IT took Europe just three weeks and a contentious Oval Office meeting to realize that its 75-year-old alliance with the United States was coming apart.
And when the Trump administration last week froze first the flow of American weapons to Ukraine and then the intelligence that warned of Russia’s impending missile launches and troop movements, a theoretical vulnerability became tangible.
The understanding that the American-led global order was over began dawning in Munich in mid-February, when US Vice President JD Vance harangued America’s closest allies at a conference usually known for displays of transatlantic unity.
Two weeks later, it was cemented in the Oval Office when a Ukrainian leader who had received little but standing ovations for three years was accused by Vance and US President Donald Trump of disrespectful warmongering and expelled from the White House, his lunch untouched.
These were just two in a dizzying series of diplomatic events that played out on both sides of the Atlantic and which promise to reverberate across the globe for years to come.
In a blizzard of meetings and decisions, multiple European countries discussed forming a “coalition of the willing” to help Ukraine, France offered to consider extending its nuclear umbrella to European allies, shares of European arms manufacturers rose 20%, and hushed speculation about the death of NATO became an openly discussed probability.
Reuters spoke to more than two dozen European and US political advisers and government officials for this story. Some described the backchannel jockeying by the Americans and Europeans as their alliance unraveled. Others recounted how shell-shocked European leaders first tried to mollify Trump, then publicly planned how to prop up Ukraine and defend themselves without the United States.
The reporting lays bare how American officials tried and failed to persuade Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to sign a crucial minerals deal and how their boiling frustration with the Ukrainian leader led to a disastrous White House encounter. Zelenskiy said publicly he feared the deal was trying to force him to “sell our country.”
Relations had frayed badly even before the rancorous Feb. 28 Oval Office meeting between Trump and Vance on the one side and Zelenskiy on the other. Trump had publicly called Zelenskiy a dictator and falsely accused him of starting the war with Russia. The Ukrainian leader responded that Trump was living in a Russian-created “disinformation space.”
By early March, Trump appeared to dash any hopes that he might relent: The US first froze weapons supplies to Ukraine, then suspended intelligence sharing, crucial for warning Ukraine of Russia’s impending missile launches and troop movements.
Ukraine’s battlefield situation has deteriorated in recent weeks. Open-source maps reviewed by Reuters show thousands of Ukrainian troops who stormed into Russia’s Kursk region last summer are nearly surrounded by Russian forces. Russia, meanwhile, has ramped up drone and missile strikes, according to data collected by the Institute for the Study of War.
