The week that shook Europe—and the historic test ahead
Before boarding my flight home from Europe to Washington, DC, I took Finnish President Alexander Stubb’s advice for those unsettled by the transatlantic acrimony surrounding last weekend’s Munich Security Conference. After a Helsinki-style sauna and cold bath at my hotel, I’m ready to process the events of the past week in their historic context.
In a conversation with me on the sidelines of the Munich gathering, Stubb focused on the long game while other European leaders were still reeling from US Vice President JD Vance’s broadside attack on European democracy and his de facto endorsement of Germany’s furthest right party ahead of the country’s elections on Sunday.
“We rationalize the past, overdramatize the present, and underestimate the future,” he told me, laying out his thinking on how to responsibly end Russia’s war in Ukraine in the days ahead. He envisioned a process in three distinct stages. First pre-negotiations would focus on strengthening Ukraine’s position. A ceasefire would follow that establishes a line of contact, confidence-building measures, security arrangements, and peace modalities. Then, and only then, peace negotiations would take place that not only end the war but also ensure Ukrainian sovereignty, independence, and integration into Western institutions.
Yet Stubb’s step-by-step thinking about the future was quickly overwhelmed this week by the inescapable dramas of the present—a flurry of events and exchanges as jarring as going from a sauna to a cold bath. The developments of recent days have underscored discord in US-European relations amid peril to Ukraine, all without offering a convincing path forward and at a moment when common cause is urgently needed.
The drama began with meetings of US and Russian officials in Saudi Arabia aimed at ending the war in Ukraine and repairing the relationship between the two countries, included a gathering of European officials in Paris who were excluded from Riyadh, and featured an unfortunate spat between US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
In a Truth Social post, Trump echoed Kremlin propaganda in branding the freely elected Ukrainian president as “A Dictator without Elections” and asserting that “Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left.” That followed Zelenskyy’s comment that Trump is operating in a “disinformation space,” a response to Trump blaming Ukraine for starting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked and illegal war.
While all that was unfolding, speculation also circulated that China might consider deploying its soldiers in a peacekeeping role as part of a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, stepping into a vacuum US and many European leaders appear unwilling to fill. Such an outcome could grant China an unprecedented role in Europe.
In our conversation, Stubb zoomed out from all this. He echoed my own frequent argument in this space that we are confronting an inflection point of historic dimensions—what I have referred to as the fourth such moment since the end of World War I.
“This is the 1918, 1945, and 1989 moment of our generation,” he said, later repeating that view in a must-read Foreign Policy interview.
If one assesses and responds to the current moment in the wrong ways, as the United States did after World War I, the consequences could be equally devastating. In that case, what followed was the spread of fascism, the Holocaust, and World War II. With the memory of those two wars front of mind, US and allied leaders got the period after 1945 right, creating the global institutions and practices that brought the world an unprecedented period of prosperity and peace among major powers.
Stubb sees the post–Cold War period that began in 1989 as one of intellectual “laziness.” Referencing the political scientist Francis Fukuyama and his book The End of History and the Last Man, the Finnish president regrets that period’s assumption that liberal democracy and globalization had triumphed, which prompted leaders to neglect doing what was necessary to sustain and build upon their historic gains.
At the World Economic Forum in January 2024, Jake Sullivan, then serving as national security advisor in the Biden administration, took a stab at describing the era currently dawning as one of “strategic competition in an age of interdependence.” Others have branded it an “age of unpeace” and “an era of disorder.” It’s too early to know what to call our emerging times, but the present period already threatens to be a dangerous interregnum as an old order dies before another is born.
Into this historic moment—featuring war in Europe, ongoing conflict in the Middle East, tensions with China, and a historic contest for the commanding heights of artificial intelligence and other disruptive technologies—American voters brought Trump back to office. He is a commander-in-chief who is as impatient with ponderous discussions about history as he is eager to shape it as one of its consequential figures.
Trump does have an opportunity to cement his place in history and preserve the hard-won gains of the post–World War II era. But his next steps are crucial. To achieve the best possible outcome, three underlying principles should guide the US president.
- There is no world in which a weaker, more fragmented transatlantic community preoccupied with infighting is in the interest of either the United States or Europe. No relationship is more foundational to shaping the global future.
- There is no world in which a slow-growing, over-regulated, insufficiently innovative Europe—unable to sufficiently defend itself from a revanchist Russia—is in either European or US interests. Europeans refer to the Trump administration’s attacks as a wake-up call on all these fronts, but the alarm can only ring so many times before Europe pays the price of irrelevance for failing to respond.
- There is no world in which inviting China into a peacekeeping role in Ukraine is prudent. China’s potential willingness to step into such a role should be a wake-up call to Trump and European leaders to settle their dispute quickly. Chinese involvement in maintaining peace in Ukraine would be like giving the henhouse to a fox, as without Beijing’s support Putin would have been unable to sustain his murderous war.
Perhaps Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski described the historic test for Trump most succinctly, speaking to an Atlantic Council event in Munich. “The credibility of the United States depends on how this war ends. Not just the Trump administration, the United States itself,” he said.
Any perceived or actual sellout to Russia’s despot would leave an indelible stain on the Trump administration and US global leadership with generational consequences.
Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.
This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.
Further reading
Thu, Feb 20, 2025
What Europeans think of Trump’s approach to Ukraine (and what they might do next)
New Atlanticist By
European leaders are waking up to calls from the Trump administration to take the lead on security for Ukraine. Atlantic Council experts share what that might look like from Berlin to Vilnius.
Sun, Feb 16, 2025
What Munich means for Ukraine peace talks
Fast Thinking By
Atlantic Council experts who were on site at the Munich Security Conference break down the Trump team's approach to negotiations on the war in Ukraine and the European reaction.
Fri, Feb 14, 2025
Dispatch from Munich: Trump has put European history in motion again
Inflection Points By Frederick Kempe
As the annual Munich Security Conference opens, there is a palpable sense that the city might again be a place where history is made.
Image: U.S. Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Deputy Prime Minister Olha Stefanishyna and Defense Minister Rustem Umerov attend a bilateral meeting, on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference (MSC), in Munich, Germany February 14, 2025. REUTERS/Leah Millis