Earlier this summer, liberal media outlets around Europe hailed the move to raise defense spending to 5 percent of GDP. While this promise, made at June’s NATO summit, conformed to a demand originally made by Donald Trump, it was widely cast as a move toward greater European self-sufficiency. For some, the pledge was even a realization of German chancellor Friedrich Merz’s talk of the continent showing greater independence — and might even signal an end of European deference to Washington.

Outwardly the main aim of the 5 percent target is to harden Europe’s defenses against Russia. Yet this joint commitment by European NATO members (Spain alone dissented) was meant to send a message not just to Moscow but to Washington. For this European move was above all designed as a way to stiffen Trump’s commitment to NATO and US resolve in supporting Ukraine. While Kyiv’s European allies have since 2022 provided more than Washington in military aid (in terms of sheer hardware costs at least), ramping up spending could show the Americans that Europe is serious and keep Trump interested in a long-haul conflict.

Even last month’s US-EU trade agreement — an unbalanced set of tariffs and promises of European investment in the United States, imposed by Trump on European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen — was said to obey this logic: the EU must play nice with the US president in order to keep him invested in Ukraine. Never mind the democratic propriety of such a rushed and even unwritten commercial deal or how committing to buying $750 billion of US liquified natural gas fits into Europe’s previously flagship Green Deal plan: anchoring the United States in European defense comes first.

For a few weeks, opinion makers in Brussels and Berlin could convince themselves that these acts of submission had bought influence over Trump. In response to his announcement of fresh US arms shipments to Kyiv in July — paid for by European NATO members — one leading German think tank hailed the success of a European “coalition of the willing” in turning his policy around. Even some progressives reveled in the US president’s mercurial outbursts, like when he called his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, “crazy” or when he threatened harsher economic punishment against Moscow. We seemed far from the moment when Trump had sought to humiliate Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office.

Yet after the Trump–Putin summit in Alaska, it is striking how little Europe has achieved through these acts of submission. Its leaders surely consider Trump a vulgar charlatan and praise him only in order to manipulate his love of flattery. What their alleged political acumen seemingly never amounts to is any material success in outfoxing him.

If the EU is a self-styled “diplomatic superpower,” what initiatives has it taken on Ukraine that step out of Trump’s shadow? The US president makes perfunctory promises to listen to his European partners, only to devastatingly undercut their position in practice. He crassly speaks the language of “deals” and “interests,” only for European leaders to impotently reframe his policy in terms compatible with their own “values.”

This was already clear with the 5 percent defense spending pledge, which recast Trump’s demand as a European agenda. But take also the question of Ukrainian territory and the principle that borders should not be changed by force. Without much heed for grim recent precedents (from Bosnia to Israel and Azerbaijan), Europe’s leaders have widely presented this as an unbreachable red line. Yet after Trump publicly said last week that Ukraine must be ready to cede territory, a statement by European leaders on Saturday modified their principle in platonic terms. They fell back on the fiction (also voiced by the US president himself) that this was Ukraine’s decision to make, as if this were itself an act of self-determination.

European leaders had likewise insisted on an immediate ceasefire before negotiating the terms of any eventual peace settlement, thereby hoping to buy time without more permanently entrenching Ukrainian losses. Freezing the conflict, even without a workable peace, would also put off the moment of having to swallow unpalatable decisions. They could be grateful that in his talks with Putin in Alaska last Friday, Trump had at least avoided formalizing what a peace deal might look like. Yet he had dismissed the priority for a ceasefire — and dropped his own previous call for harsher sanctions on Russia if its leadership didn’t agree to an immediate truce. The Europeans were consulted as they had demanded, and then all but ignored once Trump met with Putin.

During negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv in April 2022, which took small steps toward the foundations of a truce, British premier Boris Johnson was reportedly dismissive of diplomatic pledges by Putin; he told Zelensky that NATO powers had Ukraine’s back and would support it as long as it wanted to fight for a better deal. This did not amount to Kyiv’s Western sponsors tearing up a peace offer; the body politic of invaded Ukraine was in any case hardly inclined to make concessions to Putin’s “security concerns.” Yet the outcome now may be worse, mutilating Ukraine’s sovereignty further even after hundreds of thousands of lives have been wasted. It may have then seemed plausible after the initial Ukrainian defense (and indeed before the successful counteroffensives that fall) to expel Russia from the territories it had occupied after February 24, 2022. Few say that now.

What of European powers’ future relations with Moscow? It seems a long time since ousting Putin from power or “regime change” was suggested as a condition for a peaceful settlement. Yet even as the US president directly meets with Putin, the main EU countries (plus Britain) are surely not thinking about détente and rapprochement so much as resisting the next invasion. For Ukraine, they can offer security guarantees — to be applied once the war has already been declared lost — and an as yet weakly developed plan for economic regeneration. If Ukraine’s south and east are to be permanently Russian and the wealth in its soil taken as reparations to the United States, Europe’s leaders perhaps imagine themselves as peacekeepers in what remains.

In the early months after the Russian invasion of February 24, 2022, some EU leaders spoke hopefully of using the war to accelerate the bloc’s flagship agenda: the Green Deal of collective borrowing and investment in the ecological transition. This was called not just a desirable move to “green” industry but also the necessary basis of the bloc’s energy self-sufficiency. Yet this has not withstood its foreign policy conformism to Washington. The eventual outcome, especially under Trump, is more prosaic: replacing fossil fuel purchases from Russia with American ones. Collective borrowing is still the order of the day, but now it is for the sake of rearmament, with the bloc’s economic dynamism centered on the 5 percent defense spending pledge.

On Monday, European leaders including Germany’s Merz, France’s Emmanuel Macron, and British premier Keir Starmer will accompany Zelensky to the White House in an apparent bid to convince Trump of the need for a harder negotiating position. The US president has publicly insisted that the ultimate decision will be theirs and not his — a rhetorical posture also distancing him from whatever concessions are made. Given that European leaders are taking no separate initiative to end the war, they will likely end up having to own Trump’s peace and even pay its financial costs. Most Europeans have not suffered the war as Ukrainians have. But European leaders’ claims of superpower status are also victims of this conflict and the American proposals for ending it.