Two days before Vance’s speech, Trump’s defence secretary, former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, was even blunter when he met European defence ministers in Brussels. Describing the return of Ukraine to its pre-invasion borders as an “illusionary goal”, he made it clear that the United States does not regard the defence of Ukraine as a NATO priority.
On the future US relationship with Europe, he said: “[S]tark strategic realities prevent the United States of America being primarily focused on the security of Europe … The US is prioritising deterring war with China in the Pacific, recognising the reality of scarcity and making resourcing trade-offs. … As the United States prioritises its attention to these threats, European allies must lead from the front.”
The speeches of Vance and Hegseth upended, in 48 hours, the assumptions upon which the security of Europe has relied for decades. Yet they should have come as a surprise to no-one: there was nothing in their remarks that had not been foreshadowed – by Trump, by Vance, by numerous MAGA Republicans – during the election campaign.
The speeches of Vance and defence secretary Pete Hegseth have upended the assumptions upon which the security of Europe has relied for decades.Credit: Getty Images
As if to underline his contempt not just for Ukraine, but for America’s NATO allies, Trump then dispatched Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Riyadh to conduct negotiations with Russia from which Ukraine and Europe were excluded.
There is only one possible interpretation of America’s diplomacy over the past fortnight: that under the Trump administration, the US no longer regards Putin as an adversary. America is no longer on Ukraine’s side. If there were any remaining doubt about that, it was extinguished when, last week, Trump parroted the Kremlin’s line that Ukraine had started the war: a claim so preposterously untrue that it transcended even Trump’s customary mendacity. His casual reversal of objective fact was right out of the pages of Nineteen Eighty-Four (“We are at war with Oceania. We have always been at war with Oceania”).
America is now on a different page from Europe – and from the rest of the democratic world, including Australia – on the most important threat to European peace since 1945. Although both utter the usual pieties about wanting the war to end, the grim truth is that while Europe has remained steadfast in its support for Ukraine, America has abandoned it.
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Today marks the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion. The initial response of the democratic world was to galvanise NATO – indeed, with the accession of Finland and Sweden, to enlarge it. Zelensky – lauded in every Western capital for his inspirational leadership and personal courage – was compared, not implausibly, with Winston Churchill. But the return to the White House of Donald Trump has changed all that. Bizarrely, it is Zelensky, not Putin, whom Trump maligns as a dictator.
Last year, Kevin Rudd was embarrassed by the revelation that some years ago, when a private citizen, he had called Trump “a traitor to the West”. Obviously that put Rudd in an uncomfortable position given his current role. But, as events of the past fortnight have proven, he was right.
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