US relations with Europe will never be the same after Trump’s call with Putin

Europe’s American century is over. Two geopolitical thunderclaps on Wednesday will transform transatlantic relations.

Donald Trump’s call with Vladimir Putin brought the Russian leader in from the cold as they hatched plans to end the war in Ukraine and agreed to swap presidential visits.

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, meanwhile, went to Brussels and told European allies to “take ownership of conventional security on the continent.”

The watershed highlights Trump’s “America First” ideology and his tendency to see every issue or alliance as a dollars and cents value proposition. It also underscores his freedom from establishment advisors steeped in the foreign policy mythology of the West, who he thinks thwarted his first term.

Although Hegseth recommitted to NATO, something fundamental has changed.

America’s interventions won two world wars that started in Europe and afterwards guaranteed the continent’s freedom in the face of the Soviet threat. But Trump said on the campaign trail he might not defend alliance members who haven’t invested enough in defense. He thus revived a perennial point posed most eloquently by Winston Churchill in 1940 about when “The New World, with all its power and might” will step “forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”