16 years after forcing Europe to invite Ukraine into NATO, the US is forcing them to rescind the invitation

Trump has stunned Europeans by announcing peace talks have begun between him and Putin, hours after his defense secretary told a NATO summit the US opposes Ukraine's membership.

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is in Brussels today for his first NATO defence ministers summit. It’s been quite a day. The former Fox News host kicked off the meeting by telling European ministers the US will not support Ukraine joining NATO (which essentially kills any prospect of it ever happening) and Kyiv should give up on any hope of getting back its pre-2014 territory as part of a peace settlement negotiation. Then, just hours later, news broke that unbeknownst to Europeans, these peace negotiations had in fact just started.

Trump announced on his Truth Social platform at 6pm that he had just had a lengthy discussion with Vladimir Putin and both had agreed to “start negotiations immediately” on ending the war in Ukraine. There does not seem to have been a single European or Ukrainian involved in this, which directly violates European leaders’ insistence over the past months that there can be “no negotiations about Ukraine without Ukraine.” Trump only called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy after the phone call with Putin, to inform him about what had been decided.

Trump said Putin will be invited to visit the United States, and vice versa. “We have also agreed to have our respective teams start negotiations immediately, and we will begin by calling President Zelenskyy, of Ukraine, to inform him of the conversation,” Trump truthed. Respective teams meaning Trump’s and Putin’s - suggesting the Ukrainian team will not be involved. Germany’s foreign minister gave a stunned reaction to Politico: “Peace can only be achieved together. And that means: with Ukraine and with the Europeans.”

This afternoon, Hegseth attended a meeting of the Ukraine Defence Contact Group, which has been set up and led by the US since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as an outside-NATO body. The Trump administration has ended US leadership of the group and passed it on to the UK. But Hegseth, speaking after the British Defence Secretary John Healey, still seemed to be running the meeting. As Healey looked on stunned, Hegseth chastised the ministers for taking advantage of America and said a peace deal needs to be reached. “Honesty will be our policy going forward,” he said. Ukraine needs to be ready to take some major losses in order to secure peace. “Returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective. Chasing this illusionary goal will only prolong the war and suffering.”

That statement, which refers to Crimea, was an acknowledgement of the obvious that European politicians have just not wanted to say out loud because it would weaken Ukraine’s position ahead of negotiations. But then Hegseth went on to the bombshell that really stunned them. Ukraine cannot expect to be allowed to join NATO as part of a peace deal, he said, and the US does not support Ukraine’s NATO membership. Any peacekeeping force after the deal needs to be entirely manned by Europeans, not by NATO, and Ukraine can never enjoy Article 5 protection that would oblige the United States to defend them. “The United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement,” he said, meaning that Russia’s expected demand for NATO and Ukraine to commit to never uniting should be acquiesced to.

It is a deeply ironic development given that, in 2008, it was a US Republican president who forced through NATO’s invitation for Ukraine to join over the objections of Western Europe. Now, 16 years later, a new US Republican president will force Europe to rescind that invitation. Europe is just as impotent now as it was then. When will this continent ever be able to decide its own future?

At the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania, President George W Bush, coming to the end of his by-then deeply unpopular presidency, was pushing for a long-held neoconservative goal: the accession of the former Soviet states of Ukraine and Georgia to NATO. However, France and Germany were hesitant about extending the invitations, fearing that it would unnecessarily provoke Russia by encircling it with an alliance that was originally set up as an explicitly anti-Russian vehicle. In response, President Bush engaged in an intense pressure campaign to persuade the reluctant European allies. Ultimately, the summit concluded with a compromise: NATO declared that Ukraine and Georgia would become members in the future, but it avoided offering formal Membership Action Plans at that time. It was perhaps the worst of both worlds: it provoked Russia and gave credence to Putin’s idea that the West was trying to encircle it, while also giving both countries no rapid path to the membership that would protect them from a possibly-provoked Russia.

Many now believe that it was this invitation that led us to the situation we’re in today, though others believe that admitting that this may have even partially played a role makes one a Putin apologist. Whether it played a role or not, just four months after the invitation at that Bucharest summit, Russia invaded Georgia in support of the break-away regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Five years later, after losing its puppet government control over Ukraine because of the Maidan revolution, Russia invaded Crimea.

There are two schools of thought here. The first is that the Georgian and Ukrainian invasions show that Russia was always intent on using violence to keep these states in the Russian sphere, and this shows that they should have rapidly moved forward on the two countries’ NATO accession in 2008. The argument goes that the only reason Ukraine and Georia were invaded and not the Baltic States is because the latter had joined NATO in 2004.

The other school of thought is that it was the invitation itself that made Russia think it had to move fast before it became surrounded by enemy states, and that signing a MAP in 2008 would have only made Russia act faster (before a NATO accession was feasible). But either of these scenarios have the same start point: accession was pushed on Europe by the United States, and Europe would not have extended an invitation were it not for the control of Washington over this continent.

That it is the US who is now 16 years later demanding that the invitation be rescinded, while holding bilateral talks with Putin to resolve the war which may or may not have been caused by that invitation, shows just how much Europe remains America’s plaything. So much time has been wasted on this continent over the past 20 years while Europeans refused to acknowledge their own impotence and dependence. Even as all the warning signs were there of a dark future scenario in which the US turns against Europe while still controlling it, Europeans looked away.

And despite all the Trump administration’s pretence of the US stepping back from its control over Europe, all the symbolic ‘handing over the reigns’ of the Ukraine Defence Contact Group, the reality is that Trump has no real intention of relinquishing control. Why would he, when it’s that control that gives him the power to bully Europe which he so enjoys? "The United States will no longer tolerate an imbalanced relationship that encourages dependency," Hegseth told the ministers today. But he and his boss are clearly loving that dependency. Europeans should not expect the Trump regime to give that up willingly. They should be ready to fight.

How much longer will Europeans endure this humiliation?