March's edition of the magazine looks at the growing divide between the EU and the US, and what's next for Ukraine.
The first fifty days of Donald Trump’s new term have left most corners of the globe on edge. For its part, Europe had largely tried to appease the mercenary and mercurial US president in an effort to avert a trade war and maintain American support for Ukraine in its war against Russia – despite the US president saying in late February that the European Union had been formed to “screw” the United States.
But, after failing to bring the Trump administration to the negotiating table following its imposed 25% blanket tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, the EU shifted tactics on Wednesday and imposed retaliatory levies on US goods worth $26 billion. The countermeasures, set to take effect in April, are the latest tit-for-tat in an accelerating global trade war that includes Canada, Mexico and China.
A day prior, Ukraine agreed to a US proposal for a 30-day ceasefire with Russia, a plan Moscow rejected just as we were going to press. While the deal with Kyiv lifted Trump’s recent freeze on US intelligence sharing and military assistance to Ukraine, it did not include any long-term security guarantees for the country. That’s good news for Moscow, which has already been emboldened by a significant shift in US policy and rhetoric around support for Ukraine, and Europe more broadly.
While Trump’s recent moves have finally galvanised European leaders to have a serious conversation around the continent’s collective defence, it may be too little, too late – at least when it comes to a potential peacekeeping mission in Ukraine.
“Any kind of European troops in Ukraine only have a deterrent effect if they are backed up by a US backstop,” Roland Freudenstein of the Free Russia Foundation told The Parliament.
As we report in this edition, Europe is now grappling with a worst-case scenario it had long feared but failed to prepare for – and the continent now faces its biggest security crisis since the Cold War.
With Trump’s ‘America First’ nationalism driving US foreign and economic policy, the EU has been left to make sense of its place in a global order that’s being rapidly – and often unpredictably – reshaped by its erstwhile ally.
It’s a moment of reckoning for the EU – one that may well determine whether it can secure its own future in a new era of geopolitical fragmentation.
– Christopher Alessi, Editor-in-Chief