European allies.
What's more, Trump appears to have ripped up a longstanding rulebook of U.S.-Russia relations, doubling down on an attack on Zelenskyy, baselessly describing the Ukrainian president as a "dictator without elections" and suggesting that he -- not Putin -- launched Russia's war of aggression against his country.
Those statements seemed to reflect Putin's funhouse mirror of history: In a speech aired in the early morning hours of February 24, 2022, Putin made a brazen case for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by weaving half-truths, distortions, and outright lies to accuse Ukraine and the "collective West" of forcing Russia to take military action.
In some respects, we've been here before. At the 2018 Helsinki summit with Putin, Trump stoked outrage in Washington by suggesting he took the word of the Russian president over that of his own intelligence agencies, which had laid blame on Russia for meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. But the Trump administration's apparent recycling of Kremlin talking points about Ukraine seem to point to a more profound break with America's allies.
But it's unclear how much Trump's mirroring of Putin's talking points translates into actual policy. Trump's 2018 summit with Putin in Helsinki triggered outrage in Washington, with talk of capitulation and Trump's apparent acceptance at face value that Russia was innocent of election interference.
But that summit, in practice, yielded no genuine thaw in relations between Moscow and Washington. U.S-Russian relations, broadly speaking, remained at the same rock-bottom levels.
Pushback from Kyiv and other Western capitals has been intense. French President Emmanuel Macron in a question-and-answer session on social media said the war was Russia's responsibility. And Ukraine has seen an outpouring of public support from around the globe marking the third anniversary of Russia's full-scale war on Ukraine.
It remains to been seen how Trump's latest remarks about Ukraine translate into policy. But at a symbolic level, at least, the transatlantic shoulder-to-shoulder approach toward Russia is looking far less certain.
