Europe Has a Leadership Vacuum. How Will it Handle Trump?

Europe Has a Leadership Vacuum. How Will it Handle Trump?

With Germany and France both in political turmoil, the new administration of Donald J. Trump will begin at a time of instability for the continent.

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Three men standing in an ornately decorated room facing cameras and a microphone boom.

U.S. President-elect Donald J. Trump, left, with President Emmanuel Macron of France, center, and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in Paris last week.Credit...James Hill for The New York Times

Mark LandlerJim Tankersley

By Mark Landler and Jim Tankersley

Mark Landler reported from London and Jim Tankersley from New York

Dec. 19, 2024, 12:01 a.m. ET

When President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine met European leaders for dinner in Brussels on Wednesday, the shadow of President-elect Donald J. Trump hung over the gathering. But it is not just Mr. Trump’s return to the White House that has scrambled Europe’s response to the war in Ukraine.

It is also the political disarray across the continent — a wave of instability that is depriving Europe of robust leadership at the very moment that Mr. Trump is challenging its deeply felt support for Ukraine and its hard-fought resistance of Russian aggression.

From Germany, where the government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz just collapsed, to France, where President Emmanuel Macron has been gravely weakened by months of domestic political turmoil, Europe’s big powers are on the back foot as they confront a resurgent Mr. Trump.

“We’re not well equipped, that’s for sure,” said Wolfgang Ischinger, who served as Germany’s ambassador to the United States during the Iraq War. “It is a horribly bad moment for my own country to be in the midst of an election campaign, with a rather polarizing political debate.”

Mr. Ischinger, who chaired the Munich Security Conference until 2022, said he was optimistic that Germany would emerge with a new government, likely led by the conservative candidate, Friedrich Merz, that could engage constructively with the Trump administration.

Mr. Macron, for all his domestic travails, appears determined still to play an energetic role in shaping Europe’s response to the war. He recently floated the idea of sending a European peacekeeping force to Ukraine, though it found little immediate support from other European officials.Still, he and other leaders are preoccupied by other issues, from economic troubles to the surge of far-right populist parties. That leaves them poorly placed to respond in any concerted fashion to what may well be politically unpalatable proposals by Mr. Trump about how to end the war.

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Several people in suits walking down a large staircase outside a building with white columns.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, center, leaves after a meeting with President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, following the no-confidence vote, at Bellevue Palace in Berlin, on Monday.Credit...Pool photo by John Macdougall

Just this week, reports surfaced that Mr. Trump’s aides were discussing a plan to create a buffer zone between Ukrainian and Russian troops that would be patrolled by 40,000 European soldiers. Such a proposal would cause an outcry in Berlin and London, where the refusal to send troops has been an article of faith since the early days of the war.

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“The 800-mile buffer zone between Ukraine and Russia is not going to happen,” said Jeremy Shapiro, research director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank based in Berlin. “Europe couldn’t do this without U.S. support. But it is a very good bit of political theater.”

Political theater is one of Mr. Trump’s specialties, of course, and he is likely to throw out other ideas for ending the conflict after he takes office. The challenge, Mr. Shapiro said, is for European leaders not to be provoked or divided by Mr. Trump but to make sure that Europe has a seat in any diplomatic negotiation involving the United States, Ukraine and Russia.

That is easier said than done, given the political crosscurrents at home. Germany is caught up in a heated debate over the economy, with its export-led model at risk because of Mr. Trump’s threatened tariffs. France has fallen into paralysis since Mr. Macron called an ill-advised parliamentary election last summer. One prime minister, Michel Barnier, is gone, and his newly named replacement, François Bayrou, is already sparring with Mr. Macron.

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Even in Britain, where voters elected a Labour government with a thumping majority in July, the country is bogged down in economic problems, as well as an insurgent threat from an anti-immigrant party, Reform U.K., whose leader, Nigel Farage, has links to Mr. Trump.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has expressed a desire to draw Britain closer to the rest of Europe, but Brexit handicaps any British leader from playing the kind of statesman’s role that his Labour predecessor, Tony Blair, did in the late 1990s.

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A man gestures in front of a microphone in a crowded room.

A photograph released by the British Parliament showing Prime Minister Keir Starmer at the House of Commons on Wednesday.Credit...House of Commons, via Reuters

That leaves Italy and Poland as unlikely standard bearers for Europe. Italy’s right-wing prime minister, Georgia Meloni, has gained influence as diplomats wager she will be able to build bridges to Mr. Trump. Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, a seasoned hand, will take a visible role when Poland assumes the presidency of the Council of the European Union next year.

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The European Commission, the E.U.’s executive arm, wants to play an active role under its president, Ursula von der Leyen. But the lack of strong leaders in Europe’s capitals will “certainly further strengthen Trump’s dismissive, contemptuous attitude toward the E.U, which we remember from Trump I,” said Peter Ricketts, a former British national security adviser.

Gérard Araud, who was France’s ambassador to Washington during Mr. Trump’s first term, said, “The three main European countries have never been so weak. And Italy and Poland, which have nothing in common, won’t take the driver’s seat, whatever their pretensions.”

Mr. Araud, who took part in Europe’s fruitless lobbying campaign to persuade Mr. Trump not to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, said European leaders were recycling the playbook they used during the first term in courting and flattering the president-elect to cut their own deals.

Mr. Macron put Mr. Trump in the front row at the recent reopening of Notre-Dame Cathedral. Mr. Scholz said he’d like to meet with him before he leaves office, which some in Germany interpret as a bid for an invitation to his inauguration. Mr. Starmer’s aides talk up a dinner that he and his foreign secretary, David Lammy, had with Mr. Trump in September. 

Mr. Starmer and Mr. Trump spoke again on Wednesday, according to 10 Downing Street, which said in a readout that the prime minister “reiterated the need for allies to stand together with Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression.”

Whether that happens depends heavily on Mr. Trump. “Either he plays on these weaknesses and divisions,” Mr. Araud said, “or he obliges European countries to unite, which won’t be their natural and instinctive reaction.”

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Ukrainian soldiers of the 38th Separate Marine Brigade in a position near Pokrovsk in November.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

After almost three years of grinding war, however, the politics of Ukraine are shifting in Europe as well, in ways that could narrow the gap with Mr. Trump. While Mr. Merz and Mr. Scholz both pledge to maintain military support for Ukraine if elected, they have promised an increasingly wary German public that they, too, will push to bring the conflict to a close.

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“We are united by the unconditional will to do everything we can to end this war in Ukraine as quickly as possible,” Mr. Merz said on Monday, in a parliamentary debate before the dissolution of the government.

Unlike in 2016, when Angela Merkel, then chancellor, got off to a chilly start with Mr. Trump on trade and military spending, Mr. Merz’s right-leaning Christian Democratic Union has tried to reach out to people in Mr. Trump’s orbit. The party even sent a representative, Jens Spahn, to the Republican National Convention.

Germany’s role in the Western alliance on Ukraine is so central that American diplomats say any Trump plan for ending the war has to include it. But the election, expected on Feb. 23, and coalition negotiations that will follow it, suggest Germany’s direction may not be clear until April or May.

“This is a dramatic point,” said Amy Gutmann, who served as American ambassador to Germany from 2022 until earlier this year.

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“It’s coupled with Germany being a stronger than ever, and more important than ever, supporter of Ukraine,” she said. “It’s also more important than ever because of the economic problems that are afflicting Europe, and Germany is front and center in that.”

Some analysts, however, argue that the focus on Europe’s faltering leaders distracts from a deeper structural problem laid bare by Mr. Trump: its continuing strategic reliance on the United States. Merely by suggesting that the United States is not committed to extending President Biden’s support for Ukraine, they said, Mr. Trump has thrown the European debate into disarray.

“All the Europeans who want to stick to their position won’t have the ability to do that if the Americans move to the other end of the field,” Mr. Shapiro said. “My prediction is that they will reconstitute themselves around the new American position.”