The short goodbye

In the space of a week, the Trump administration cut Ukraine and Europe out of peace talks with Russia and left the entire transatlantic alliance in turmoil. How will the continent's divided leaders respond to the stark new reality?

- Patrick Wintour MUNICH

As European leaders met in Paris on Monday to prepare an answer to their apparent exclusion from the talks about Ukraine's future, the existential and all-encompassing question of how to influence an unchained US president occupied every European leader.

Amid widespread calls at the summit for a large boost in defence spending, the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, said that his proposals for British and other European troops on the ground in Ukraine would only work with significant US support that is not yet on the table.

"Europe must play its role, and I'm prepared to consider committing British forces on the ground alongside others, if there is a lasting peace agreement, but there must be a US backstop, because a US security guarantee is the only way to deter Russia from attacking Ukraine again," Starmer said. His remarks amounted to a call for Donald Trump to recognise he cannot wash US hands of Ukraine without also damaging European security.

The Finnish president, Alexander Stubb, speaking at last week's Munich Security Conference, before the Paris meeting, offered some Nordic advice. "We Finns in these situations are cool, calm and collected so what we do first is have an ice bath and after that we go to the sauna and then we reflect." Faced by what he described as a "cacophony" of het-up and shocked diplomacy, he suggested: "We need to talk less and do more."

His Latvian counterpart, Edgars Rinkēvičs, said such discussions about Europe's relationship with the US resembled psychological counselling. He worried that part of European culture just may not be attractive to modern America.

The new prime minister of Iceland, Kristrún Frostadóttir, urged Europe to try to calm things down. "There is a lot of hot air and not much clarity about what the US is saying and what it is expecting. Let's make sure we are not reacting to the wrong things," she said.