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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to These Times. I'm Tom McTae. And I'm Helen Thompson. For this episode, there's really only one subject we could possibly talk about, and that is the extraordinary events of the past week after Donald Trump announced the U.S. would begin peace talks with Russia to end the war in Ukraine.
And U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth warned Europe that America was no longer primarily focused on European security. And at the Munich Security Conference, Vice President J.D. Vance tore into the continent for its failures to get its own house in order.
In response, Emmanuel Macron called an emergency meeting of the leaders of Europe's major military powers and Keir Starmer followed the French president's earlier declaration that French troops could be deployed to Ukraine as a security force by indicating that British troops
could also be sent to the country as a guarantee against future Russian aggression. The question for this week's episode then is does President Trump's bid for peace in Ukraine mean the United States security commitment to Europe is over? From my perspective, the American troop levels on the continent are important. What happens 5 or 10 or 15 years from now is part of a larger discussion that reflects the threat level.
America's posture, our needs around the globe, but most significantly the capability of European countries to step up. And that's why our message is so stark to our European allies. Now is the time to invest because you can't make an assumption that America's presence will last forever.
Helen, there's absolutely loads that we could cover here in this episode. I mean, including much of the content of JD Vance's pretty extraordinary speech at the Munich Security Conference, which was largely directed at Germany. It seems ahead of its elections next week because.
The fact that it is tied so closely into the German elections, we're going to deal with much of that in next week's episode, which will be on the German elections, which take place on Sunday the 23rd. So in this episode, we're going to try. And in that, to try and give it some structure, we will deal with...
Eastern Europe in the first half, which is the centre of this crisis, and then what that means for Western Europe in the second half, and how to think of this moment historically. And as you sort of suggested, Helen, whether this is some major...
historical turning point if we take this story all the way back to the end of the Second World War. I mean, thinking about the last week then, I think there are these two important moments that seem to frame it. There is the Trump-Putin telephone call in which President Trump announces that peace negotiations will start immediately between the US and Russia in Saudi Arabia.
And this will happen without direct European presence. It's unclear exactly what the Ukrainian presence will be, but Trump only informed President Zelensky about this. move after the telephone call had happened. And really framing that, I think you also had
Pete Hegseth, the Defence Secretary's arrival into Europe, into Brussels, where he sets out the American policy towards Ukraine and Europe in general over the next four years. Yeah, if we just take on the Ukraine... bit first there was a reasonable amount of specificity actually in what Hegseth said and I think it could be summed up as five things the first of them was the nato membership for ukraine was entirely off the table now in one sense that's not a new position though it's clear that the
Biden administration flirted in the last months of its presidency with giving some kind of perhaps conditional commitment to Ukraine joining NATO. The second thing that Hegseth said was that...
There will be no circumstances whatsoever in which US troops could be sent to Ukraine for any reason. So whether that was obviously to participate in the war out of the question, but also for peacekeeping and that... any peace settlement that was reached would have to be covered by European, and interestingly you said, a non-European troop, but meaning...
clearly not meaning and American troops when he said non-European. The third thing was that the United States would no longer supply or pay for weapons to go to Ukraine and any future assistance for Ukraine. in military terms would have to come from european states the fourth specificity on ukraine was that ukraine would have to accept that it could not go back to the borders that it had before 2014 so that was the borders and before
russia's annexation of crimea the fifth one which is a bit more general but it obviously has crucial implications for ukraine that in order for Europeans to do what Hegseth was saying they have to do, European members of NATO would have to move to 5% of GDP going on defence spending. I think the really important thing here, Helen, is to try to place Hegseth's speech in the context of the military situation that is unfolding.
on the ground in Ukraine today. And I think this is where the peace talks are going to be. very difficult i mean when we cast our mind back to before the election president trump was talking about solving the ukraine war or ending it on day one of his presidency i mean clearly that was never going to be the case But I think we should just add a real sense of skepticism here about the likely outcome of these peace talks, because on the ground, the situation seems to be that Russia...
is making steady gains it was over the course of last year from the summer to around december it seems it's the the momentum of which he was taking territory in ukraine was increasing now that's It seems to have slowed down somewhat from December. And there are different speculations about why that is the case. Is it sort of running out of momentum at some point? Is it hitting a wall of Ukrainian defense that is harder to break?
down? Or is it something to do with manpower issues that both sides are facing? But I think the fundamental nature of the war on the ground is that the Russians are winning. This is a fundamental problem. for Donald Trump is because why would Putin agree to halt the war when he is winning? He is managing to recruit something like 30,000 Russian men a month, which is absolutely extraordinary if you think about...
the size of the British or the French or any of the European armies, the total size of the forces that are available, and you think that they are currently recruiting 30,000 men a month. These are extraordinary numbers. You add on to that the number of... was it the 10,000 North Korean soldiers that they were deployed into Kursk to try and push back the Ukrainian advance in Russia? And we should just note on that.
The Ukrainian territory, the territory that Ukraine took in Russia is currently, they're now holding something like 30% of what they took originally. So that, I think, gives you an indication. of the feeling of momentum that the Russians have. On the other side of the ledger, Ukraine has got a real problem of manpower. And this is something that the Americans and the Europeans currently cannot do anything about, that we can supply equipment to...
the Ukrainians. But currently we are not supplying, nobody is considering supplying actual fighting men on the ground in this war. We're talking about troops. after the war is finished as a security guarantee. That's very different to providing men. to fight on the ground in the war itself. So these are specific issues. Zelensky has a problem with mobilizing people under the age of 27, 25. So these are specific questions that the...
Americans are pressing Zelensky on. So if we take that as the background to the peace negotiations, it then gives you a sense of why it's going to be difficult for Trump to be able to impose a solution onto Putin. To do so, a lot of analysts seem to be saying that what he's going to need to do is, in some senses, at least threaten something he's going to have to offer an escalate to de-escalate policy now what is that going to be is it going to be sanctions is it going to be
an agreement on more weapons. He's already ruled that out. Hexeth's ruled that out in the long run. So there are sort of structural difficulties here when we think about these peace talks. I think it's quite revealing in this respect. that if you look at the official statements that came out from Putin's office after Trump made clear that this phone call had taken place, they're pretty noncommittal, even about going to the...
negotiations. I think there is a counter argument to the, let's just look at the military facts on the ground in the land war to see whether Putin's got any incentive to negotiate. And they would be that Bearden has lost quite a bit in the war in the Black Sea.
It's pretty significant. I think I've said this quite a few times, but I think it does come back to the fore now that the Russian Navy has been pushed out of Sevastopol. If that were to be the outcome of the war, the final outcome of the war. that would be a big historical moment. I mean, there's only the interlude of the Crimean War since Russia controlling that port since the end of the 18th.
century. The second thing is that the sanctions on the Russians' liquefied natural gas port in the Arctic have hit over the last few months. They were tightened, I think, from the end of sometime in late 2023. And the sanctions also on the financial sanctions on Gazprom have also hit, including the strength of the Russian currency since the last autumn. And in a different sense, I don't think it's insignificant.
that Trump's proposing that these discussions should happen in Riyadh, in Saudi Arabia. No. Because it brings the Middle East into play and we know that Russia did take a hit. We talked about it quite a bit at the end of last year in terms of its strategic position. in the Mediterranean because of the events in Syria. It's effectively, in terms of being able to keep those bases there, had to engage in probably quite complicated discussions with the Turkish.
So you could argue that there's space for the Trump administration to try to pressurize Russia in relation to the overall geopolitical picture and not... just in relation to Ukraine. Because if we think about the significance of Syria and go to the next level, power up to Iran, Iran's had a terrible 2024. And in that sense...
Iran is a less reliable partner for Russia or a less capable partner, perhaps that would be a better way of putting it, for Russia than was the case earlier. So you could argue that what... Trump is after or the people around Trump is after are after is some kind of like grand bargain that would tie the Ukrainian question to these other geopolitical questions particularly in the Middle East
Yeah, there's the Russia analyst in the United States, Michael Kaufman, was also saying that Saudi Arabia could be an interesting or an important player, I should say, in these negotiations. And perhaps that's another reason why they're happening in Saudi Arabia. to really put pressure on the Russians is to somehow be able to drive down the price of oil, which is a major source of funding for its war in Ukraine. And so the major way of doing that is to try and get the Saudi Arabians on board.
board with that. Now, I think, from my understanding, from what you've said before, Helen, that has not proven very easy for American administrations in the past to be able to get the Saudis on side on that. But perhaps having it there and having them at the table is...
an indication of what is at stake here. It's also something that I thought listening to you there is that there are other analysts that are saying that Putin might have or might feel that it is in his benefit to take a pause at this point, to have a kind of ceasefire for the moment, to regroup.
and then to go again because of some of the pressures that you mentioned and the fact that some of the momentum did slow towards the end of the year in terms of making gains in Ukraine. So perhaps he is thinking he can... use these negotiations to play for time without making any commitments that means this war is coming to an end? I think there's another way of looking at it, which would be to say that from...
Putin's point of view that the events of last week, both in the content of what was said by Trump and by Hegseth and the European reaction to J.D. Vance's speech at the Munich Security Conference. is in itself a kind of victory. Because what was put on the table by Hegseth most explicitly was the nature of the American security commitment to Europe. So if you go back and look at his general...
remarks in Brussels. He said that he was, quote, here today to directly express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe. And then... He gave two reasons why that was the case, what these stark strategic realities are. The first was that the United States, again, quoting, faces consequential threats to our homeland, meaning that it had to be focused.
on border security and second we also face a peer competitor in the communist china and the stress that china was able to threaten both the american mainland meaning tying it to the border, things we've discussed about before, and core national interests in the Indo-Pacific. So this is from Putin's point of view.
pretty welcome news because it's really questioning whether the American commitment to European security formalized via NATO exists any longer. And that's what I think the possibility... that the American security commitment no longer exists is what gives the meaning, the intense meaning, I think, to the events of last week. Now, that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist and that this is not.
or that this should be better thought of as a threat to the Europeans. Get your act in order. And if you don't get your act in order, this is what's going to happen. But it could be that actually the people who are now in power in Washington think... we can no longer have 100,000 American troops in Europe doing the things that they've been doing since the beginning of the Cold War. And that there has to be an actual shift of a significant number of those troops.
out of Europe. To me, Helen, I remember this conversation I had with a French diplomat who said to me that these warnings had been coming for a long time. But in his view, Europe would never take them seriously until a moment came. where they felt that they were real, that the Americans were just pulling out, that Europeans would not step up to the plate because they never would. There was never really the reason to do so, to make the decision to shift spending.
from whatever it may be, health care, pensions, welfare spending, to significant increases on defence, was never going to happen until... the Americans pulled out, or a moment like this. Now, I think that's where you place this in the historical context, don't you? And you suddenly think, is this that moment or not? Well, what's interesting about that, Tom, is in a way...
It clearly is because something, I think, has changed. Simply the fact that Trump is in power again and has started his presidency in the way in which he has. And part of that... is in some sense the United States becoming a revisionist power. I mean, joining China and Russia as revisionist powers. And you can see that clearly in relation to what he said about Greenland and what he said about Canada. And in that sense, when...
this message is coming about Europe, whilst that is going on, that is a moment when the world has changed. On the other hand, you could say, well, look, Europe has been here before. If we go back to 2010, so this was a moment in which European governments... almost all of them were making defense cuts in response to the 2008 crash. Then Obama's defense secretary, Robert Gates, who'd also been defense secretary under...
George Bush Jr. from 2006, said this. In the past, I've worried openly about NATO turning into a two-tiered alliance between those willing and able to pay the price and bear the burdens of alliance commitments. and those who enjoy the benefits of NATO membership but don't want to share the risks and the costs. This is no longer a hypothetical worry. We are here today and it is unacceptable. And the context for that summit in Wales with this ambition for 2%,
was Crimea, was the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014. And this really, we could say, is the beginning of... this shock that we are experiencing here in Europe today from this past week. We can think of this week as the shock, the turning point. But I think in some sense that's historically illiterate because the crisis began.
in 2014 with the annexation of territory of european territory to another country and the beginning of the war in the hansk and donetsk that is the beginning of this war i mean of course it intensified or it moved into a different phase of warfare in February 2022. But really, we have to think about this as a crisis for Europe that began in 2014, don't we?
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think that what was important about the 2014 crisis in terms of the relationship between the European states and the United States. was it showed that there was a fundamental divide in approach. And what's interesting is that in one sense, it's in geopolitical terms, the exact opposite of what was the case.
What is the case now? So the response of the Americans, the Obama administration, even more so actually the first Trump administration to the annexation of Crimea by Russia, was to provide... arms and training for Ukraine. And the response of the two principal European Union powers who were engaging with Ukraine, which interestingly wasn't. the united kingdom which was still in obviously um the european union at the time so france and germany was the minx peace process and the point of that
was that there would be essentially a political agreement to give the two breakaway provinces. And the point of that was that there would be a political settlement in the two breakaway. republics that would give them very considerable autonomy whilst remaining under ukraine's formal And I think it's fair to say that those two paths, the American response and the Franco-German response, continued all the way through to February 2022. If you look at what Macron and Schultz were doing in the...
a few weeks leading up to the invasion, they were practically begging Putin to go with Minsk II and not go with invasion. In the interim, so I think it was in October of... 2021, the Biden administration had offered a new security partnership to Ukraine. Now events have gone in the exact opposite direction because you've got an administration in Washington that's saying there is no military commitment.
from the united states any longer to supporting ukraine and the europeans saying well there has to be And if you're not going to do it, we're going to try to do it ourselves. Yeah, when you paint that image, it does really feel like we're moving into a completely new era. Because I think one way of thinking about that original period is...
America kind of hiding its leadership behind Franco-German diplomacy. It is providing a bare level of military support at that point. Again, we need to think about, I think it's Trump who begins the first lethal military. aid for Ukraine. Obama was quite cautious about how much he was prepared to give to Ukraine. He didn't want to be drawn into a conflict in Europe. And again, this is interesting to think about it in the big picture, that you have this consistent message from America.
presidents, Democratic or Republican, that they don't want to be extending their commitment into Europe. And they want Europe to play more of a leadership role in the continent by increasing the defense spending.
through NATO, but also taking the lead diplomatically. They were quite happy with the process. And it is interesting that the UK was not involved in those original negotiations. They were very much a Franco-German-led approach. But now what you have is you... almost have a kind of American reaction that none of that was enough you know that they actually were drawn in
more and more into European affairs, greater and greater commitments in terms of financial commitments to Europe at the very moment where the feeling that they have to turn towards China is becoming more and more acute. So the sort of the pressure is building, but nothing has yet changed. And the Europeans have not stepped up to the plate. And now you have this moment where Trump is coming in and it's like, it's the shock to say, right, that's enough. The cord is being cut. The crux of this now.
Tom, is the new American position under Trump coherent? Because it's one thing to say that, look, backing Ukraine militarily and hoping, as the Biden administration had done after... six or so weeks of the war that a strategic blow could be delivered to russia hasn't worked out and now the stark reality is on the ground in the big geopolitical world i don't just mean in ukraine mean that washington has to go in a different like direction but where does that leave the
American security commitment to the Eastern European members of NATO. And in a way, the Baltics are obviously important, but I think we should concentrate on Poland because I think that is the crux. And if you go back to Trump's first administration, then he was very keen, actually, on the American security commitment to Poland.
And he wanted to move American, some American troops at least, out of Germany into Poland to make Poland the front line, so to speak. And it's not, I think, coincidence that... after i think it was in this order that hegseth was in all of berlin brussels and warsaw yeah and there he lauded the poles as united states premier ally in europe now if it's the case
that the American security commitment to Europe doesn't exist any longer, where does that leave Poland? And I think we've got to think about this in two different ways. The first of them is whether there could really be
a domestic political basis in the United States for saying that we are indifferent to Poland's security. And the second of them comes from that because... the place i think that comes really sharply into focus if trump were to succeed in in bringing the ukraine war to an end at least in its current sort of phase is belarus and that is a state that is central in so many ways not just the present moment to the russian polish relationship but historically so
as well. This is territory in which the Poles and the Soviets fought over a number of times right back in the years after the First World War and then during the Second World War. And if you go back to the autumn of 2021, there was a big border crisis on the Belarus. Polish border, the Russian and the Belarusian government were essentially sending
migrants over the border. At some point last year, Donald Tusk, the Polish Prime Minister, took unilateral action, sort of effectively breaking EU rules in order to deal with what he saw as that border. problem. It's not difficult to imagine circumstances in which a crisis in Belarus leads to huge consternation in Warsaw.
about whether events there are destabilizing that border, and then what would the American position be? Is it really to say that we are indifferent? And I think that this is where the Polish question is quite different from the Baltic position. Absolutely. I think what is crucial here is the ambiguity of the moment that we're in. We don't know what...
is what is the meaning yet of what the Americans are saying and what the Europeans are working towards in response. We don't know what America's commitment to Europe is at the moment. We don't fully understand the position that... we're in and the stakes which we're talking about. And we don't know it in relation to Ukraine. So if we think about what Putin's ambitions are in Eastern Europe, they have not changed since he was setting them out in 2021.
of the invasion in 2022, they are much more extensive than control over the breakaway regions in the east of Ukraine or confirmation of his annexation of Crimea. They continue to involve the neutrality, as he would see it, of Ukraine, which effectively means not being absorbed into the Western security order. But they also involve the pushing back of NATO.
explicit about this in 2021 is the pushing back of NATO back out of Eastern Europe on the borders of Russia from the Baltics and back into its position. of the 1990s. That is the long-term strategic goal. And then you have the prospect of continuous ambiguity.
in ukraine about what is the commitment in ukraine what is what is its position after the peace talks as you say belarus absolutely crucial not just geographically in terms of its place north of Ukraine as a launching pad, as it was for invasion in 2022, but also north into the Baltics, where you have the three Baltic NATO members. Lithuania and Latvia but you have
Belarus itself as a core part of NATO war planning. And the scenario that really plays on people's minds in NATO is similar to as you have sketched out there, Helen. It's of something happening. as happened in Ukraine, where there is some kind of civil unrest, civil war, or an attempt to replace the regime, the pro-Putin regime in Belarus, where you then suddenly get, you say you get demonstrations.
like you had in Kiev, and you have the Russian army coming into Belarus, and you have all of the old issues about Poland resurfacing directly. because then you have the presence moving towards Poland in a more obvious sense, and you have these historical questions. Somebody put it to me, Poles seeing their brethren being slaughtered just across the border. And so you suddenly have a... direct sort of confrontation in terms of, as Poland sees it, America's core ally in NATO feeling...
under threat from the Russian advance into Belarus. So all of this is coming together. And I think the key point is the sense of ambiguity that will continue after this moment. But you could look at it in another way. which is that the facts on the ground, so to speak, where Poland are concerned, pull in the opposite direction to the rhetoric. Now...
The caveat to that would be that these facts on the ground, some of the more recent ones were done by the Biden administration. So to give like two examples is that the US opened a new missile base in northern Poland near the Baltic coast in November. January, I think it was actually the day after Trump was inaugurated, the US supplied the first tranche of Abrams' main battle tanks to Poland as part of an agreement that had been struck to send more military.
weapons to Poland in 2002. So what that does is it raises the stakes if they actually do mean it. and that Poland can no longer treat the United States as its ultimate military guarantor, then we really are in a completely different world than we were even now.
few weeks ago. And I think in a way, and this gets us in a way, what we can talk about in the second half, is that the question of Poland's like position in the continent has in so many ways been historically central since the Second World War. to the whole nature of the relationship between American power and the European continent and the way in which Poland's future was carved up essentially in 1945 between Roosevelt and Stalin.
Well, let's turn to that after the break, Helen, where we're going to turn to the security implications for Western Europe. No matter what happened, you deserve support. If you've ever experienced sexual violence or abuse, free specialist and confidential support is available 24-7. 0808 500 2222 or visit 247sexualabusesupport.org.uk to chat online or find out more. Delivered by Rape Crisis England and Wales. Funded by UK Government. Acast recommends.
The elevator? We're in the middle of a city whose entire population vanished without a trace. We did what had to be done. Sometimes what goes down comes back up again. Maltopia Productions presents The Gentleman from Hell. ACAST is the home of podcasting, including such shows as The Logbooks, The High Performance Podcast, and the one you're listening to right now.
Helen, one way to think about this, and we've used this term before, as events of the past week have been experienced as a shock for Western Europe, for the leaders of not just Western Europe, but leaders. of all European powers in a sense. But I think it's also been experienced as something of a humiliation in a way, because it's a form of power play here that the Trump administration is saying quite explicitly.
And in response to questions of whether the European powers will have a seat at the table in Saudi Arabia, the answer is no, the European powers will not have a seat at the table. Ukraine will have some role. It's unclear what role that will be. But the European powers, the answer is no. And this takes you back to moments in history where that was obviously explicitly the case.
particularly Yalta at the end of the Second World War, where Europe was carved up really between Roosevelt and Stalin. Now, Churchill was obviously there, but I think we can see in that particular moment that Churchill...
was the junior partner, clearly, to Roosevelt. And it was American power that was the dominant force in those discussions from a Western perspective. And I think this is an important moment just to reflect on briefly, I think, because This is not just how Donald Trump is thinking about the world in terms of nations with power, great nations being able to carve it up.
into spheres of influence, perhaps for their own benefit, that those who pay their way and have the power will get their rewards for that. And those who don't, well, then they don't get a seat at the table and they have to accept their position. But this is also what Putin has been wanting from the beginning. from 2021, when he was making his case that NATO should be withdrawing from its positions in Eastern Europe, he was saying explicitly that the negotiation should be between Russia.
and the united states because in his view the united states was the leader of the western order and this was a question of the west versus russia so it's very much In one sense, are we returning to the days of Yalta? I think that there's a lot of things that are interesting, Tom, by going back to the Yalta conference, which we should say was held in February of 19.
so in the last months of the war in Europe, that what it did was effectively to formalise a division of Europe that became the Europe of the... Cold War. That meant that the Baltic states were going to remain part of the Soviet Union after the Soviet Union had invaded them in 1939. It allowed the Soviets to keep quite a bit of pre-1939.
Poland also invaded by the Soviet Union in September of 1939. And it subjected a significant number of East European states to Soviet control. If you look at Soviet military ambitions during the Second World War in terms of... essentially eastward expansion it was only Finland that escaped in terms of being able to defend itself so in that sense the Soviet Union for all the appalling loss of life
that it suffered in relation to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, in terms of its westward expansion, was a very significant military victor in the Second World War in ways that changed the shape of... Now, you could say, well, look, it wasn't so much a carve up between Stalin and Roosevelt with Churchill as a bystander. It was a recognition of the fact.
that the war militarily had gone in the way in which it had and that the Soviet Union had military control in these places and that it's inconceivable that the United States and Britain could have fought. Another war having defeated Nazi Germany to push the Soviets back. But it's also the case that if you look at what happened during the course of the war itself, that the Roosevelt administration gave enormous support.
financial support to the Soviet Union, ways at times that were more generous than the financial support that it gave to Britain and never put any conditionality on that aid in relation to the future of Poland in particular. And it's notable that
after Roosevelt died in April 1945, and Truman came in, that he was not particularly happy about what had agreed in Yalta, but it was too late. And the next conference, which was the one in the Potsdam, That brought the Polish tragedy to the fore because...
There, the Americans recognized the pro-Soviet government in Poland and did the recognition of the Polish government and exile in London and agreed to the transfer of Konigsberg, which is now Kaliningrad, to the Soviet Union. Now, I think that what's striking about... This moment as relevant to today is not just as you said, Tom, that it's Putin who wants in a way to reinstate the altar principle, which he sees as great powers have legitimate spheres of influence.
The Soviet, now Russia, has a legitimate sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. And it is of complete irrelevance in Putin's worldview in this sense, what the sense of national identity or desire for... sovereignty of the citizens of these states are that this is a world in which great powers behave like great powers and everyone else in some sense sucks it up.
Interestingly, though, the comparison is also being made in recent weeks by the Ukrainian foreign minister, who is saying, yeah, this is the problem that Putin does want a new Yalta. He does think it's irrelevant, like whether the... citizens of the states that are subordinated to this geopolitical map, what that they think. And the problem I think then for the West European states is, are they actually any more powerful?
any more capable of resisting having somebody in Washington who thinks let's carve things up with the person in Moscow than Churchill really was in in in 1945 now again you can say well look the military facts on the ground are just not as overwhelming as they were in 1945 and so the West European states have got the capability of
pushing back against it in the interest of themselves and of the East European states than they had in 1945. But in some sense, the very fact that they are so militarily weak and have got electorates themselves that are... not used to thinking in terms of living in a militarised world and a militarised Europe hinders them.
I mean, J.D. Vance talked about this as well, didn't he? And as I said at the beginning, we'll turn to J.D. Vance's speech and its specific attack on Germany in the next election. Briefly he did talk about the fact that Germany, the one country he held up as an example of what countries should do, which is to protect their manufacturing capacity, was not using it.
or was degrading it and not using it to be able to produce weapons for Ukraine or for Europe. And that it was making the same mistakes in his view that the United States, the United Kingdom, France and others had made. and had left Europe in the position in which it was today. But I think this moment is so important because...
It's not just a question of capacity, is it? Can Western Europe replace the United States? Does it have the wealth or the manufacturing ability to do so? But whether it has the political will to do so. do that, whether it is willing to see itself.
as a as a block without the united states that can act in one way with one policy to maintain the borders that currently exist and that they are beyond question and i think when you speak to people in nato they're saying that the the importance of this moment is that it's not just what's happening
in the united states or what the united states are saying but if you just look at europe that you have you have countries across europe and in central central and eastern europe like romania czechia hungary where people are talking in ways that are much more similar to that kind of Yalta.
or even a kind of pre-Second World War mindset. They're thinking more in discussions about spheres of influence or a world in which borders kind of shift and great powers are not... one is not more moral than the other and that you just have to kind of live in a world of competing powers and competing influences and that is perhaps what you have to do and that becomes that comes into play if you believe that the American
guarantee is not permanent and you don't trust Western European countries to step into that position. I mean, that certainly is, say, the position of Viktor Orban in Hungary. You can easily see that a sort of a small... military victory for Russia in Ukraine, say, where they don't take the territory that they hope to take in Ukraine, but it has an outsized political influence because it
creates the world that Putin wants to create himself because that becomes the mindset of European states. I was struck by this one comment that a senior official said to me. So, you know, the paradigms... the way we think about geopolitics at the moment are set by the Cold War and the Second World War. And they are two wars, one hot, one cold, where the good guys won and won decisively.
But I think actually that is the crux of the problem of the misunderstanding the Europeans have of history in this moment when it comes to the Second World War. Because when they say the good guys won... They just mean that the Nazis were defeated. It completely ignores the fact that the Soviets were, not just in terms of like defending themselves, but in terms of...
taking the positions that they did in Eastern Europe. And it isn't just a question of the fact that they effectively had an empire, but that they actually shifted the entire map of Europe westwards, so to speak. that they went further, they took territory from what was pre-war Poland, and that pushed Poland further westwards. And that meant that Germany moved further westwards. That's why it was a question in 1990, when coal wanted...
German reunification about whether he was going to accept the borders, because in that sense, resolving the German question from the Second World War, it threw it. it threw it open again. And I think that's the return of history that has come to Europe of realising the historical contingency of the outcome of the Second World War in terms of where that these borders are.
including the position of Kaliningrad and Russia having this sort of enclave on the Baltic coast. And in that sense, I think that's what the whole West European mindset. has not really had to grapple with yeah for such a long time and that history is now being like forced into our faces so to speak and saying well what does it mean
when we have to recognise the historical contingency of where the borders of the independent states of Europe are. And I think that most people in Western Europe don't really want to think. about what the map of Eastern Europe looks like and what it would actually mean to say, oh, we are in a military alliance that we want to preserve, in which we are committed to the defense of the borders of the Baltic states and of...
Poland in this context. The impulse is still, and you can see that I think in the way in which Robert Harbach responded to Vance's speech, is to think that what's at issue is values. Harbach said over the weekend, in response to Vance, the Western community of values was terminated here, meaning by what Vance said in uni. But NATO was never a values-based alliance. It was a response to...
the Soviet control of Eastern Europe and the implications of that for the division of Germany into West Germany and East Germany. And I know that, as we said before, that West Germany wasn't initially in NATO, but that was what the front line of the Cold War. And I think one of the other things that comes out is that there has been in Germany at times, particularly in the last couple of decades of the Cold War, a mindset that has been a little bit sympathetic to this, okay.
is that what really matters is Germany's position and the Soviet. And if you go back to the speech that Schultz made in the days after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, you talked about this as a rupture going back to the European security. architecture of the 1970s and the Helsinki agreement. But the point about the Helsinki agreement was that it was premised on the de facto acceptance of Soviet control over Eastern Europe.
And it's these tensions between like whether West European governments and West European citizens really understand what it means to say Western European soldiers might have to die. to put it very crudely, for the independence of Poland or the Baltics at this moment completely pushes to the fore in ways I think that in part explain why the shock is as it is. I mean, my first thought, Helen, there listening to you is...
Thinking historically about NATO as an organization of values just seems bizarre when you had the dictatorships in Spain and Portugal and you also had Turkey as a member. This is just, I don't think, a sensible way of looking at it or particularly helpful. When you're thinking its primary purpose is a military alliance to contain the Soviet Union. That was the purpose of NATO. And I think in some sense it's just going back to that.
essential purpose of it is actually much more helpful when you're thinking about the Russian threat today. And if you place your mind or place yourself in the mind of Western European leaders, I mean, I keep saying Western European leaders. When I'm thinking about the leaders who are meeting in Paris today, we're recording this on Monday morning, leaders are...
meeting in Paris this afternoon, Monday afternoon. They include Poland's, the Polish leader, Donald Tusk. But I think that goes to the crux of the fact, and it's notable the Baltic governments are not represented there, that for the West European... governments that poland is the center of the question yeah yeah and they are the one country i think they're spending four and a half percent of uh gdp now um on defense whereas uh you know again you cross
Western Europe. It was just nowhere near that figure. I mean, I was surprised in my conversations over the weekend when kind of quite downcast officials were saying, look, if you really are honest about... the, say, the British military budget, what the UK actually spends on conventional forces when you strip out, say, the nuclear, the amount of money that Britain spends on nuclear weapons, it's around one and a half percent.
of GDP on conventional forces. The British Army is down to some number below 80,000. And you have former generals saying that there is just no way that Britain can provide forces into Ukraine that can... are sufficient as a security guarantee. This moment is a challenge to Western Europe. And I think just to reveal its actual priorities here. And I think it's this...
It puts this question in the minds of governments like Poland and the Baltics and others, which kind of, again, it feeds into the narrative that Putin is trying to create, which is that the way that the world works is transactional. And your security depends ultimately on the commitment of these people in Western Europe who you don't know what their commitment is.
It hasn't been tested. It's never been tested. So in a sense, you're better just to get into a good place and do deals with me so that I'm not going to attack you. This becomes a kind of...
a change in the mindset for not just Western European leaders, but those in Poland, those in the Baltics, those across Central and Eastern Europe as well. It's a fundamental question of... political commitment not of values i think that's the the core point here i think that this raises a interesting point tom which i think that we touched on i can't remember now in in which episode a few weeks ago which is
The way in which in the 90s that the Americans themselves under the Clinton administration were willing to introduce a language of values into NATO. This idea that it was an alliance of... democracies and a commitment to Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia being part of some kind of community of values, democratic values now that the Cold War was over was part of the justification.
of enlarging nato to include that those states and as we've said before there was also a motive of pressurizing the europeans about these states joining the european union by saying well look if you're not going more quickly on letting them join the European Union, we are taking them into NATO. Now, if you look at them, the French response to that was to be very sceptical. The French were sceptical about...
the eastern enlargement of the European Union. They were skeptical about the eastern enlargement of NATO. And they were so because they thought the consequences of this would be that it would be harder for West European... side of the European Union to assert autonomy against the United States. And that in that sense, that a NATO and a European Union that included Poland...
was going to be more American orientated than one that wasn't. Now, the interesting thing then about this moment is that Macron, despite I think having shown considerable sympathy still with that position, when the ukraine war began has moved in a completely opposite direction which is effectively to embrace the polish question and to say that actually that
the European Union has to deliver on security itself for East European members. So the original French conception of we want security economy.
from the united states i don't think really does embrace eastern europe whereas macron's new version of it like rather does and that's i think because history has just the territorial fault lines in eastern europe have come so much to the for over the last couple of years, that even a French president whose first concern in some sense is autonomy from the United States cannot ignore this question in the way in which they previously did.
There are so many challenges to the different states in Europe from this moment. As you mentioned, Macron there, and the long-term goal from de Gaulle onwards to use the European Union as a way to... regain a sense of global power and prestige and autonomy from the United States as being a central part of that and why that has always caused such a tension with kingdoms, membership of the European Union and our different goals geopolitically.
and how that has caused a kind of certain tension. And then with the expansion of the European Union eastwards after the end of the Cold War, how that changed the dynamic again. But this moment that we're living through now, it does shift.
not just the French sort of perceptions about what is possible and what they need to do from this moment, but also countries like Poland, like in Warsaw, how are they going to be thinking about this moment now in terms of what they need to do? They need to be planning for both. to presumably keep the United States in Europe, the old goal, but also to be planning for what is going to happen.
if that is no longer the case. From Britain's perspective and from Germany's perspective, how are they supposed to react to this moment? What is the kind of strategic goal now for a country like the United Kingdom? when it looks at the European defence architecture at the moment. And it's got these sort of competing priorities of maintaining some kind of economic and security alliance with the United States.
thinking particularly here about ai in terms of economics but the united states being the primary security partner that hasn't shifted but macron is actively bringing the united kingdom into these European discussions. He has done it with the European political community from the beginning. This was a vehicle to try and keep the United Kingdom in the security discussion and he's done it here.
with the the emergency response in paris it's very noticeable and what what is it that the uk is going to then take from this what is it that it's going to gain from being a a major security player
in the continent with tens of thousands of troops potentially deployed to Eastern Europe. What is the purpose of that from Britain's perspective? What is the long-term strategic goal? And all of this then, I think... plays into this wider question of the the western response to the rise of china because i think in some senses if the united states is shifting away from europe to be able to concentrate
on its challenges to its security at the border and to China in the Pacific. And it demands that the Europeans pay for their own defense, their own security. say they get anywhere near to 5% of GDP among France, Germany, Britain, and Poland. I think the inevitable consequences of that is that the Americans will... even on the terms of Trump's own understanding of the world, he will lose some control over Europe. He will be less powerful.
relative to europe if europe is spending that much money on its own defense at that point what does europe then do in terms of its relationship with china in particular i think that it has less interest in following an American line, a kind of a joint position against China than it would do under the current circumstances. I think there's a lot there, Tom. I mean, one thing I think is true is that there has been very little like unified, like Western response to China.
I don't think it makes sense really to talk about that because, I mean, the West in this context, because we can see that those hierarchical relationships between the United States and Western European states have been very much in play.
In terms of dealing with the China issue, think of the pressure put on the British government alone over the Hawaii issue. Think about the way in terms of European states trying to, or the European Union, I should say there, trying to assert some autonomy on China policy against... the United States, the way in which in those weeks leading up to Biden's inauguration that Merkel and Macron went off and did that deal, although it didn't get ratified on the investment agreement.
I think the difficulty of thinking that the scenario in which you described like plays out is the sheer industrial weakness. Yeah. of the West European states. And this again is where I think that it's really just erroneous to talk in the way in which Hobart did about the Western community of values like coming to an end. Because if you just look at the...
The reasons why Germany, which has been the industrial powerhouse of the European economy, not just like the West European economy, is in the difficulties in which it is. It's got two causes. One of China's rises in manufacturing high-tech superpower, effectively. But the other is the breakdown of the German-Russian energy.
relationship and who was it that wanted that to happen and did quite a number of things to ensure that it did happen but the United States I mean and this is where there is a kind of like I think things that are true that aren't being like put on the surface, so to speak. If you think of the ways in which the Americans under the Trump administration pressurized.
the Germans to end Nord Stream 2. If you think about then, there would seem strong likelihood now that the Americans at least gave some kind of tacit consent to the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines. pretty direct relationship between Americans saying, we do not want European states dependent upon Russia for their energy.
And the difficulties that Germany in particular has in thinking that it could use its industrial economy to rearm and to turn itself into a significant military power to deal with the things that the Americans then say. this is what you're supposed to deal with in terms of providing security guarantees to Ukraine and Poland and etc. But I think it's also true that the Americans are in more of a bind done because of the China issue.
than they would like to be on the European side. Because in the same way... in which there's an issue for the Americans about the Chinese economic presence on their borders, Mexico and Canada, there's an issue for the European Union. about the Chinese economic presence in this state, Belarus, that is now pivotal to the future of Eastern Europe. So the train routes that bring...
Chinese goods by land into Europe, into the European Union, both go through Belarus. If you look at it in terms of not just China's economic... penetration, if you like, of Belarus. But in the security sphere, in July of last year, so July 2024, there were joint military China-Belarus operations. They were presented as like being like anti. So if the American priority is confrontation with China, both in the Indo-Pacific and at its borders, then the confrontation with China goes into Europe.
And it does so in this state that is very strongly aligned. In some sense, it is in the Russian sphere of influence. It's got a significant border with Poland that's been problematic for the last few years. I'm not sure the Americans either can detach. from the implications of that because if the mindset is china well china goes into europe too and it goes into europe via belarus in a trade sense
Yeah, so America is asking for all of these things that are in some senses contradictory. It's saying that the Europeans need to get their house in order while making it more difficult for the Europeans to get their house in order by...
sanctioning the destruction of its energy infrastructure in relation to Russia and at the same time it is saying to the Europeans that they have to get in line over this sort of grand question of China. I suppose it's worth throwing in these sort of, we're sort of coming to the end of the episode here, but it's worth throwing out some, I don't know if these are counterintuitive thoughts, but right now it looks like the Americans are.
you know, utterly dominant. And there is a kind of energy to the United States that is putting the Europeans in the shade. And Trump looks kind of supreme in a political power sense. But I guess there is... an argument that this is potentially a moment of opportunity for Europe to...
If it shows the ability to grab hold of it, this is a moment which it can say, okay, well, if you're demanding our autonomy, we will take hold of it. There are political opportunities for governments like Starmer or Macron or whichever. Gem...
government emerges from the elections next week, which is they're all facing a similar crisis of a crisis of industrialization, de-industrialization in a sense, or economic stagnation. There is a way of sort of combining, and I know that this has been about at the most senior levels in the British government of combining the need to rearm.
with the need to re-industrialize parts of the country outside of Paris or London. So you could see a kind of a political solution to this, and you could see if there was... a willingness on the Europeans' behalf to think less conventionally in a way, how you could start to construct.
new structures for Europe, which would include countries like the United Kingdom, which would then sort of create potentially different forms of association for britain and it's economically sort of beyond the security questions if you can start moving in that direction perhaps something else something else will come of it but also the europe the americans if we're thinking about them in terms of their power at the moment, as you say, maybe in the long run, they start to lose control.
of places. And how does Europe get its energy security back in the long run if the border has been settled, if the war has been settled in Ukraine? Well, maybe it starts to rebuild its relationships with Russia and maybe it starts to deepen its relations with China because it no longer feels the pressure as much.
from the United States. I guess all I'm sort of suggesting is that there are potentially different consequences to this than the Americans can currently see. I think if you're looking into the medium term and the long term, then... There's no reason at all to think that the Americans have thought through, or Trump and the people around him have thought through what the consequences of this might be. But I think if we concentrate in the short term...
we can see some things that push quite strongly against the this is going to be an opportunity thesis. And that is the state of play in four of the domestic politics. of larger European countries. So Germany, France, Britain and Italy. We just deal quickly with Italy, which we mentioned before. Maloney is sympathetic too.
the Trump project in any number of ways. She would probably sign up to quite a bit of the things that Vance said in his speech. In Germany, by contrast, they were furious about the Vance speech. And I think that one of the things that's going to be true about the outcome of the German election is that the actual coalition formation of it is going to be very difficult. I mean, even if you look at the last couple of elections in Germany, it's taken several months.
for a government to emerge. So we're now going to be talking about all that we've been discussing in this episode going on with possibly profound uncertainty in Germany about where its politics are. going depending on how well the afd like end up going and then we turn to like britain and france we've talked about the french political crisis quite a number of times over the last nine months or so is that the only basis for getting a budget through the French
Parliament at the moment is effectively by decree, which every time that is done means that there's a possibility of a vote of confidence in the prime minister. The French have been through four prime ministers during the course of 20. And in the British case, although the government is stable in the sense that, albeit highly unpopular, it's got a large majority and it's a long way from the next election.
that Britain is the country that has experienced... a significant bond market crisis what happened to the list trust government the autumn of 2022 it has a macroeconomic vulnerability in terms of the size of its trade deficit that is not true
of the French, like all the Germans. So it's one thing for Keir Starmer to sort of brief out that maybe that Britain could get to 2.7, which is a percent of... GDP on defense which in terms of what Trump's got in mind is really neither like here nor there but somebody would have to be
in officers chancellor which might not be the present chancellor who was willing to take significant risks with britain's position in the bond markets or come up with something more radical in terms of some kind of element of financial repression to make it possible for that extra borrowing that will be required or come up with a plan for radical public expenditure cuts to justify the
shift to spending more on defense without increasing like borrowing these are things i think that are actually in really quite different ways existential in in france for the french government the german government or the future german government and the the British government. And this moment, even if it turns out to be the case that the American security commitment to Europe is not ending, it's still got the ability, just the moment itself and what's been said, really to intensify.
the fault lines around each of these countries politics yeah and with that Helen we should probably bring this episode to a close because I mean I think that the case that you just made seems inarguable in a way. And it's fundamentally, I think, a question of strength, isn't it? Of sort of geopolitical strength, economic strength. Do any of these countries in Europe have the strength to be able to do anything different?
from this moment. Right now it looks impossible. It doesn't look like, I can't see a political leader who has the kind of charisma, vision, power kind of to use it as an opportunity to create something new, which is what I guess... the best political leaders are able to do somehow. They're able to grab hold of something. And if that's not true...
there is no such person, then I think we should face the possibility that this moment has got the capacity to be very destabilising in European politics and Western European side. That if it turns out that something really is... changing, that there was now a serious doubt about the American commitment to the security guarantee. Given that has structured West European politics, you could say back to 1949.
47, yeah. Then what happens when it's off the table? Because in a way that has been the underpinning of the politics that we have known in Western Europe. Yeah. For the best part of eight decades. And the first test is going to be the German elections next week. And that's what we're going to cover next week. So we should bring the episode to a close there. and return when we discuss the German elections next week. Please do tune in again. See you then next week.
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