First came King Abdullah of Jordan. Now British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron are slogging over to Washington to temper the passions of the man in the Oval Office.
A pattern has been set.
US President Donald Trump fires a salvo at the status quo on Palestine or Ukraine and the gatekeepers of that policy ask themselves: are Trump’s words for real? Or are these shock tactics, the opening gambit of a long period of haggling?
A Palestinian negotiator likened Trump’s tweets to guns being fired at a tribal wedding: lots of noise, some of the guests could even get injured by falling bullets, but in the long run, no serious harm done.
Is this right?
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If you believe senior Egyptian sources, Trump was “attentive and sympathetic” to the Jordanian king’s pleas and an Egyptian alternative plan to Trump’s mass population transfer is a real possibility.
If true, that scenario would lend support to the notion that Trump has spurred the Arab states into action. However, we have already seen how nothing Trump says or does with Israel is ephemeral.
A permanent effect
When offered the opportunity, his successor Joe Biden pointedly refused to reverse the “achievements” of Trump’s first term of office, be they annexation of the Golan Heights, the moving of the US embassy to Jerusalem, the Abraham Accords, or indeed sanctions on Iran.
Rather, he built on the foundations Trump laid – with disastrous consequences.
Similarly, Trump’s espousal of mass ethnic cleansing in Gaza has already had a permanent effect. It has made the mass transfer of Palestinians, once espoused by a fringe, mainstream policy in Israel, with a clear majority of Israeli Jews in favour.
This, in turn, begs the question of why any future Israeli leader would invest in talks on a Palestinian state if they believe that the conflict can be ended by shipping Palestinians out.
Transfer this dynamic to Ukraine, and a giant sinkhole has opened up under the once rock-solid foundations of the transatlantic alliance.
Not just about how to stop the war, but America’s commitment to European security. Europe finds itself with few materials to fill the gap.
Neither America under Biden, nor Europe today has a credible path to victory. After the costly failure of Ukraine’s counter-offensive in 2023, Europe has no credible strategy on how Ukraine can win back the territory it lost to Putin’s invasion.
Nor have the Western-supplied upgrades in Ukrainian firepower, the latest being permission to use long-range missiles against targets in Russia, changed the strategic course of the war.
Nor does Europe have ideas on how to stop the Russian army from gradually biting off bigger chunks of eastern Ukraine towards Pokrovsk in the north and Kupiansk in the south.
In short, there is no credible European strategy to improve Ukraine’s position at the negotiating table.
Europe’s ‘indispensable ally’
For all his blatant untruths, Trump does get some things right. “The cards” are in Putin’s hands, he declared, and in this he is right.
And, just as importantly, Europe lacks the means to oppose him. Take the idea of creating a buffer force to police a ceasefire.
To label Trump’s relationship to Putin as appeasement and to liken it to Chamberlain’s agreement with Hitler is ahistorical virtue signalling at its worst
Europe has a critical shortage of long-range munitions and mass military logistic platforms.
France’s doomed intervention in Mali in 2013 was only made possible because the US transported its military equipment and provided mid-air refuelling aircraft based in Spain to keep French fighters airborne.
“They [the Americans] are called the indispensable ally for a reason,” one European foreign minister told the FT. “We can’t run any form of complex military operation without them, or sustain even simple tasks.”
Barely had Starmer voiced the prospect of the UK leading a peacekeeping force than he was brought back to reality by Richard Dannatt, former head of the British army.
Dannatt told the BBC: “We haven’t got the numbers and we haven’t got the equipment to put a large force onto the ground for an extended period of time.” Or as Herbert McMaster, Trump’s former national security adviser, put it on Monday, “The US Marine Corps is bigger than the British army.”
There is a growing body of opinion around the Black Sea, Turkey and the southern flank of Nato that wants this war to end.
The sinkhole is not just between Washington and Berlin and Paris. It’s between the northern and southern flanks of Nato as well. Whether the shock to Europe’s defence establishment delivered by Trump’s envoys is rhetorical or real, one trend is clear.
Europe’s defence needs and America’s are sharply diverging for the first time since the end of the Second World War. “This war is far more important to Europe than it is to us,” Trump wrote. “We have a big, beautiful ocean as separation.”
To compare Volodymyr Zelensky to Winston Churchill, as the UK defence secretary John Healey did after Trump attacked the Ukrainian leader as a dictator, will not bring Ukraine’s nightmare war any quicker to a conclusion.
To label Trump’s relationship to Putin as appeasement and to liken it to Neville Chamberlain’s agreement with Hitler to annex the Sudetenland, a German-speaking region of Czechoslovakia at the Munich conference in 1938, is similarly ahistorical virtue signalling at its worst.
A convenient smokescreen
The Munich conference of 1938 has been invoked as a warning against any form of concession to an irremediably evil foe.
But it is fundamentally flawed as an analogy for the wars that develop today, or even as an accurate description of what actually happened in Munich in 1938.
Like Putin, Netanyahu establishes ‘facts on the ground’ by seizing land and holding onto it by force of arms
Munich gave the British Royal Air Force (RAF) two years to rearm, which allowed it to defeat the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain in 1940. As it was, the aerial battle was won by fine margins, and owed more to Hitler’s mistake in switching his bombers from targeting airfields to cities.
This battle, according to Andreas Hillgruber, the leading German historian of that period, was one of the turning points of the war.
Had Britain gone to war over the Sudetenland, as it did over Poland a year later, and an ill-equipped and ill-trained RAF had lost control of the skies over Britain, the outcome might have been very different.
The appeasement model of Munich makes even less sense in Ukraine, whose conflict with Russia predates Putin’s invasion in 2022 and where Nato’s eastern expansion played a vital part in turning a pro-western Russia against the West, impelling it to revert to an aggressive, religiously inspired Tsarist imperialism.
Both the Russians and Western Ukrainians played the nationalist card to disastrous effect, making war in eastern Ukraine, an ethnically and linguistically separate area, inevitable.
The Munich paradigm has only space for one aggressor, but that is not what happened in Ukraine between the fall of the Soviet Union and today. The moral certainty of the Munich paradigm is a convenient smokescreen.
Nor does it help to claim that if Putin wins in Ukraine, Moldova or Estonia are next. Putin has effectively won in Ukraine, if victory is defined as keeping the territory his forces have conquered.
Securing the borders of Eastern Europe will as much be down to diplomacy with Russia as summoning the military force to protect borders. At the moment Western Europe has neither.
Ending Israel impunity?
How does all of this affect the Middle East?
Indisputably, the lurches of US foreign policy from one administration to another affect every country that thinks US military support is baked into its relationship with Washington.
It isn’t any more. Saudi Arabia learned this hard way when Iranian-built drones attacked its oil installations, temporarily halving the output of Aramco. Trump, who was president at the time, did not react.
Any treaty signed by one US president can be overturned by his successor. This is currently thought by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump’s closest ally in the world, to be working in Israel’s favour.
Netanyahu’s boast is that he can work any US administration to his benefit. He could find envoys to “talk Democrat” when Biden was in power. And he has the financiers to channel the most extreme of policies into the empty brain of Trump and his coterie of advisers today.
Both the Zionism of the existing leadership of the Democratic Party and Trump’s use of Christian evangelism advance Israel’s implacable opposition to a Palestinian state and thus a solution to the conflict.
But Israel benefits as much from Europe’s role in this conflict. British, German and French support for an Oslo process allowed Israeli settlers to secure their grip on the Occupied West Bank for decades.
This was one of the factors that led to the Hamas attack of October 2023.
Europe trains and funds a Palestinian Authority that exists only to be the eyes and ears of Israel’s massive security operation. If any outside power worked for the occupation of lands that was as cheap and painless as possible for the occupier, it was Brussels.
Quite apart from which, Israeli Jews regard themselves as Europeans protecting Europe from Islam.
As much as the French colonists of Algeria, who declared the North African state an integral part of France, Israeli Jews cherish and nurture their links with the Jewish diaspora in Europe, without whose support Israel would not exist.
Where does Israel sit if, as Trump now claims, “a big, beautiful ocean separates America from Europe”?
It is not a question uppermost on Netanyahu’s mind. But it should be.
Europe’s nightmare
Like Trump, Netanyahu’s extremist government has courted the neofascist and traditionally antisemitic European far right, the very parties that are rocking German, French, and potentially British politics as well.
Like Trump, Netanyahu tears up agreements mid-stream, as he has done by his refusal to withdraw his forces from Lebanon, or as he is doing with the Gaza ceasefire.
Israel’s delight at changing the demographic balance of the population between the river and the sea would swiftly turn into Europe’s nightmare
Like Putin, he establishes “facts on the ground” by seizing land and holding onto it by force of arms.
If Netanyahu and Ron Dermer, now his chief negotiator in talks in Doha, succeed in their aim of “thinning” Gaza’s population out – a policy of theirs since the first days of the war in October 2023 – hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Palestinians could be heading Europe’s way.
If right-wing nationalism and immigration are the two forces fashioning the politics of every major western country, Israel’s delight at changing the demographic balance of the population between the river and the sea would swiftly turn into Europe’s nightmare.
All these factors are working against Europe’s defence and European interests. All of them threaten political and social stability in Europe.
We will see what happens in Europe if Netanyahu restarts the war in Gaza or annexes part of the West Bank. Could Israel operate with the same impunity if Europe finally joined the dots, and tempered its vital support? I doubt it.
But as a result of the beautiful ocean that has opened up between Washington and the rest of the world, this is a distinct possibility.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.