It's time Europe started to prepare for a new cold war

The negotiations over Ukraine show that Trump has pulled the US defence rug from under our feet. Europe must stand alone or it will fail

- Richard Shirreff and Stefanie Babst

It is always painful to abandon longstanding certainties. The transatlantic security bond has, for 76 years, been one such certainty. Since 1949, generations of Europeans and North Americans have lived with the confidence that political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic shared a strong commitment to the international rules-based order, democratic principles, and a common vision of “Europe whole, free and at peace”.

Notwithstanding sporadic disagreements between individual allies, and regular requests from the US for Europe to bear a fairer share of the military burden, the allies’ vow to defend each other in case of need and maintain a credible military deterrent was never called into question, and neither was the willingness of any given occupant of the Oval Office to come to the aid of a Nato member if they were attacked.

Now, Donald Trump and his Maga acolytes have brutally shattered this certainty. The transatlantic partnership is unravelling in front of our eyes: in the space of 100 days, Trump has undermined Nato’s collective stance on defence; hit the global economy with tariffs; threatened the territorial integrity of dedicated allies Canada and Denmark; interfered in the internal affairs of allies with his brazen support for European right-wing populist parties; and departed from well-established multilateral bodies including the World Health Organisation, the International Criminal Court and the UN Climate Change Conference. In a series of hammer blows, Trump has shattered the rules-based global order.

Shockingly for Washington’s longstanding European allies, the Trump administration is prepared to hand on a plate to Vladimir Putin, the most brutal aggressor Europe has faced since Hitler, two major Russian foreign policy goals: the decoupling of America from European security, and the neutralisation of Nato.