Europe’s Trump dilemma


US President Donald Trump has announced that he intends to talk “peace in Ukraine” with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin at a possible meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The two leaders’ encounter may yield some results – or prove an utter flop, as did their summit in Helsinki in 2018.

But what matters is that Trump’s bombshell of an announcement supercharged a conversation in Europe about what to do with an increasingly untrustworthy ally. The fact that an American president could contemplate, let alone affect, a grand geopolitical bargain in Europe over the heads of the Europeans has sent shivers down the spines of many, as has the prospect of being left alone to handle a hostile and aggressive Russia.

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Discussions on how to respond to this predicament seem to have split into two lines of thinking.

One posits that the only realistic option is to hug the United States ever tighter in the hope that strategic withdrawal never takes place. That implies ignoring Trump’s rhetorical antics and, if need be, pandering to his Siberia-sized ego and meeting some of the demands he makes.