Donald Trump is becoming the greatest unifier of Europe since the end of the cold war.
Donald Trump is becoming the greatest unifier of Europe since the end of the cold war.
By Fabrizio Tassinari/The Guardian
Wed 20 Aug 2025 00.00 EDT
The US president may be helping Putin to destroy the west, but his vanity is causing Europeans to speak with one voice on Ukraine
Seven is a biblical number, a number dear to ancient Rome, and the number of Cristiano Ronaldo’s lucky jersey. Perhaps it is also now going to be the answer to Henry Kissinger’s (probably apocryphal) question: what number do I call when I want to talk to Europe? Maybe the answer is seven, like the number of leaders sitting at the table in Washington on Monday alongside Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
It’s difficult to say at this stage whether anything good will come from the impromptu White House summit, but European leaders showing up as a group in support of Ukraine was a first. This seven-member format – Nato, the European Commission, France, Germany, the UK, Italy and Finland – truly spoke with one voice. They did so on a crisis, Ukraine, over which they have sometimes been bitterly divided throughout the past three and a half years (remember Emmanuel Macron’s early concern not to “humiliate” Vladimir Putin?). Yet Ukraine is also the dossier over which European leaders have converged and yielded the greatest impact during the same timeframe: from the 18 sanctions packages the EU has imposed on Russia and the opening of EU accession negotiations for Ukraine, to the supply of weapons to Kyiv.
In Washington, we saw a rare and unprecedented yet admirably balanced European ensemble: countries from northern and southern Europe, large and small, two nuclear powers and permanent members of the UN security council, the two institutions headquartered in Brussels but often appearing to inhabit two different planets; and the UK, perfectly in tune with European positions, despite having withdrawn from its core political entity.
For those like myself who have followed the chimera that is European foreign and security policy for years, it was almost an epiphany to witness these seven leaders, each speaking for two minutes, repeating the exact same message. To be sure, they had nuances as varied as their English-language accents. Macron and his German counterpart, Friedrich Merz, insisted on a ceasefire, while Italy’s Giorgia Meloni claimed ownership of the proposal for possible military protection of Ukraine modelled on Nato’s article 5. Yet everyone agreed on the need for iron-clad security guarantees for Kyiv, keeping the transatlantic front united and the imperative of a just and lasting peace.
As always, it took a crisis to jolt Europeans out of their inertia. The immediate one began last Friday with the shameful summit in Alaska between Trump and Putin. Trump alarmingly reneged on threats and ultimatums to Russia and instead rolled out the red carpet for the Russian dictator, for reasons we may never fully understand. It continued over the weekend with the real risk that Zelenskyy could once again be the victim of an Oval Office ambush.
European leaders behave like supplicants to an almighty Trump. Putin just sees him as a protege.
Paradoxically, we must thank Trump’s vanity, disloyalty, his disdain for liberal and democratic ideals, his cynicism, for giving Europeans the urgent signal they needed to dash to the table in Washington. Trump may be destroying what remains of the west; but together with Putin he is unwittingly proving himself to be Europe’s “other”, that is, the external force that is shaping its collective identity, and thus the greatest unifier of Europe since the end of the cold war.
The key question, of course, is where all this shuttle diplomacy leaves Ukraine. For good and bad, a momentum is building towards a concrete peace framework – albeit without a ceasefire, in a clear nod to Russia’s demands. The contours of this deal would involve territorial concessions in the four regions of eastern Ukraine illegally annexed by Russia in 2022. These were ominously displayed in the Monday meeting by Trump himself on a custom-made board map. The more Ukraine and the Europeans converge on the inevitability of land concessions, the more they emphasise the need for the US to provide “security guarantees”, in effect a collective defence assurance, backed by military assistance, akin to Nato’s mutual defence pledge. In the now typical Trumpian transatlantic fashion, Europe would have to pay for these. All of this, as well as longstanding Russian demands for a future new security architecture in Europe, would be the object of the much-touted direct trilateral summit between Trump, Zelenskyy and Putin.
Finland’s president, Alexander Stubb, one of the summit seven, has a maxim about how Europe works which he likes to repeat: “First there’s a crisis, then there’s chaos. And in the end, you arrive at a suboptimal solution.” One must hope that this time Stubb is wrong: the formulas being discussed now are born out of a tragedy and may well be suboptimal. But the stakes have rarely been higher: the consequences for all of Europe if these talks are followed by chaos could be devastating.
Fabrizio Tassinari is executive director of the School of Transnational Governance at the European University Institute in Florence.
By Fabrizio Tassinari/The Guardian
Wed 20 Aug 2025 00.00 EDT
The US president may be helping Putin to destroy the west, but his vanity is causing Europeans to speak with one voice on Ukraine
Seven is a biblical number, a number dear to ancient Rome, and the number of Cristiano Ronaldo’s lucky jersey. Perhaps it is also now going to be the answer to Henry Kissinger’s (probably apocryphal) question: what number do I call when I want to talk to Europe? Maybe the answer is seven, like the number of leaders sitting at the table in Washington on Monday alongside Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
It’s difficult to say at this stage whether anything good will come from the impromptu White House summit, but European leaders showing up as a group in support of Ukraine was a first. This seven-member format – Nato, the European Commission, France, Germany, the UK, Italy and Finland – truly spoke with one voice. They did so on a crisis, Ukraine, over which they have sometimes been bitterly divided throughout the past three and a half years (remember Emmanuel Macron’s early concern not to “humiliate” Vladimir Putin?). Yet Ukraine is also the dossier over which European leaders have converged and yielded the greatest impact during the same timeframe: from the 18 sanctions packages the EU has imposed on Russia and the opening of EU accession negotiations for Ukraine, to the supply of weapons to Kyiv.
In Washington, we saw a rare and unprecedented yet admirably balanced European ensemble: countries from northern and southern Europe, large and small, two nuclear powers and permanent members of the UN security council, the two institutions headquartered in Brussels but often appearing to inhabit two different planets; and the UK, perfectly in tune with European positions, despite having withdrawn from its core political entity.
For those like myself who have followed the chimera that is European foreign and security policy for years, it was almost an epiphany to witness these seven leaders, each speaking for two minutes, repeating the exact same message. To be sure, they had nuances as varied as their English-language accents. Macron and his German counterpart, Friedrich Merz, insisted on a ceasefire, while Italy’s Giorgia Meloni claimed ownership of the proposal for possible military protection of Ukraine modelled on Nato’s article 5. Yet everyone agreed on the need for iron-clad security guarantees for Kyiv, keeping the transatlantic front united and the imperative of a just and lasting peace.
As always, it took a crisis to jolt Europeans out of their inertia. The immediate one began last Friday with the shameful summit in Alaska between Trump and Putin. Trump alarmingly reneged on threats and ultimatums to Russia and instead rolled out the red carpet for the Russian dictator, for reasons we may never fully understand. It continued over the weekend with the real risk that Zelenskyy could once again be the victim of an Oval Office ambush.
European leaders behave like supplicants to an almighty Trump. Putin just sees him as a protege.
Paradoxically, we must thank Trump’s vanity, disloyalty, his disdain for liberal and democratic ideals, his cynicism, for giving Europeans the urgent signal they needed to dash to the table in Washington. Trump may be destroying what remains of the west; but together with Putin he is unwittingly proving himself to be Europe’s “other”, that is, the external force that is shaping its collective identity, and thus the greatest unifier of Europe since the end of the cold war.
The key question, of course, is where all this shuttle diplomacy leaves Ukraine. For good and bad, a momentum is building towards a concrete peace framework – albeit without a ceasefire, in a clear nod to Russia’s demands. The contours of this deal would involve territorial concessions in the four regions of eastern Ukraine illegally annexed by Russia in 2022. These were ominously displayed in the Monday meeting by Trump himself on a custom-made board map. The more Ukraine and the Europeans converge on the inevitability of land concessions, the more they emphasise the need for the US to provide “security guarantees”, in effect a collective defence assurance, backed by military assistance, akin to Nato’s mutual defence pledge. In the now typical Trumpian transatlantic fashion, Europe would have to pay for these. All of this, as well as longstanding Russian demands for a future new security architecture in Europe, would be the object of the much-touted direct trilateral summit between Trump, Zelenskyy and Putin.
Finland’s president, Alexander Stubb, one of the summit seven, has a maxim about how Europe works which he likes to repeat: “First there’s a crisis, then there’s chaos. And in the end, you arrive at a suboptimal solution.” One must hope that this time Stubb is wrong: the formulas being discussed now are born out of a tragedy and may well be suboptimal. But the stakes have rarely been higher: the consequences for all of Europe if these talks are followed by chaos could be devastating.
Fabrizio Tassinari is executive director of the School of Transnational Governance at the European University Institute in Florence.
