"Sir Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz have become adept at scrambling to deal with the latest bad news from Washington. Their meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Downing Street on Monday was so hastily arranged that Mr Macron needed to be back in Paris by late afternoon to meet Croatia's prime minister, while Mr Merz was due on television for an end-of-year Q&A with the German public."
"But diplomatic improvisation alone cannot fully answer Donald Trump's structural threat to European security. The US president and his emissaries are trying to bully Mr Zelenskyy into an unjust peace deal that suits American and Russian interests. In response, the summit helped ramp up support for the use of up to 100bn in frozen Russian assets as collateral for a reparations loan to Ukraine."
"Brimming with contempt for liberal democratic values, it confirmed the Trump administration's desire to minimise security guarantees in place since the second world war, while simultaneously pressuring the EU into betraying the principles on which it was founded. This was a for the record version of the US vice-president JD Vance's mocking Munich speech last February. Passages predicting the civilisational erasure of Europe through migration and EU integration could have been written in the Kremlin, which duly noted an overlap in worldviews."
European leaders scrambled to respond to abrupt policy shifts from Washington, holding a hastily arranged meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy that highlighted constraints on practical diplomacy. The US president and his emissaries exert pressure on Ukraine to accept a peace deal that would suit American and Russian interests, reducing Ukraine's leverage. European proposals include using up to 100bn of frozen Russian assets as collateral for a reparations loan to bolster Ukraine's negotiating position. The White House's national security strategy revealed contempt for liberal democratic values and a desire to minimise postwar security guarantees, while encouraging resistance to EU integration and support for nationalist parties.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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