I recently returned from Europe, where I met with political leaders, diplomats, military members, and civil society leaders as part of a Council on Foreign Relations trip on NATO and the transatlantic alliance. The trip could not have been more timely. Ukraine is losing its valiant war with Russia, Europe is on the brink of despair, and Donald Trump’s inauguration is weeks away.
Everywhere I went, there was deep concern about what Trump’s off-the-leash second term means for Ukraine as an independent state, NATO, and the broader transatlantic relationship.
Trump blithely says he can end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. Transactional, he salivates to return from a Putin summit with a deal, his favorite word. Instead of Peace with Honor, the 1973 Richard Nixon bromide about Vietnam, it might end up being “Peace in our time,” Neville Chamberlain’s slogan after the 1938 Munich agreement, which, far from ending the conflict in Europe, ushered in World War II a year later.
No one, of course, knows what the Mar-a-Lago Metternich has in mind by a deal, but one can guess this means he gets Putin to agree to a cease-fire and beats up on Zelensky to sign on to wherever the borders are that day. Good luck. Security and economic guarantees cannot be a part of the package since Putin would never agree to allow Ukraine to join NATO. And Trump rightfully would never commit to a bilateral U.S. guarantee of Ukraine’s security.
After Munich, Winston Churchill famously said, “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.” Will Putin’s next move be on Moldova and then, at some point, if he’s convinced Trump has neutered NATO, even Poland? The outlook is a gathering storm like the 1930s.
Allies conclude that a hasty deal is a respite, allowing Russia time to regroup and attack Ukraine as Putin did in 2014 when he annexed Crimea and then waited eight years to invade Ukraine again. Barack Obama’s response and the West’s were so lax that Russia went out and tried to take the whole country in 2022. If that wasn’t bad enough. Putin has breached multiple accords with his neighbors. His word is meaningless, and Zelensky knows it.
So do the Finns, now 5.6 million strong, whose democracy has a strong military and compulsory conscription. They went to war with Russia twice in the 20th Century before joining NATO in the 21st.
Helsinki could put 900,000 highly trained soldiers in the field. My meetings there clarified that Finland is determined to contribute heavily to NATO, well in excess of the 2 percent guideline as one of its two newest members with Sweden.
Finland sees itself as threatened by Russia not only because of Ukraine but because of its geopolitical position. I spoke with brave Finnish paratroopers at a military base near the Russian border. They are prepared to respond if attacked.
Finland shares a heavily forested 833-mile border with Russia and harbors an ancestral fear of Moscow. Russia tried to annex Finland in the 19th Century, and, as noted, Finland fought twice against the Soviets in the 20th.
The Finns had maintained national readiness well before joining NATO. That it, along with the Swedes, left behind decades of neutrality to join the alliance speaks to the alarm and determination Russia’s invasion of Ukraine triggered.
Finland and Sweden’s NATO membership is valuable all around. The two countries now enjoy the protection of NATO’s security guarantee, and NATO now enjoys the aggregate strength and strategic location of its Nordic members.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Finland left conscription in place, maintained high defense spending compared to the average NATO country, and continued to prepare a national civil defense against a potential attack from the East. Its 2024 defense budget amounted to $5.8 billion or 2.33% of GDP, but it has promised to increase defense spending due to the “NATO bump.”
Finland considers itself an Arctic state, and rightfully so. Armed with state-of-the-art icebreakers, the Finnish military readies for the Arctic as the new battleground, knowing the Chinese are taking advantage of the warming of the polar icecap to establish new trade routes in the Arctic, and Putin also has designed on the frozen north.
This brings us to Poland, which, like Finland, points out that it is meeting or exceeding its NATO commitment. Warsaw is spending over 4 percent of GDP or $34.9 billion on defense, while larger, wealthier France and Germany are paying substantially less.
In Europe, Ukraine is no abstraction as it may be for some in the United States. Trump’s picks—Marco Rubio for Secretary of State and Mike Waltz for National Security Adviser—each voted in Congress against U.S. aid to Ukraine. For Europeans, the plight of Ukraine is front and center in their lives every day. Poland has borne the brunt of the influx of Ukrainian refugees and has been, all in all, quite welcoming. After the war started, there was an initial wave of several million Ukrainians crossing into Poland. Now, more than one million remain. The rest have returned home or resettled elsewhere. Poignant was the comment of a 12-year-old girl who had fled Ukraine. She said that safety means having a place to sleep, knowing where her parents were—and living under the NATO umbrella.
Rzeszów, with a population of 200,000, is the largest city in southeastern Poland and traces its origins to the Middle Ages. It had a significant Jewish quarter near the village square, which the Nazis destroyed. It has now been rebuilt.
The city is roughly 56 miles west of the Ukrainian border. Its airport is guarded by a phalanx of Patriot missiles controlled by the U.S. Army, as all military aid to Ukraine goes through Rzeszów.
Zelensky called Rzeszów the “rescuer city.” It has a modern Medevac unit to receive the Ukrainian sick and wounded who come overland through one of five border crossings.
The war wounded wait in screened cubicles to be transferred by air to hospitals in other countries.
Rzeszów has hosted upward of 100,00 Ukrainian refugees, most of whom are productively employed, contributing to the economy, and broadly accepted by the local community.
Poland is staunchly anti-Russian and pro-Ukraine. There were conflicting assessments of Russia’s staying power. Some, such as U.S. Ambassador Mark Brzezinski (the son of the late U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski) and Poland Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski (the spouse of author Anne Applebaum), now a candidate for the Polish presidency, are optimistic.
They see Moscow’s war effort could peter out within roughly a year under economic and labor constraints.
Perhaps. Other seasoned observers believe time will not work to Ukraine’s advantage, imperiling its millennia-old culture. The war is now essentially a sitzkrieg, but while previously Russia was advancing a few yards at a time each day, now the number of yards is in the hundreds. The Poles see a pressing need to keep up the flow of aid to Ukraine. Sikorski pitched for offline funds to buy urgently needed trucks to be sent to the front at $10,000 per copy.
Everyone knows that Putin only understands strength. His contempt for weakness is unparalleled. Only with a Ukrainian battlefield breakthrough can there be hope for a diplomatic solution to guarantee Ukraine’s sovereignty.
China’s support for Russia complicates matters. Moscow counts 500,000 killed or wounded in the Ukraine incursion. Their mercenaries have been supplemented by as many as 100,000 North Korean troops that Russia has hurled into the breach, whose presence on a European battlefield has caused “grave concern” among allies from Germany to Japan to Australia. We know Trump views China as a more significant adversary than Russia. That is why Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, stressed in her congratulatory call to Trump that continued support of Ukraine is necessary to push back against the Xi-Putin axis, which now includes Iran.
Ukrainians are coming to terms with being unlikely to recapture all the territory Russia has taken by military force, not just since 2014 but even since February 2022—particularly if Trump reduces or eliminates military support, as seems probable. And so, their focus is shifting to whether a shrunken Ukraine can be prosperous and secure as a smaller state and how to keep Russia from mounting another assault at a later date.
Prosperity, they believe, comes with a meaningful, fast-track process toward EU accession. We’ll see if it works this time.
The Europeans are ingenious in tailoring their message to Trump. Trump shouldn’t let Ukraine become “his Afghanistan.” After a Cold War that kept the Russians out of Western Europe from 1945 to 1991, Trump would not want to go down in history as the president who lost Europe to the Russians. We also heard the argument that a failed state in Ukraine would weaken Europe when the United States needed it to stand up to China. But will these appeals work?
On the trip’s final leg, I visited NATO Headquarters in Brussels, housed in a magnificent futuristic architectural structure.
But what would the future of the 75-year-old alliance be if the U.S. withdrew or just sewed enough doubt about Article V’s attack-on-one-is-an-attack-on-all centerpiece? We can’t know. If Trump makes a deal, will Zelensky and the Europeans accept it or meekly fall into line? NATO officials told me that Zelensky will fight to the “last broomstick” and that NATO and the Europeans would fight on, too. Zelensky recently said Russia’s war in Ukraine will end “faster” when Donald Trump takes over as president. Perhaps he was being diplomatic toward the American president who was impeached for leaning on Kyiv to prosecute Joe Biden.
With all this uncertainty coming from the election, it is no wonder Secretary of State Blinken said he is putting every dollar of aid he has in Zelensky’s hands before the first of the year. And, Biden, in a Parthian shot, just took the plunge by authorizing Ukraine to use for the first time American long-range weapons in defense of Ukrainian forces. The weapon systems, known as ATCMS, will be deployed to strike Russian and North Korean troops in the Kursk region of western Russia. It’s about time.
One thing we do know, and I couldn’t escape feeling: A storm is gathering over Europe.
