Europe’s Union – a gift from history.Image: shutterstock.com
The EU is stronger than its reputation, but it must act more confidently. And she can’t let Trump put a spell on her, because he’ll be gone in three years.
December 24, 2025, 7:44 p.mDecember 24, 2025, 7:44 p.m
Matthias Naß / Zeit Online
It sounds like a platitude, but it remains fundamental to all of Germany’s political actions: We won’t find anything better than Europe. You have to remind yourself of this simple, big truth every now and then. Especially after a classic week in Brussels that couldn’t make anyone really happy, but in the end everyone was somewhat relieved going into the Christmas days.
The fight for new financial resources for Ukraine could not have started more dramatically than Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk with his warning that Europe would have to pay “either with money today or with blood tomorrow.” The EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas spoke of an “all or nothing week”.
“Everything” would have been a decision at the EU summit: Make Russia pay – we will make the frozen Russian assets available to Ukraine, which can use them to buy weapons for its defense and fill the gaps in the state budget. The attacker pays.
This decision was not made because the EU did not have that much courage to face the nuclear power Russia. But there was also no such thing as the “nothing” feared by Kaja Kallas. After all, the Union wants to take on new debt amounting to 90 billion euros and transfer the money to Ukraine so that it can survive Putin’s war of terror for two more years.
What was at stake was clear to everyone
So Europe has shown itself capable of acting, but also assertive? What was at stake was clear to everyone, including Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever, who was Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s opponent in the dispute over Russian assets. De Wever also knew that if Ukraine was not helped, the country would collapse. Such an outcome would be “the ultimate geopolitical decline for Europe that we will feel for decades to come,” said the Belgian. “From then on we no longer play a role.”
The horror scenario could be averted, but the EU did not demonstrate its real power in this fateful question either. It was actually like always. Powerful unity is opposed by particular interests. In the case of Ukraine financing, it was Belgium’s fear of Russian recourse claims. When the signing of the Mercosur free trade agreement with four South American countries was postponed at the same time, it was the resistance of French and Italian farmers.
Europe remains a “continent plagued by self-doubt” (Timothy Garton Ash). Which is fatal. The EU not only needs to represent its own interests more courageously. It also has to become stronger because only then can it hold the West together. This is being questioned in an arrogant way by Donald Trump. However, he is not yet hopelessly lost.
The USA’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) is based on the decline of Europe. But the passage of the NSS to the EU is far from a rational foreign policy analysis. It is pure radical nationalist resentment, as cultivated in the circles around Vice President JD Vance. Most Republicans are also likely to shake their heads at the hatred of Europe. It is certainly not the majority opinion in Washington. Wolfgang Ischinger from the Munich Security Conference is right: “It should be lowered.”
Europe must assert itself against Trump
Strategically, the main task of European foreign policy remains to preserve the unity of the West, together with the political forces in the USA that are willing to do so. Europe must assert itself against the Trump administration, not against the United States of America.
Three years from today, Trump’s successor will already have been elected and is preparing for his inauguration. There is much to suggest that it will not be a Republican. Horrified, the majority of Americans are turning away from the current president, as the recent elections show, most recently in Miami, where the Democrats won for the first time in 30 years. It is quite possible that Trump will be a so-called lame duck after the midterm elections next November.
Is it all just wishful thinking? If there is one constant in American politics, it is the ability to self-correct. This became evident after the disgusting hunt for communists in the McCarthy era as well as after the Nixon years, when the USA threatened to sink into the quagmire of the Vietnam War and Watergate. Time and again, this country, which has no shortage of mistakes, has freed itself from its own aberrations.
There is also good news
So let’s not let Trump jinx us, but instead pursue a policy that confidently defends Europe’s interests and values. Putin awakened the will to do this with his attack on Ukraine. Now the agreed investments in defense must actually come about. It doesn’t help much when, as is currently happening, the Germans and French fall out over the joint production of a combat aircraft, a 100 billion dollar project after all. It also doesn’t help when the French president starts his own telephone diplomacy with the Kremlin without coordination.
If the Europeans don’t act courageously, if they don’t take risks against both Putin and Trump, then, as Green Party leader Franziska Brantner put it, “we’re on the menu.”
It is the laborious, not at all glamorous, but sometimes very clever compromises made in Brussels that hold Europe’s Union, this gift of history, together. The fact that this has still been achieved is perhaps good news at the end of a dark political year.
This article was first published on Zeit Online. Watson may have changed headings and subheadings. Here’s the original.