Last Friday, U.S. President Donald J. Trump and Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky held the most amazing press conference of all time. For 30 minutes, Trump insisted on the importance of a peace deal in Ukraine and Zelensky refused to concede any concrete points that would make a peace deal possible. Tempers flared, and Trump ended the meeting by telling Zelensky that “the problem is I’ve empowered you to be a tough guy,” and that “I don’t think you’d be a tough guy without the United States.” He told Zelensky that “You don’t have the cards” and that “you’re either going to make a deal or we’re out,” in which case the Ukrainians would have to “fight it out” without U.S. support, which “I don’t think is going to be pretty.” Thereafter administration officials sent the Ukrainian delegation packing, their minerals deal unsigned, their lunch uneaten.
The exchange cast the entire European establishment into a psychiatric crisis. German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said it “took [his] breath away,” adding, absurdly, that he “would never have believed that we would ever have to defend Ukraine from the United States.” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, meanwhile, deplored this “new era of lawlessness,” emphasising that “For us, it is clear that we stand firmly by the side of sovereign and free Ukraine.” The “enemy,” she said, “sits alone in the Kremlin, not in Kyiv or Brussels. We can never accept a reversal of the roles of perpetrator and victim.” You will note that German political leaders have ceased regarding the United States – the foremost guarantor of their security – as their most central ally. Their primary loyalties have shifted to the Ukraine. More on that below.
On Sunday, Germany’s most tiresome state media talkshow host, Caren Miosga, convened an emergency meeting of very stupid people to have a sad about the breakdown in Ukraine-U.S. relations.
Our Mickey Mouse Club foreign minister Baerbock was there, and she spoke in grave tones about the immorality of it all, insisting that “we Europeans” must show “resolve” in this dark time. Claudia Major, a lunatic political scientist suffering from a surfeit of estrogen and a deficit of neural matter, deplored Trump’s “preference for Russia” and his “preference for autocracy.” She said it was outrageous that great powers like the United States and Russia could just sit at a table and “clarify the important questions” while all others have no role to play at all and are reduced to the status of mere “bargaining chips.” Perhaps if Germany had more than 150 operational main battle tanks and munitions stores to last us beyond a few days of fighting, we would not be mere bargaining chips. Instead, we have one of the world’s most expensive social welfare systems and a tumorous bureaucracy the likes of which human civilisation has never seen before. Priorities!
Major also said many other crazy things. For example, she said we have to be very clear on the importance of fighting for the Ukraine and against Russia. That means, I guess, that we will fight Russia all by ourselves if we have to. With what, is unclear. Then a vacant Baerbock said we need to find partners across the world, including the Gulf states, to ensure that Russia, China and the United States don’t just divide up the world among themselves. Apparently Baerbock has no idea that these nations, being great powers, have long since done precisely that. She furthermore explained that the United States aren’t our partner anymore, and then she also said that we have to do everything to ensure the United States continues to be our partner, among other things by explaining to the Americans that there will be “consequences” if they cease being our partner.
Such is the state of political discourse in the insane asylum known as the Federal Republic of Germany, in case you were wondering.
Also on Sunday, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer convened his farcical Ukraine Summit in London. The event had been scheduled well before Zelensky’s Oval Office beatdown, but it was an opportunity to stand strong with the black jumper man, who was apparently so traumatised by his international humiliation on Friday that he had yet to change his clothes.
At the end of it all the Eurotards and Zelensky, together with a politically disgraced Justin Trudeau and the Turkish Foreign Minister, stood impotently on a staircase for a group photo, flanked by profoundly lame “SECURING OUR FUTURE” signs. It is all about making a statement, saying the right words, and sending the right media message, here in newly independent Europe.
The sharp-eyed among you will notice German Chancellor Olaf Scholz posing in the third row – yet another clue that we have before us a deeply irrelevant moment. These people are not going to secure anybody’s future. They are just going to light a bunch of money on fire. At a press conference afterwards, they announced their pathbreaking achievements, which came primarily in the form of commitments. The Summit attendees are committed to military aid for Ukraine, they are committed to Ukrainian sovereignty, they are committed to Ukraine’s defence and they are committed to developing a cringe “coalition of the willing” to enforce any future peace agreement that Trump might hammer out without consulting them or giving the slightest shit what they think about it.
Alas, the degrees of commitment vary drastically among the parties involved. The UK and France are ready to send their soldiers to the contact line next week. Germany and Italy, not so much. The Americans were accordingly unimpressed, if slightly bemused. Afterwards, J.D. Vance gave this statement in an interview with Sean Hannity:
If you want real security guarantees, if you want to actually ensure that Vladimir Putin does not invade Ukraine again, the very best security guarantee is to give Americans economic upside in the future of Ukraine. That is a way better security guarantee than 20,000 troops from some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years
After the London Summit, Zelensky said he believed the United States would continue supplying military aid to his country, because the two countries have a “strong enough partnership.” He also said that any peace deal “is still very, very far away.” The man must have absorbed from the Eurotards in London the uncertain hope that Trump represents a passing anomaly rather than a permanent political shift, and that if we can all just hang on until 2029, a new Bidenesqsue president will take the reins and we can get back to our costly games of brinksmanship on the Eastern Front.
The problem with this thesis is that nobody is remotely sure it is true and also that 2029 is a long way off. Trump responded by saying that “This is the worst statement that could have been made by Zelenskyy,” and then he suspended all military aid to Ukraine. I guess the Ukraine and the United States do not have a “strong enough partnership” after all. The suspension will take some months to affect Ukraine’s prospects on the battlefield, but its consequences for Zelensky’s attitude have been quite immediate. The man has now decided that he is ready “to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible” and that he is also ready to “work fast to end the war” and that he is furthermore ready “to move very fast through all the next stages and to work with the US to agree on a strong final deal.” Zelensky is all about fastness now.
Eurotard-in-Chief Ursula von der Leyen responded to the American aid suspension by unveiling a five-point plan to “rearm Europe.” In the CDU they just love five-point plans. The Eurotards want to relax debt rules and incentivise member states to spend more on defence and they’re even going to set up a 150 billion-Euro fund for this purpose. Because it is the EU we are talking about, all of this is going to be extremely cumbersome, stupid, wasteful and the direct archetypal opposite of fast. Also it turns out that a great many member states don’t want Brussels to be doing this at all:
National capitals fear European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will exploit this crisis to extend Brussels’ powers to new areas and strengthen her influence vis-à-vis national governments.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, she sidelined countries to purchase vaccines on their behalf, and at the start of the war in Ukraine, she took the lead on Russia sanctions and weapons deliveries for Kyiv …
EU leaders don’t want this to happen againon a sensitive issue like defense spending.
“Defense is still very much also a national responsibility,” said a seniorEU diplomat last week explaining their country’s opposition toward an defense cash pot handled by the Commission …
Countries such as Poland and Finland in particular want to shield defense from the Commission’s attempted overreach.
“Poland has a clear idea about wanting to do this outside of the Commission,” said a second EU diplomat from another country.
They added, however, these lofty arguments are really a “fig leaf to hide more sensitive issues such as member states not wanting to have any outsider saying what you should do.”
The EU is an economic union, not a mutual defence league, and it exists in its current form only because the United States has pacified Europe. Should this pacifying force disappear, the Brussels pencil-pushers will not be able to replace it with all the billion-Euro funds in the world, because as European countries rearm and see to their own defence, they will discover that they have divergent interests. They will lose enthusiasm for paying bureaucrats in Belgium to fund the rearmament of rivals and Europe will return to the way it always was before the Americans arrived – a Continent of rivalries and shifting alliances, a Continent of nations rather than currency zones and customs spheres, but perhaps also a Continent that prefers once again to be ruled by adults rather than by the neotenous, moralising hall monitors who presently imagine themselves to be in charge.
