Feb 14, 2025

Boris Johnson

Zut alors! Gott im Himmel! To listen to the wailing here at the Munich Security Conference you would think that Donald Trump has pulled out of Nato and cravenly capitulated to the Kremlin.

You get the impression that the valiant Volodymyr Zelensky has been sold down the Dnieper, that Ukraine is done for and that a new darkness covers the face of Europe.

It’s a betrayal! It’s appeasement! It’s Munich all over again, says everyone at Munich, as if each individually struck by his or her own brilliance in spotting this eerie echo – as they see it – of the disasters of the 1930s.

In the imagination of the euro-nomenklatura, the 47th president of the US is suddenly sporting a grey moustache and spongebag trousers and waving a bit of paper above his head called ‘peace in our time’.

Yes, Trump is apparently the reincarnation of Neville Chamberlain, who so pathetically failed to stand up to Hitler, and as for Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, and the rest of the Trump cabinet – they are just a bunch of cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

They have abandoned the idea of US hegemony, wail the Europeans, and a buoyant Putin is poised to sweep into Eastern Europe, and build back a Russian sphere of influence, while the Chinese rightly conclude that they can do whatever they like with Taiwan and the South China seas. ‘It’s over! It’s over for the West!’ is the word at Munich – and of all the panicky nonsense I have heard in my time, this takes the biscuit.

Strip away the usual anti-Trump hullabaloo of the liberal media and you can see that the basic facts are unchanged. Those facts favour the West – and they favour Ukraine.

For three years the Ukrainian troops have fought like lions and they are unconquered. They have comprehensively demolished Putin’s propaganda about their country. They have proved their nationhood and their willingness to fight. That patriotism is inextinguishable and in one way or another they will eventually win their freedom. But we must face the reality of this miserable war and its human cost.

We in the West have egged those Ukrainians on; we have held their coat and praised their courage. We have administered a steady drip feed of support.

We have done enough to stop Ukraine from being crushed, but out of a mistaken queasiness about the consequences for Russia itself, we have not yet done enough to ensure that Ukraine wins. Biden did not do enough. The Europeans did not do enough and in the face of this appalling, grinding conflict Trump is absolutely right to want to make peace.

He is right to talk to Putin and Zelensky, as he said he would – and no, I see no sign whatever that he will betray the Ukrainians. I know that he does not want to betray them, not at all, and I don’t believe that he can.

He can’t launch his presidency with a rout for the West and allow Putin to humiliate Nato. He cannot and will not tolerate another Afghanistan, the chaotic implosion of a Western-facing government; and be in no doubt that is what would happen.

If the Kyiv government were to fall, as the result of an unjust peace, and if Putin were to get Ukraine back under his tyrannical thumb – then that whole vast country would erupt in an insurrection that makes Bosnia look like a picnic. The violence would last for decades and the spillover would continue to drag down the world economy for years.

Trump doesn’t want that. Nor does he want to sustain the consequent damage to the prestige of the US – and the fatal loss of momentum for his new and dynamic administration. He knows that the stakes are very high and therefore we should listen carefully to what he is actually saying, as opposed to what some of his critics fear he may mean.

Donald Trump is determined – to judge by the words of his defence secretary Hegseth and by what Trump said himself in the Oval Office – that any peace deal should result in a free, sovereign and prosperous Ukraine, fortified by new and strong security guarantees of a kind that ensure Putin never attacks again.

As Trump told the media himself, he believes there can be no peace deal unless Putin gives back land that he currently holds. Above all, Trump 47 is continuing the tradition of Trump 45 and giving a global lead in offering unprecedented military support to the Ukrainians.

In short, the Trump administration is continuing to back Ukraine against what Hegseth called ‘Putin’s war of aggression’ – not least because, as Trump put it himself, he can’t let Putin win.

That is the Trump plan, in a nutshell. It is common sense and to achieve this objective he needs ‘peace through strength’ – and here we come to his justified complaint about the handling of the war so far.

There is only one way to make the Ukrainians strong and that is for their friends and supporters to pay, and to pay more. We are now at the beginning of a long overdue negotiation – not between the Russians and the Ukrainians, but between the US and the Europeans.

Trump’s message is very simple. It is that we Europeans can no longer sit around like sulky kids, waiting for the grown-ups in Washington to devise, and pay for, a plan for Ukraine.

This is our continent, our future and so far the Europeans have abjectly failed to take responsibility.

Take the question of Ukrainian membership of Nato, which Hegseth is supposed to have ‘taken off the table’. Actually, he has not done any such thing.

He has simply said that it isn’t realistic as part of a negotiated settlement with Putin and that is obviously true. If Putin were now to accept Ukraine signing up immediately for Nato – when he has fed so many Russians into the mincer – then I expect he would be promptly assassinated by members of the Russian nationalist right and hurled into the ice floes of the River Moskva.

That does not mean, of course, that Putin can eternally constrain the choices either of a sovereign Ukraine or of Nato. For Ukraine to drop its aspirations to Nato membership, you need to change the Ukrainian constitution – which isn’t going to happen, not under Zelensky or any other potential democratically elected leader. And after decades of promises Nato cannot now repudiate its commitment to Ukraine – not without complete destruction of Nato’s own credibility and the principles on which the alliance was founded.

All Trump and Hegseth are saying is that Nato membership, as part of the deal, is not practical politics now and no European government is in any position to dissent. It is absurd for the Europeans to feign indignation on this point.

When did you last hear a European government insisting on urgent Nato membership for Ukraine? Has Britain been championing that cause? Have you heard Starmer even murmur that it would be a good idea?

The euro-whingers need to look at the history of this question. Back in 2008 there was one country that passionately argued for Nato to embrace Ukraine. It was the United States, at the Nato summit in Bucharest.

Who said no? It was the Germans and the French, mainly because Europeans were already mainlining Russian gas. They were nervous of upsetting Putin. As for the Brits, the then PM, Gordon Brown, didn’t even bother to turn up.

As things have turned out, the Americans were completely right. Imagine if we had taken Ukraine properly into Nato then, with an Article 5 security guarantee. The Ukrainians would then have been locked into an irreversible path, away from Russian-style corruption and moving ever faster towards Western democracy and freedom. We would have cleared up that fatal ambiguity about Ukrainian status and identity; and Putin would never have invaded, not in 2014 or in 2022.

In other words, it wasn’t the Americans who held up Nato membership; it was the timorous and appeasing Europeans. Which is precisely why the Europeans cannot now complain about Hegseth’s other observation – that Ukraine is simply not in a position, right now, to take back by force all the land it has lost since 2014.

How did the French and the Germans respond when Putin’s men invaded the Crimea and the Donbas? They set up a useless rigmarole called the Minsk Process (I am afraid the UK, again, was not even at the meeting), which treated the war as a domestic spat rather than a violent attack by Russia on Ukraine.

The Europeans didn’t even think of seriously helping the Ukrainians to fight Putin and that limp posture continued until 2018 when Washington finally broke the taboo, and gave the Ukrainians valuable lethal weaponry, under the presidency of – you guessed it – Donald J Trump.

Look at this conflict from the American point of view. You see a lot of European handwringing, but no real guts, no leadership. Even today we haven’t produced a plan – mainly because the Germans are blocking it – to do what we did to Saddam and Gaddafi and seize Putin’s frozen assets. Why haven’t we taken this obvious step and seized the $300billion, much of it in Belgium?

This cash could be used, legally, to help recompense the Ukrainians for the destruction Putin has inflicted, on the understanding that a lot of it would be used to pay back the Americans for their support. Why are we hanging around?

It is getting urgent, because after three years we Europeans are not coming anywhere near the American levels of support for Ukraine. I am afraid Trump is right about the proportions of military assistance given and the failure of Europeans to share the burden. If you doubt him, look at the graphs supplied by the Kiel Institute, which I take to be impartial.

The US contribution dwarfs the rest of us – about $65 billion in military kit alone and Trump is right to want us to do more.

Americans work damn hard. They are on the whole more productive than Europeans and they take shorter holidays. They do not spend so much on welfare and they do not have state-funded cradle-to-grave healthcare services.

They do not see why they should pay so much more, per head, than the Europeans to avert a total disaster in Europe. They elected Trump with a clear mandate – not to abandon Ukraine, but to address that point.

It is therefore time for us all to step up. If Ukraine cannot be urgently inducted into Nato – and I accept that Putin will not desist if those are the terms – then we need the next best thing.

We need to make Ukraine impregnable – as Pete Hegseth says – to further attack and that means that we all need to increase our effort: logistics, intelligence, tanks, planes, guns, shells, drones. Use the $300billion; stop such madness as paying Mauritius £18billion to steal the Chagos islands from the UK.

We need to invest in UK defence manufacturing and technology, and if we go at it with conviction, there are big opportunities for British jobs and growth. We can help turn Ukraine into a steel-quilled porcupine, so heavily fortified that Putin will never try to take another bite.

To make this transformation we Europeans cannot just sit back, in our infantile way, and expect the Americans to do it for us. Britain can lead it, just as we led in 2022, when Putin invaded, and Ben Wallace set up the Ramstein process that shifted so much weaponry so fast to Ukraine.

It may amaze you, but Britain is a great power. We have more heavy lift military aircraft than the almost the whole of the rest of Europe. We are and always have been the natural No.2 in Nato, the quintessential transatlantic power in that we have worked decisively to engage America in the peace and security of Europe.

We need to do the same again, now. Yes, I believe the US would support such a European-led project, with intelligence and air cover; indeed, the Trump administration has said as much. But to keep the Americans in and properly engaged, we must this time show that we mean business.

Donald Trump is not betraying the Ukrainians – not at all. At the end of all this, he wants a free, sovereign and independent Ukraine. He knows that the peace and security of Europe – and the world – depends on the outcome, as well as his own political legacy.

But to achieve that end he also knows that the time has come to be brutally objective – and fair – with the Europeans. It is time for us to stop panicking, stop whingeing, step up and increase our share of the burden.

It is also time for Britain to come off the sidelines and give a lead.