By Arnaud Bertrand, Twitter, 2/15/25

This is beyond insane: Keith Kellog, Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, confirms that Europe will NOT have a seat at the table in the negotiations to end the war.

When asked at the Munich Security Conference “Can you assure this audience that Ukrainians will be at the table and Europeans will be at the table?”, his response was: “the answer to that last question is no.” By “last question”, he meant whether Europeans will be at the table.

Later on in the conversation, he was asked to confirm this: “So the Europeans […] you don’t think should be at the table directly?”. His answer again was “I’m from the school of realism, I think that’s not going to happen”, and that he understood hearing this might be “like fingers on a chalkboard, may grate a little bit but I’m telling you something that’s really quite honest.”

He was very clear though that he still expected Europeans to provide security guarantees and abide by the deal: “you have to understand, when you sign up for these security guarantees, that is an obligation and the reason I say that and I challenge many people that are out there, right now, 2014 Wales declaration, all the NATO allies, 2% of GDP, 20% of that was modernization, there are still 8 nations who’ve not even gotten to that number, okay? So when we get to it make sure you check your 6 as they say that the obligation is upon YOU when WE make these commitments.”

So to sum up, the US position is that Europe should stay out of negotiations that will fundamentally affect their security architecture – yet bear the primary responsibility and cost for the negotiations’ outcome.

And on top of that, it’s quite clear from previous Trump declarations (like here: https://nypost.com/2025/02/10/us-news/trump-says-ukraine-has-essentially-agreed-to-allow-the-us-access-to-500b-in-rare-earth-minerals/) that the U.S. will be looking in the deal to take control of Ukraine’s rare earth minerals as payment for the military aid it has provided, leaving presumably nothing to Europe.

I’ve repeatedly warned that Europe was fast walking towards its own century of humiliation if it continued on its current path. I think it’s now pretty damn clear that we’re very much there already.

If this goes through, this would possibly be unprecedented in European history – never before, to my knowledge, has Europe’s security architecture been redrawn without any European power at the table. Even during Europe’s darkest moments – including the Mongol invasions, the Ottoman expansions, or the Yalta Conference – European powers always had some voice in negotiations affecting their future.

To be clear, the primary culprit here isn’t the U.S. or Trump: any student of history knows that we live in a deeply unfair world where, as ancient Greek historian Thucydides wrote 2,500 years ago, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” As such the blame lies almost entirely on us Europeans, or more precisely on our immensely incompetent leaders. And I want to stress this last point: they are literally incompetent on a millennia scale, given that they’ve managed to reduce Europe to a position that lacks any historical parallel, where it’s expected to simply accept and implement whatever security arrangements others decide for it.

Trump himself does what’s best for the U.S. – “America first”, remember? – and to be fair to him the Biden administration left him with a pretty bad hand. It’s crystal clear that Russia won in Ukraine, despite all of NATO’s efforts, and as such the U.S. very much risked coming out of it looking like the loser that it objectively is.

Faced with this, Trump’s strategy clearly is to reframe this defeat into an “art of the deal” victory by securing U.S. access to Ukraine’s natural resources while offloading the costs and responsibilities of the post-war security arrangement onto Europe. Meanwhile Europe, which has failed to develop any meaningful strategic autonomy over the past decades (in fact it’s moved in the opposite direction), finds itself with little leverage to prevent this.

In fact, European “leaders”, in their treasonous meekness, are already signaling that they’ll resign themselves to their fate. Mark Rutte, NATO’s Secretary General, for instance enticed Europeans not to complain about the situation (“to my European friends, I would say, get into the debate, not by complaining that you might, yes or no, be at the table, but by coming up with concrete proposals, ideas, ramp up (defense) spending”, https://voanews.com/a/europe-will-not-be-part-of-ukraine-peace-talks-us-envoy-says-/7976497.html).

And Keir Starmer, invited by Macron at a “crisis summit” in Paris to discuss the situation, said that his primary goal in the meeting would be “to ensure we keep the US and Europe together. We cannot allow any divisions in the alliance to distract from the external enemies we face.” (https://theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/15/europe-will-not-take-part-in-us-russia-talks-ukraine-kellogg).

I let you appreciate the perfect illustration this provides of the very mindset that has led Europe to this unprecedented position of weakness – responding to diplomatic humiliation with calls for even more subservience.

So what could Europe do? After all, it is true that they have very little leverage, mainly due to the fact that they are “protected” by the very power that decided to put them on the menu instead of at the table.

One idea could be to out-Trump Trump, and to angle for a deal where the U.S., not Europe, ends up the loser. They could for instance finally tell the truth about what led to the war in the first place, namely NATO expansion pushed by the U.S., as well as the U.S.-led coup in Ukraine in 2014, and dissociate themselves from this, just the way Trump is very conveniently trying to dissociate himself from his own country’s previous policies.

They could make it clear that they reject any deal that gives the U.S. access to any of Ukraine’s resources, and signal to Russia that they’re open to a different kind of security architecture in Europe – one that doesn’t rely on U.S. leadership or NATO. After all, if Trump can say he’ll make deals with Putin, why couldn’t Europe do the same?

They could also reach out to China, which has already made it very clear that it opposed a deal in Ukraine without Europe at the table (https://reuters.com/world/china-calls-all-stakeholders-ukraine-war-be-peace-process-2025-02-15/) and which is anyhow much better positioned to negotiate with Russia than Trump is.

We could end up with a Europe freed from American tutelage for the first time since 1945, establishing a new multipolar equilibrium with China and Russia – turning Trump’s attempt to exclude Europe into the very catalyst that finally enables European strategic autonomy.

But this would require a level of strategic thinking that current European leaders have consistently shown themselves incapable of. Instead I’m afraid they’ll continue their current path of attempting to maintain the façade of transatlantic unity even as they’re being openly humiliated.