Trump 2.0: Shaking Up Europe

Where should we start today, Molly? Oh, why don't we just pick a place at random, say, Ukraine? You know, you just spun the globe, put your finger on it, just so happened to be the place where all the news is right now. Because this week, diplomats from the U.S.
and Russia met to negotiate on the future of the war in Ukraine, which was something that the Biden administration was not willing to do without Ukraine at the table. But the Trump administration is willing to do without Ukraine at the table, which marks a pretty big shift in how the U.S.
deals with Russia. It's a very big shift.
I think it's too soon to say exactly what the results of this will be.

But at least rhetorically, it is a massive shift in the way America talks about our position in the world and our alliances.

Should anyone be surprised about this based on the way Trump talked about Ukraine and the rest of the world during the campaign?

Yes and no. Like so many things Trump does, it is shocking but not surprising.

A lot to talk about today, as always.

From the Journal, this is Trump 2.0.

I'm Ryan Knudsen.

And I'm Molly Ball.

It's Friday, February 21st. Coming up, President Trump wants to end the war in Ukraine.
So how is he going to do it? And what will that mean for the rest of Europe? Hi, this is Debbie, your Blinds.com design consultant. Oh, wow.
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in all states or situations. All right, so we spent the last few weeks talking mostly about

Thank you. All right, so we spent the last few weeks talking mostly about President Trump's efforts to cut the federal government.

We've been talking about Elon Musk and Doge and USAID, but now the focus has really shifted

overseas to Ukraine.

So to help us understand this shift in what's been going on with Ukraine, we brought in our colleague Alex Ward, who covers national security. Hi, Alex.
Hey, how are you? Hey, Alex. So, Alex, how would you describe how the U.S.
government's position is changing on Russia and Ukraine under the Trump administration? The Biden administration's whole view was the U.S. provides Ukraine support militarily, economically, and will only consider negotiations when the Ukrainians are ready.
The Trump administration has a very different view. Their view is now is the time to have negotiations because Ukraine can't win, which is a fair argument to make.
But the question now is, as the negotiations go, is does Putin actually want to negotiate? Will the Ukrainians agree to whatever might be on the table? And will the U.S. just cut a deal that in theory stops the fighting and call it as a win, but leaving the wounds to fester in Eastern Europe? So regardless of whether Ukraine wants these negotiations or not, these negotiations are now taking place between the U.S.
and the Russians. There was a meeting this week in Saudi Arabia.
As these negotiations get underway, what's the Trump administration's position compared to the Biden administration's? I mean, actually, in some ways, if you think about it, the position is quite similar, right? I mean, the Biden administration didn't want Ukraine and NATO. Trump doesn't want Ukraine and NATO.
The Biden administration didn't think Ukraine could necessarily win the war. The Trump administration doesn't think Ukraine can win the war.
And the Biden administration thought this war would end with a negotiated settlement. And the Trump administration believes it's going to end with a negotiated settlement.
So there actually isn't a massive difference. The big one, and this is a big one, is that the Biden administration said no deal about Ukraine without Ukraine.
There will only be negotiations when the Ukrainians say they are ready. And Trump is clearly saying the opposite, right? We're going to start these talks now, whether Ukraine wants to or not.
And there are talks literally happening without Ukraine. So that's a big shift.
But in terms of the grand architecture, there's actually a lot more similarity than differences between Biden and Trump. There is another big shift, though, which is in the way Trump is talking about this conflict, and specifically the way he's talking about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
After Trump's phone call with Putin, Trump said that Zelensky was a dictator. He said there should be new elections in Ukraine.
And he accused Ukraine of starting the war. What do you make of that? I mean, it's certainly shocking, right? I mean, we have known that Trump tends to occasionally listen to parrot Kremlin talking points, and he was on a long phone call with Vladimir Putin, so it's very possible that a lot of this literally came from that conversation.
But, I mean, this was quite the escalation. It is certainly the harshest comments by any U.S.
official, and of course it's coming from the president, since the all-out invasion began three years ago. Along those lines, Alex, I understand there's a lot of outrage about the administration's rhetoric, particularly toward Zelensky.
But is there any chance that this could be an effective strategy, that it could actually be effective in changing the dynamic, potentially even making peace more possible? I mean, yeah, right? One of the critiques of the Biden team was, hey, you guys are saying this is going to be a negotiated settlement and you're not negotiating. So maybe there should be at least some back channel or some clear effort, even if it doesn't work, even if it takes a long time.
Like be caught trying to end the war in a peaceful way that might actually give Ukraine an advantage. Now, Trump is basically doing what the critics said, right? Start the negotiation, see what is in the realm of the possible.
The problem here is that there is no clear indication that Putin wants to deal for real. And there's no clear indication that Trump is willing to stick out this negotiation until Ukraine kind of comes out more on top than not in what the final outcome will be.
It seems like President Trump is pushing for the war to end, but he's doing a lot of the pushing against Ukraine, and he wants the war to end even if that means giving in to Russia on some of its demands. Yeah, if the war ended right now, then Russia will have effectively taken 20% of Ukraine's territory, and there will be no security guarantees of what could happen in the future, say, if Russia rearms, which European intelligence indicates could happen in about five years.
And the overlying question to all of this is, does Trump desire, what does he desire more? A really good outcome in the negotiations in the war, or some sort of deal where the U.S. and Russia can become friends again? My instinct, and so far, it seems, he cares more about the U.S.-Russia relationship improving than he does about a good, quote-unquote, outcome in the Ukraine war.
And those two are quite literally, like like fighting in parallel. Molly, could this strategy cost Trump politically in any way if the Trump administration resolves this conflict by giving in to some or many of Russia's demands? Yeah, I think there is a possibility that this doesn't go over well politically.
We have seen that majorities of Americans consistently do see the Ukrainians as the good guys in this conflict. And depending on how you ask the question, do support the U.S.
taking the side of Ukraine. Now, that doesn't mean that people have unlimited patience for continuing to send money and aid or that people would favor sending American troops to aid the Ukrainians.
But, you know, the last time I saw a poll that asked people's approval of Vladimir Putin in the United States, it was something like 8%. Not a popular guy.
Putin is not a popular figure in the U.S., even among Republicans and Trump supporters. Let's talk about how Europe is responding to all this.
Alex, last week you attended the Munich Security Conference in Germany, which is this major annual convention of European security experts. And Vice President J.D.
Vance gave this big speech that seemed to reframe America's relationship with The threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it's not China, it's not any other external actor. And what I worry about is the threat from within.
The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.

There's so much buzz in Washington about this speech,

and it seems like something that is likely to sort of go down in history

and be remembered, which is pretty rare for anything a vice president says.

Do you think the speech was that important, and what did you think of it?

Well, a little bit of backstory.

So we interviewed J.D. Vance in Paris, you know, a couple of days, the day before the speech, excuse me, in which we were given a copy and we read it and we were able to ask him questions about it.

And it was very clear that he went in with the intention to shock, with the intention to basically send a signal of, hey, Europe, the biggest issue we have right now is we, the United States, provide you a lot of security.

And you Europeans are basically like letting legal immigrants in and censoring right wing speech.

And that doesn't feel like a fair trade.

Europe faces many challenges, but the crisis this continent faces right now, the crisis I believe we all face together, is one of our own making.

If you're running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you. Nor for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump.
Usually, that speech in Munich is just like, yes, the US and Europe agree to work together and we wish you'd spend more, but otherwise we'll be fine and we'll find some solution in Ukraine.

Like, it was a purposeful decision not to do that.

And to be in the room, you know, I was expecting the bombshell.

And I was trying to tell people, like, you need to be ready for what's to come.

And people in the room were not ready.

And you had, like, German ministers screaming no.

You had, by the end of the conference, one of the Munich security leaders cry and walk off stage. This order is easy to disrupt, it's easy to destroy, but it's much harder to rebuild.
So let us stick to these values, let us not reinvent them, but focus on strengthening their consistent application. Let me conclude and this becomes difficult.
I mean, this was a massive signal to Europe that, like, the U.S. is not who you thought it was.
It's not your friend anymore. All the evidence Europeans have is the U.S.
is not the friend of Europe that it used to be and is far more antagonistic than it used to be. And so I think this conference, which is supposed to kind of be about, you know, where to from here on Ukraine, ended up becoming something broader about where to from here for the transatlantic alliance writ large.
Where does Europe go from here? What options does it have? I mean, I think the loudest voices are those who are freaked out, right? Hey, maybe the U.S. isn't a reliable ally anymore.
You know, they might be selling Ukraine up a river here. This is a problem.
And now we in Europe need to actually like start reorienting our foreign policy in a way or away from the United States. We relied on the U.S.
security for so much. We spent on a bunch of other things, you know, like social welfare programs, et cetera.

And we've let our militaries decay. And now we're in this moment where the U.S.
has been warning us to spend more. And now, you know, effectively, this is shock therapy.
That would be the Trump administration's argument. And there are a lot of Americans that would sort of agree with it.
And frankly, there are now Europeans who are like, this is a bit on us. So, Alex, how would you how would you describe what the new world order is then under Trump and Trump's worldview?

I mean, it's hard to know. We're only a month in.

But I think it's very clear that the United States are no longer, as of this moment,

following the tenets of that post-World War II order, right?

Where it's now tariffs are good.

You know, we don't necessarily have to support a democracy.

Allies are not necessarily allies. They're takers, not sort of force multipliers.
This is a wholesale change in the way the U.S. has sort of done business.
And so if this were to continue, right, politics aren't linear. Things can change.
But if this were to continue, the U.S. will be a wildly different global actor.
And that not only just changes the way the U.S. does things, but also changes how our allies negotiate and our allies act and our adversaries act.
And it leads to a whole different order. And what's fascinating here is like basically for the last 70 or so years, you sort of knew that one of the variables in the world, the United States was a constant, right? Everything else moved around it.
Now one of the major variables in world politics is how the U.S. is going to act.
Molly, how long do you think this shift will last? Or will it just change again if a Democrat wins the White House in 2028? The argument that I've been hearing is that it is de facto permanent because no matter what happens next, people's sort of faith in the U.S. has been shattered.
That having now elected Trump twice, it doesn't matter if the next American presidents are staunch internationalists because they just can't trust us not to do something like elect a Trump who has opposite views. Right., as you were alluding to, there was this idea that sort of politics stops at the water's edge.
But we now see sort of definitively that there's a new Republican Party that doesn't believe that and that is poised to be the either ruling or opposition party in the U.S. for the next generation.
All right, we're going to take a

quick break. And when we come back, we'll talk some more with Alex about Russia and the deeper

meaning behind Trump's long live the king post. So stick around.
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See remixyogurt.com. All right, Molly, Alex, as you know, we love listener questions on this show, and we've got one from William Green in Brooklyn that happens to be about Russia.
When President Trump talks about geopolitics, he often talks about it in 19th and early 20th century terms, in terms of great powers and spheres of influence. And this is most obvious in his dealings with Vladimir Putin.
In light of that and in light of his recent controversial remarks on Ukraine,

my question is, does Trump think it was a mistake to push for the collapse of the Soviet Union

and would he welcome an attempt by President Putin to reclaim it?

Thank you.

Thanks for the question, William.

It's a really interesting one.

I will say, I don't know if I've ever heard Trump utter the words spheres of influence, right? But I do think there's an interesting point to be made here about sort of the tension between isolationism and nationalism, right? Because you have Trump saying that America first means America looks out for its own interest.

Other countries are free to do the same.

But inevitably, it comes into tension, right, when America has interests in these other places, but they are pursuing, single-mindedly, their own self-interest. So if you retreat from the world and say, no, no, we're only about America first now, you don't get to say what Russia does in Europe.
You've sort of forfeited your part of that argument. Oh, I have so many thoughts on this.
Okay. I'd love to hear them.
Okay, first of all, in Trump 1.0, I thought what was fascinating is their main sort of theory of the case was, hey, sovereignty. Every country gets to do what it wants.
I'm sort of going off of Molly's point here. Now it's very different, right? Vance goes into Germany and says, hey, Germans, do this.
Do this meaning crack down on immigration, stop policing speech online, as Vance was alluding to in Munich. Yeah, that's right.
Now it's very much listen to what us, the United States wants, but it's kind of a more MAGA, like they're trying to make, remake the world in the MAGA image, which is anathema to the sovereignty idea. So that's one.
Two, to be fair to the Trump administration, there is like a sort of grand strategic idea to the working with Russia here, and that is to pull it away from China, right? One of the things that they fault the Biden administration for doing was by defending Ukraine so much and by hitting Russia so hard that it effectively forced Russia into China's hands. And so by sort of appealing to Russia and offering its incentives to improve relations with the U.S., it might actually pull Russia away from China.
All right, Alex, thanks so much for your time. Yeah, thanks for having me.
Sorry I talk so much. Thanks, Alex.
All right, Molly, before I let you go, I've got one more question. On Wednesday, Trump posted on his media platform Truth Social, long live the king, referring to himself.
This was alongside an announcement that he's going to revoke a Biden-era approval of congestion pricing in New York City. And then the White House posted an image of Trump wearing a crown that said the same thing, long live the king.
Do you think that Trump is just trolling, or is this a reflection of how he actually sees himself? Yes. Yes to both.
I think the answer is yes to both. And it's nothing new.
And I think there's also a third option to which the answer is also yes. And that option is, or is this about the expansion of executive power in a way that many, particularly Republicans, have sought for many years.

And the answer to that is also yes. And then there's also this post that he made on social media where he said, he who saves his country does not violate any law, which seems to be sort of part of the same theme.
Right. This idea that he sees himself as having sort of imperial unrestricted power.
Look, there has always been this group of Republican legal scholars who believed that the president embodied the executive branch and ought to have vastly more power than he currently holds in the way, the sort of customs and norms of our constitutional system. Trump just seems to want to do stuff and not think that anyone should be able to stop him.
We also seem to be making this argument that some of these laws that he is accused of flouting, specifically I'm thinking of shutting down government agencies without congressional approval, are that the laws themselves are anti-American or they're part of the problem, and so he is the solution coming in and sort of getting rid of them or saying like, these shouldn't apply to me. Right.
And I think, you know, there's a really interesting and nuanced discussion to be had here about executive power, even if that is not necessarily the discussion that Trump himself is participating in, right? I think a lot of Americans have been frustrated for many years with the gridlock and polarization that have turned Congress into basically a non-functioning body and have made it impossible for governments to actually implement the things that candidates campaign on, right? So we have a campaign where one candidate's like, we're going to do health care. And the other candidate's like, we're going to reform entitlements.
And then no matter who it is that gets into office, they just can't do anything because of what a political scientist would call all of the veto points built into our system of governance. And the way that a lot of what started out as relatively straightforward checks and balances have been choked over the years with, you know, different bureaucratic requirements and institutions and personnel and so forth.
So I'm not trying to whitewash the arguably authoritarian impulses that Trump is flamboyantly displaying. But that doesn't mean that he doesn't have a point about the ways in which our system has made it hard for presidents to actually do the things that they promised to do.
And that voters are voting for them to do. And this is the argument of a lot of the Trump allies who say, this isn't contradictory to democracy.
This is democracy in action. People voted for Trump.
They want him to do the things that he said he was going to do. And if the system is set up in such a way as to make it impossible for him to do those things, he is actually being small-D democratic, pursuing the will of the people by seeking ways to do those things.
Well, thanks so much for your time, Molly. Really appreciate it.
Thanks, Ryan. Another fun one.
And we'll see you in a week. See you then.
Before we go, do you have any questions about what the Trump administration is doing? Email us and let us know. Please send a voice note to thejournal at wsj.com.
That's thejournal at wsj.com. Trump 2.0 is part of The Journal, which is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal.
This episode was produced by Enrique Perez de la Rosa and edited by Katherine Whalen, with help from Pierce Singhe. Molly Ball is the Wall Street Journal's senior political correspondent.

I'm Ryan Knudsen.

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