As August gives way to September, Europe will need to move from well-intentioned hope to a more muscular realism. Russia’s latest deadly attack on Kyiv, including on the EU’s own offices, confirms that peace is nowhere in sight. Donald Trump’s decision to demonize India for buying Russian oil – rather than pressuring Vladimir Putin himself – confirms that America is not serious about securing peace in Ukraine either.
Meanwhile, Trump’s threats of more tariffs on Britain and the EU if they continue to regulate big US technology firms confirm that their hopes of using the trade deal to stabilize the transatlantic relationship and keep America onside over Ukraine have been dashed.
It is not that Europe has been inactive this summer. A lot of good work has been done on designing ways to provide credible guarantees for Ukraine’s security after a ceasefire or even a peace settlement has been agreed with Russia.
Giorgia Meloni claimed proudly in her Rimini speech that an Italian idea for a guarantee modeled on NATO’s mutual defense agreement was now “the main proposal on the table.” European officials have said, equally proudly, that America has agreed to support such European guarantees by providing intelligence, surveillance and some unspecified form of backing from the US Air Force.
Regarding Ukraine, the best aspect of Meloni’s speech was that she made no attempt to praise Trump for his diplomacy towards Russia, emphasizing instead the heroic resistance of the Ukrainian people and the collective role of the West in supporting them.
International observers will have noted with approval that she is too smart and strong to copy the NATO Secretary-General by calling Trump “Daddy” or emulate other European leaders by praising him lavishly. But she nevertheless needs to apply to Ukraine the central claim of her Rimini speech, the idea that she is governing “nel campo del reale,” on the field of reality.
Talking about security guarantees may have been a realistic way to try to persuade both Trump and Putin that Europe is serious and that a peace, once achieved, can be maintained. But that effort has now run its course. Any further talk about security guarantees, including asking whether a NATO-style guarantee would have any credibility or whether America’s promise of support is to be believed, would be a waste of time. Even worse, it would be a distraction.
The reality is that the war is continuing, that Russian attacks on civilian targets are deadlier than ever, and that Putin shows no interest in stopping. If Italian and European diplomacy and defense policy are to re-enter “il campo del reale,” they are going to have to find immediate and concrete ways to strengthen Ukraine’s heroic resistance and to show Putin that, contrary to what he seems to believe, time is not on Russia’s side.
Ukraine’s most critical military need, as last week’s missile attack on Kyiv demonstrated, is more and better air-defense systems. While both sides are using missiles and drones to attack each other, more of the Russian missiles are getting through Ukrainian defenses. Ukraine is succeeding in its own attacks on Russian oil refineries and other logistical assets but its attempts to attack Russian cities are proving less successful as they are better defended.
Only once Ukraine gains bigger supplies of long-range missiles, including a new cruise missile called the “Flamingo” that it is building itself, will the fight become more balanced. What Ukraine particularly needs to do is to move from simply making sporadic, even if successful, attacks inside Russia to building a sustained campaign of air warfare. Purchasing more American missiles, using funds provided by Europe, may help that campaign to begin this autumn, but it would be even better if European countries could provide Ukraine with more of their own missile stocks.
An encounter with reality came over the weekend when EU foreign ministers met informally and heard Kaja Kallas, high representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and vice president of the European Commission, speak in urgent terms about Ukraine’s funding gap, asserting that the financial responsibility lay with Russia – not EU taxpayers.
The reference, which the assembled ministers discussed, was to the US$200 billion of Russian central bank reserves that have been frozen in European accounts since the invasion in 2022.
The simplest and most effective way to punish Russia and help Ukraine would be to confiscate those assets and hand the funds to Ukraine. Another would be to invest the funds in higher-yielding securities and hand the income to Ukraine. But several European countries, including Italy, are opposing this on the grounds that it may breach international law.
It is hard to see how protecting the funds of a war criminal corresponds with “il campo del reale.” At Rimini, both Meloni and her predecessor, Mario Draghi, expressed forceful concern about the geopolitical irrelevance of the European Union, and called for new actions to make it more relevant. The Italians and other Europeans should take their chance to use the EU’s financial muscle to restore its relevance. Plenty of clever ways have been proposed to circumvent the legal objections.
Muscle-power is also going to be necessary in the face of the man the seven European leaders, including Meloni, were facing across the White House dining table last week. Even before European officials had had time to study the belatedly supplied written version of the trade agreement that the EU Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, verbally agreed to with Trump in Scotland in July, the US president had shown that his instinctive response to a submissive counterpart is simply to ask for more.
He has done this on behalf of the huge issue that the EU’s trade negotiators had felt proud of having excluded from July’s trade deal: technology firms and the enforcement of the EU’s Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act.
His threat is not one you would expect from an ally: If the EU maintains the rules and penalties envisaged by those two digital acts, he says, America will retaliate with new tariffs on goods imports and even perhaps with personal sanctions against European officials responsible for enforcing that legislation. He is making the same threat against the United Kingdom.
In an interview with the Financial Times on August 29, the EU’s Competition Commissioner Teresa Ribera vowed to fight this American blackmail – including, if necessary, tearing up the July trade deal. Muscles are needed, on trade as well as on defense. Welcome back, Europe, to the new reality of the transatlantic relationship.
Formerly editor-in-chief of The Economist, Bill Emmott is currently chairman of the Japan Society of the UK, the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the International Trade Institute.
This is an updated version of the English original of an article published in Japanese and English on Italy’s La Stampa and, in English, on the Substack Bill Emmott’s Global View It is republished here with kind permission.
