Davos arrives just in time for the inauguration of Donald J. Trump 2.0, and Europe is anxious. Trump is like an asteroid headed towards Earth, argues Hubert Védrine, the former French Foreign Minister, and debates over the impact will dominate the cozy internationalist bubble that builds up every year under the snowfall of the Swiss Alps.
Trump speaks variously of huge new tariffs, of seizing Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal, of tying American involvement in European defense not only to increased military spending by Europeans, but also to the reduction of the surplus trade with the United States.
Védrine and other analysts warn that Trump likes to talk big and then bargain, and that threats and problems come and go. As his former national security adviser, John Bolton, once told USA Today, working in the Trump White House was “like living in a pinball machine” as Trump flitted from one issue to the next.
But one of the dominant themes in Davos is likely to be Ukraine. Trump says he wants to end the war in one day, which virtually no one takes literally, not even his special adviser on Ukraine, Keith Kellogg. Mr. Trump or not, Ukraine is slowly losing the war and negotiations are on the way to try to end the bloodshed, probably this spring.
But on what basis is the key question. Russian President Vladimir V. Putin faces high inflation and interest rates but has placed his country in a war economy in what he presents as an existential conflict with the West. Despite very high casualties, it is so far able to compensate for its losses with major financial incentives: 70% of its forces are contract soldiers and only 7% are recruits, said Zaki Laïdi, a French analyst who advised the former head of foreign policy of the European Union, Josep Borrell Fontelles.
Putin believes he is winning the war and that Western resolve to continue supporting Ukraine at such a high economic cost, with so little Ukrainian progress in the trenches, is waning, says Liana Fix of the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. So, even if Putin accepts a request or even a request from Trump to start negotiations, he is unlikely to accept an unconditional ceasefire and will insist on strict terms to end the war.
In his regular end-of-year press conference and TV show, Putin repeated his thesis that Ukraine is not truly an independent state. Any negotiations, he said, will start from “current realities on the ground” and will be based on Russia’s position in talks with the Ukrainians in Istanbul in 2022: that Ukraine agrees to abandon its NATO aspirations and become a neutral state, accepting strict limits. on the size of its armed forces and will change some of its laws to respect Russian interests. It is unclear whether Putin would accept Ukraine’s membership of the European Union, but it is doubtful, given that his opposition to a much weaker association agreement between Kiev and Brussels led to the 2013 Maidan uprising.
“Putin wants a reordered world, with Ukraine under control and NATO withdrawn,” Fix said. An American official, speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity of the topic, said Putin wants “not just a neutral but a neutered Ukraine.”
Putin’s stated intentions to reorder Europe’s security architecture, weaken NATO and divide Washington from Europe go far beyond Ukraine and should not be ignored, said Norbert Röttgen, a foreign policy expert and EU lawmaker Christian Democrats, the party that is expected to win the German elections at the end of February. “The future of Europe is a question of security and we must make this war a failure for Russia,” he said. “Because even if it succeeds, the lesson is that war works.”
It is unclear how to ensure Russia’s failure without a sharp and rapid increase in European support for Kiev. European leaders talk about the need to do so and spend more to defend themselves. But they are divided over how urgent the danger Russia poses to them. They have their own financial difficulties, with low growth and an aging population, and they disagree on how much to spend on their militaries, although Trump is expected to demand that Europe also shoulder much of it of the burden of supporting Ukraine.
Trump’s disinterest in multilateral alliances and his desire to focus on China means that responsibility for European security “is ours now for the first time since December 1941, and Europe is not prepared for this fundamental change,” he said Röttgen.
Mark Rutte, the new NATO secretary general, who will be in Davos, similarly argues that Europe must do more in its own defense to support Ukraine so that it can negotiate forcefully and deter Russia in the future, not it matters who the American is. president. European allies “must adopt a wartime mentality,” he said. He will urge NATO to set a new target for military spending at 3% or even 3.5% of gross domestic product at its next summit this summer in The Hague.
Since Russia is not on the verge of collapse, Laïdi said: “We in Europe must deter Russia, strengthen our defense and start working seriously together.”
Mr. Röttgen echoed that call. Europe simply needs to do more and more efficiently, and do it through NATO, with less nationalism, he argued. “Europe must understand that its defense industry is about security and not just jobs,” he said.
Ukrainian leaders understand that negotiations are coming. For some time now, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has stopped insisting that the war can end only with the full restoration of Ukrainian control over the 1991 borders, including Crimea and large portions of eastern Ukraine, long occupied by troops Russian. Zelenskyj, who will visit Davos, instead underlines the security guarantees for his country after the end of the fighting, insisting that only NATO membership will be satisfactory.
That’s unlikely to happen, most analysts and officials in Washington and Europe agree. But many, including Rutte and key members of the outgoing Biden administration, still argue that even just one more big push in support of Ukraine this year will bring Putin into more serious negotiations. But it’s unclear where this big push will come from.
“We still feel that Ukraine is fighting our war, but let’s tell the truth,” said Charles A. Kupchan, a former Obama administration official and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The United States has a policy without strategy,” insisting that the West will support Ukraine as long as necessary and that only Ukraine can decide when and how to negotiate, as if Washington had no interests of its own, he said . “This is dangerous and is turning Ukraine into a failed state,” he said.
Some see Russia and its desire to continue the war collapsing under economic and trade pressure, Kupchan said. “But I see the opposite: Russia is fine and Ukraine is short of gas, without enough manpower or air defense, and it’s not like it’s all in Western warehouses – we don’t have it.”
But even if the fighting ends, the most difficult issue, everyone agrees, is Ukraine’s future security. Is there a possible form of NATO membership and collective security that covers only part of sovereign Ukraine? Would joining the European Union, also considered a long way off, be enough? What would Russia tolerate? And could promises not to invade again be trusted?
Some argue – and think Trump might demand – that Europe should manage Ukraine’s security and suggest sending European troops after a ceasefire. But would they be there to monitor a ceasefire or to police one? And if so, given Ukraine’s enormous size and its long borders with Russia, how many thousands of troops would be needed? How much would all this cost? Would it draw troops away from defending NATO members and undermine their confidence in the alliance’s commitment to collective defense? And wouldn’t they need American air cover?
The suggestion of European troops, originally floated by Estonians and sometimes mentioned by French President Emmanuel Macron, has been met with considerable skepticism, including by Poland, which has a long border with Russia.
A senior German official, also speaking anonymously in accordance with normal diplomatic practice, calls the entire discussion premature and irresponsible, offering Russia an easy way to divide Europe and the United States. First of all, he said, we need to see how the war ends.
For Röttgen the war is less about territory than about Ukraine’s sovereignty. “Ukraine must emerge as a sovereign and viable country,” he said. This at least seems doable, but what remains unclear is how to ensure that the emerging Ukraine is not invaded again.