Trump's Calls Surprised European Leaders

The US president-elect asks a lot of questions.

While Europeans are quite nervous about President-elect Donald Trump, based on his campaign slogan “America First” and reputation as a critic of NATO, European authorities are gradually coming to terms with his return to the White House.

This opinion was expressed by writer and journalist David Ignatius in his column for The Washington Post, written based on a trip to Paris and Berlin.

“We worked with the first Trump administration, and we will work with the second. … You have to be emotionally neutral about what’s out of your control,” the journalist quotes the words of the Minister Delegate for European Affairs of France, Benjamin Haddad, which he said in the presence of French, German and Polish experts in Paris.

Ignatius claims there was no dissenting voice around the table. The big concern at this meeting, as all the others, was Trump’s position on Ukraine, for which Haddad warned that a U.S. “capitulation” to Russian President Vladimir Putin would be “disastrous” for Europe, Ignatius reports.

According to the journalists, European leaders have been contacting Trump since his victory on November 5. What they’ve encountered is a president-elect posing questions about Ukraine, rather than making demands.

As Ignatius writes, citing a high-ranking German official, when German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called Trump the weekend after the election, the latter showered him with questions.

“What do you think of [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky’s victory plan? What do you think of Putin?” Trump asked, according to a senior German official familiar with the call.

According to Ignatius, Europeans have gathered notes about similar calls by leaders of France, Poland, Denmark, the Czech Republic and other countries.

“The calls were friendlier than expected, and Trump was more in a listening mode — well prepared and not rambling,” said the German official.

Ignatius believes that these upbeat comments surely reflect Europe’s desire to develop a good working relationship with Trump at a time of “crisis and confusion”.

“In the East, an imperial aggressor; in the West, an America that is no longer transatlantic; and in the middle, a Europe that is weak,” the journalist quotes one of the former foreign ministers of an unnamed European country.

Europe’s leading spokesman in discussions with Trump, several officials told Ignatius, is likely to be Mark Rutte, a former Dutch prime minister who is the new secretary general of NATO. Rutte has been described as a “Trump whisperer,” in part because he assuaged the then-president after a 2018 tirade about NATO by agreeing that Trump was right to demand that alliance members spend more on defense.

According to the journalist’s information, Rutte is expected to travel to Mar-a-Lago soon to discuss strategy for the Ukraine peace negotiations that Trump has said he wants, officials told me. Rutte’s message will be that Trump’s interests and Europe’s are both served by a “just and lasting peace,” one that doesn’t reward Russian aggression and can provide durable security guarantees for Ukraine, the senior German predicted.

“Be aware that you have to solve Ukraine in a way that doesn’t come back to haunt you during your term,” is how the German official described the message to Trump to Ignatius.

A condition of any successful peace agreement is that “this war will never happen again,” because Ukraine’s security will be protected, representatives of the European authorities told the journalist.

During a private meeting in Brussels this week with NATO defense ministers, General Secretary Rutte urged European leaders to engage Trump.

“Don’t gossip about Trump. Call him and get him on board,” Rutte advised, according to one European official who was present. “Make sure that America stays on our side.”

According to him, Rutte also urged the European defense ministers to increase their defense spending well above the target of two percent of gross domestic product.

“If this war ends with Russia winning, we’ll have an emboldened Russia on our border, and the cost of driving Putin back won’t be 3 percent of GDP, but 4 or 5 percent,” Rutte told the group, according to the official.

Ignatius says that his takeaway from these conversations was that Europe knows it needs Trump. France and Germany, the traditional anchors of the European Union, are weak politically and financially. “A menacing Russia is at the door”, the journalist is convinced.

Trump is the leader of a “frazzled” transatlantic alliance, whether he likes it or not. The gut-check question is how he will work with Europe to stop the current conflict in Ukraine — and avoid another round, Ignatius sums up.

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