The EU is pushing for more war to try to prop up its economy, but Putin’s gains cannot be pushed back short of going nuclear (literally).
The grim reality is that the U.S. and the EU would have to engage in a nuclear war to dislodge Russia from the extensive territory in eastern Ukraine and Crimea that Russia already holds. Given time, Putin will almost certainly claim the remaining territory in the Donbas region of Ukraine that he insists is essential to achieve before realizing peace with Kyiv.
As I have argued previously, simply by withdrawing from the conflict, Trump can force an endgame to the war. Corruption-plagued Zelensky’s insistence that Ukraine must preserve sovereignty by refusing to concede Donbas to Putin has made clear to President Trump the economic reality of the war. Without U.S. munitions, financing, and military assistance, Zelensky’s plan for the EU to spend another $1 billion monthly to acquire military hardware elsewhere will be another futile waste in an already failed effort to dislodge Russia from Ukraine.
That Trump did not include the EU in formulating his 28-point peace plan made clear that Trump views the Europeans, not Russia, as the barrier to peace. Trump appears to have reached a turning point in October, when he rejected the plan advanced by General Keith Kellogg, U.S. Special Envoy on Ukraine, to supply Ukraine with long-range, nuclear weapons-capable Tomahawk cruise missiles with a range sufficient to strike deep into Russia.
Obviously, Trump realized that increasing Ukraine’s military ability to bring the war to Russia was a strategy that would escalate the far-from-being-a-proxy-war between NATO and Russia into a direct war between the United States and NATO, on the one hand, and Russia, on the other. The best efforts of U.S. Special Envoy Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, during a prolonged meeting with Putin in December failed to convince Putin to end the war by having the Russian military stand down in place. Having won significant battlefield gains in Donbas during September and October, Putin appears confident his military forces will be able to take the approximately 20 percent of the industrial-rich Donbas region still under Ukrainian control in the coming weeks.
The EU decision to scuttle Trump’s peace plan delivers an opening to fundamentally restructure the relationship between Europe and the United States that has existed since the end of World War II. Utilizing Vice President J.D. Vance as his point man, Trump can spark disagreements that turn the majority of EU nations against Germany and France, along with their legions of unelected bureaucrats in Brussels and Luxembourg, who see the strange marriage of neo-Marxism, cultural Maoism, and radical Islam as the doorway to their long-imagined globalist dystopia. By opening its borders to an invasion of Muslim “immigrants,” the EU has set in motion a revolutionary force determined to impose upon the continent a version of Sharia law that has nothing whatsoever in common with what the EU likes to call “democracy.”
David Horowitz, in his 2006 book, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, was among the first to argue that Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1972 radical Islamic revolution in Iran had achieved a fusion between radical jihadist Islam and neo-Marxism that would ultimately typify Democrat party’s affinity for anti-American and anti-Israeli groups like Hamas. The greatest danger to Western Europe is not that Putin will invade Finland or Poland, but that radical Islamic anti-Christian immigrants will undermine the Western Civilization principles that have spurred the rise of Europe since the dawn of the Enlightenment.
Islam may already have achieved the population ratio in Western Europe to mobilize university-indoctrinated woke radical leftists to support demands for separate Sharia law-based states in various EU countries. Such a movement would supplant the 1950s fear that the Soviet Union would invade and occupy Western Europe.
Such a dynamic would further make NATO obsolete, with the irony that Russia has largely avoided the EU’s coming Islamic revolution by limiting Islamic immigration into the Russian Federation’s non-Islamic states. By combating Chechnyan Islamic terrorism by encouraging religious reformation within the Muslim-dominated states in the Federation, Russia has largely forestalled the Sharia separatists’ demands for independence.
The “America First” National Security Strategy document that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth released on December 6, at the annual Reagan National Defense Forum, provided context for understanding President Trump’s change of course to distance the U.S. from NATO and the EU’s enthusiasm to continue funding Ukraine’s war with Russia. On page 25, the Hegseth report noted that continental Europe has been losing share of global GDP—down from 25 percent in 1990 to 14 percent today, “partly owing to national and transnational regulations that undermine creativity and industriousness.” Indirectly, the report attributed the loss of GDP share to the radicalization of Islamic immigration that the continent has experienced since 1990:
But this economic decline is eclipsed by the very real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure. The larger issues facing Europe include the EU’s and other transnational bodies’ activities that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.
The report stressed that, should such trends continue, Europe will be “unrecognizable in 20 years or less. As such, it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies.”
As the Atlantic Council reported, on November 10, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) exposed an alleged $110 million corruption scheme at the state-owned nuclear company Energoatom. Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andrii Yermak, the country’s lead negotiator in talks with the U.S., was implicated in the scandal. He resigned as anti-corruption officials searched his residence.
With U.S. support evaporating, on December 12, Zelensky met in London with the leaders of Great Britain, France, and Germany to form a “coalition of the willing” to continue the war against Russia and fill the void left by Washington’s withdrawal of support. By announcing at the conclusion of the meeting that he would not concede territory to Russia, Zelensky effectively killed President Trump’s 28-point peace plan.
With NATO refusing to face the reality that Russia has won the war in Ukraine, and with the EU incapable of creating policies that benefit the EU middle class by expelling an increasingly problematic population of Islamic immigrants who are unwilling to assimilate, an economic rapprochement between Trump and Putin might further fracture an already tottering EU and NATO. As Europe distances itself from the Trump White House, Trump might consider pursuing a country-specific policy toward Europe. For instance, he could impose 50% or 100% tariffs on the EU to retaliate against the European Commission for trying to finance a debt-plagued EU by fining X and Elon Musk €120 million for alleged speech offenses and for failing to meet transparency obligations under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA).