Trump meets Putin | Europe's Ukraine calculations

While Merz assessed the talks with a positive outlook, nothing can disguise the obvious lack of transatlantic coordination. And the fundamental differences between Trumpist foreign policy and the interests of the EU governments are even more significant. While the US government no longer shows any interest in the war in Ukraine, European governments view it as a war for the future of the continent. Making matters worse for them is the fact that US foreign policy vacillates between the option of a "Europeanization" of the war – in which EU governments are allowed and expected to buy weapons for Ukraine from the US – and a rapid end to the war with major concessions to Russia.

Europe's constant reference to international law is not idealistic, but interest-driven.

The emerging option of a "territorial swap" is not only exacerbating tensions between European states and the US in principle, because it threatens to be negotiated over the heads of Ukraine and Europe. A "territorial swap" would also have material consequences: From the US perspective, it would most likely mean that Russia would have to surrender parts of its conquered territory in order to retain other conquered territory. From the perspective of EU governments, this would constitute far more than a violation of Ukraine's territorial sovereignty. A shift in borders represents the de jure legitimization of a serious breach of international law that directly affects the order on the continent.

In contrast to the global power USA, which under Trump sees a regulated world order as a restriction of its own ability to act, the sovereignty of the EU members in the international system of states is essentially based on this order . European integration had developed over decades in a complementary way to US hegemony and its institutional system; this also applies to the economic and trade order. A globalization process secured by and with the USA, including a multilaterally anchored world trade order, created the conditions for European export success and for the EU's economic and political weight on a global scale. The transatlantic alliance and its security multilateralism were always one of several pillars of US hegemony, in which the EU states played a subordinate but nevertheless privileged role. These pillars are now collapsing one by one, without the EU having the capacity to establish its own multilateral order on a global scale. That is why the EU has a more normative-institutionalist view of the order in Europe – as the weaker actor, it needs such an order more than the USA.

A peace agreement negotiated between the US and Russia that legalizes border shifts based on a violation of the UN Charter would therefore strike Europe to the core. This would amount to legalizing the violation of an order that the US itself cannot guarantee. Therefore, the constant European reference to international law is not idealistic, but rather driven by its own interests. While EU states are now arming for conventional wars and no longer primarily for overseas deployments, it will take time before this can materialize in terms of power politics. Added to this is the fact that the confrontational US customs policy has undermined the export model of important European states and thus very directly undermined the material and economic foundations of potential European power.

These interrelationships between normative principles of international law and the concrete European interest in more multilateralism in the Western camp lie at the heart of the transatlantic crisis, which is evident in many areas – from global trade to the war in Ukraine. The EU faces the choice of either normatively defending an order that it cannot itself guarantee or maintaining good relations with a hegemon that itself does not want to guarantee the order and whose loyalty to Europe is questionable.

The US, on the other hand, has acted in recent weeks confident that it has now found a powerful lever against Russia: its tariff power, which is intended to exert effective pressure on its allies. However, it is questionable whether this US calculation will pay off. Trump has since qualified his tariff threats against Russian trading partners. The unrelated punitive tariffs against China have also been postponed for another 90 days – while the EU only concluded an extremely poor tariff deal with the US in July.

However, the EU's capacity to support Ukraine should not be underestimated: Europe's cumulative arms procurement, at €35.1 billion, has now surpassed that of the US by €4.4 billion. After US military aid was put on hold for months from late summer 2023 due to the Republican blockade in the House of Representatives, there was speculation about a collapse of Ukraine – but this did not materialize. Ukraine has also so far survived the withholding of US military aid after the Trump administration took office. By steadily expanding military support for Ukraine, EU governments are trying to put Kyiv in a position to avoid having to sign every agreement with Russia. In doing so, they are also strengthening their own weight vis-à-vis the US.