They came smiling, but the task was immense. After dozens of summits at which a hesitant and discordant EU had failed to agree on anything like a cohesive plan for the end of the war in Ukraine, this one had, suddenly and vitally, to be different, reports The Guardian.
The leaders of France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Spain and – speaking for the Nordic and Baltic states – Denmark, plus Britain’s prime minister and the heads of Nato and the European Commission and Council, arrived in Paris reeling from a historic week.
Last Monday, the US vice-president, JD Vance, had told Europe its “excessive regulation” of potentially harmful technologies was all wrong. Two days later, Donald Trump called Vladimir Putin to start talks between the US and Russia on ending the war.
The same day, the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, told his European opposite numbers at a meeting in Brussels that the US was no longer “primarily focused” on Europe’s security and the continent would have to take the lead in defending Ukraine.
On Friday came Vance’s coup de grâce: a violent ideological assault accusing European democracies of quashing free speech, bowing to multiculturalism and running scared of voters. Forget Russia: the real threat to Europe, he said, was “from within”.
The US vice-president then declined to talk to the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, instead meeting Alice Weidel, the leader of the far-right AfD, a party that Germany’s security agency keeps under surveillance as a potential threat to democracy.
In five days, leaders were made forcefully aware of three realities: first, the US and Europe appeared no longer to share the values that, since 1945, had underpinned the transatlantic alliance. Second, Europe could no longer rely on the US to defend it.
Third – on the immediate question to which Europe was most eagerly awaiting an answer – the US plan, insofar as it actually exists, did not seem to include a place at the table for Europe (including, for that matter, Ukraine).
Monday’s Paris summit was convened by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, because, in the words of an Élysée adviser, “there is now a necessity for Europeans to do more, better and in a coherent way, for our collective security”.