What will Europe do with Trump's America?

Kaia Kalas, the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission, stressed that Europe and Ukraine must be involved in any agreement if the US and Russia are to accept them.

Many European leaders have echoed this position, stressing the link between Ukraine’s security and European security.

Meanwhile, European leaders are rallying to support Zelensky after the controversial White House incident between Volodymyr Zelensky and Trump. Now the question is, can European leaders save the day by meeting Zelensky at a crisis summit in London?

Shortly after Trump’s sharp and angry remarks, mostly aimed at Zelensky, senior European politicians turned to the X to express their unconditional support for Zelensky and Ukraine.

“Today, it became clear that the free world needs a new leader. It’s up to us, Europeans, to take this challenge." the EU Foreign Chief said.

There are now questions about the Western alliance and the continued security blanket that the US has thrown over Europe since World War II.

Even before the extraordinary fallout between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, relations between Washington and Europe were already in a state of significant disarray.

Transatlantic relations were already fraying even before the undiplomatic scenes in the White House; indeed, in the past few weeks, there have been growing signs that European powers have finally decided to free themselves from their postwar dependence on America.

There are countless uncertainties about how all of this will work, NBC reports, but will Europe’s new military independence mean parity with the US within NATO?

For example, Macron and Starmer say they have no intention of reducing their cooperation with Washington. The point is that would American involvement on the green continent be reduced or even eliminated?

In any case, the scale of the challenge is vast; the US military is so deeply entrenched in Europe that removing it would leave huge holes in air defenses, military satellites, and cyberspace, said Esven Bishop, director of the Egmont Institute, a Brussels-based think tank.

Since World War II, the US has agreed to protect Europe’s declining military, with the understanding that in return it has been able to extend its hard and soft power across the continent and beyond.

Removing this co-existence will require hundreds of billions of dollars, likely to be provided by European taxpayers already struggling with a cost-of-living crisis and cuts to public services.

The combined E.U. defense budget of last year, $457 billion, was dwarfed by that of the U.S., $968 billion. Russia’s total, $462 billion, was also larger.

Friedrich Merz, after his center-right Christian Democratic Union party won the German election said; “My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the U.S.,” said .

As it goes, the German politician isn't the only one who thinks like this. There stands Macron, who for years has argued Europe needs to end its reliance on Washington. “We are experiencing a historic moment,” Macron said in response to Merz’s overtures. “It can lead to an unprecedented Franco-German agreement.”

It will take “five years as a minimum” for Europe to “fully deter Russia without any U.S. contribution,” said Luigi Scazzieri, assistant director at the Centre for European Reform, a London think tank. “You can probably get something that fills a large part of the gap in two to three years — but only with a lot of urgency.”

Regardless of those practical mountains, Merz’s comments showed an “understanding that we are in a new era of trans-Atlantic relations,” said Sophia Besch, a senior Europe fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington think tank.

The Trump administration “no longer acknowledges shared community of values, shared interests, and puts forward a very ‘great power competition’ view of the world, where Europe is a side player and Russia is an equal,” Besch said.