Jamie Dettmer is associate editor and a foreign affairs columnist for POLITICO. Cast your mind back to last year, when European leaders scrambled back and forth across the Atlantic, seeking to patch up tattered relations between U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
After the Oval Office brawl where a scolded Zelenskyy pushed back against Trump and his vice president before being ejected from the White House, then-U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron led the effort to engineer a call between the pair, during which the Ukrainian president expressed regret about the meeting — but fell short of apologizing. Likewise, after Trump’s August summit in Alaska with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Starmer and his top security adviser Jonathan Powell worked feverishly alongside other European leaders to rescue the broken relationship between Kyiv and Washington.
They even came up with a ceasefire plan and got U.S. buy-in. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte also did some heavy lifting. But this time, after Trump unveiled a controversial diesel deal with Russia and called — once again — for Zelenskyy to step down, the European reaction has been less febrile.
Of course, they have offered Kyiv strong rhetorical support and unveiled more Russia sanctions, but there has been no frantic, panicky outreach effort to Trump to mediate a speedy repair. Because the Trump shock factor is wearing off, hazards Ukraine’s former Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba. According to the Financial Times, EU officials plan to urge Zelenskyy to tone down his increasingly sharp remarks about Trump, fearing they are only inflaming the situation.
Starmer’s successor, Andy Burnham, is positioning himself as someone who can “lay the ground” for a reconciliation, he explained to the House of Commons Wednesday. Nonetheless, the calmer reaction to Trump’s maneuvers stands out, acknowledges Daniel Fried, a former senior U.S. diplomat who served as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs under U.S. They want to mitigate the damage over the next two years while Trump is in office.
They do work with people in the Trump administration with whom they can work. And there are such people.” Speaking from Warsaw, fresh from attending a recent security conference in the Polish capital, he said the Europeans understand now that much of what Trump does is performative and has a short life span — like the Russian diesel deal, which has a shelf life of two or three days, he said. In other words, why get worked up about it?
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