Key to US response on Ukraine: A restoration of trust with allies

Before stepping into a tête-à-tête meeting in Munich Saturday with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on the Russia-Ukraine crisis, French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian offered a statement that was striking for its brevity and word usage.

Noting his pleasure at meeting with “Tony” once again, France’s chief diplomat said, “We have a very strong relationship, which I could summarize in two words: trust and transparency.”

Trust? That is not the word Mr. Le Drian would have used just a few months ago to characterize Franco-American relations, which had plunged to new depths of distrust and suspicion over a surprise U.S. deal that had replaced a French contract to supply Australia with a fleet of nuclear submarines.

And it’s not just France. “Trust” would almost certainly not have been the first word from NATO and other European allies of the United States in the months after last summer’s hasty and botched U.S. pullout from Afghanistan. Like the French over the submarine deal, America’s NATO allies had felt blindsided and disregarded by the unilateral withdrawal.

Mr. Le Drian’s highlighting of trust underscored the success of a campaign President Joe Biden and his top national security aides have undertaken since last fall to reestablish trust with European allies.

The goal of the effort: make transatlantic unity a formidable diplomatic weapon for confronting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s menacing stance toward Ukraine and European security.

After what administration officials say has been dozens of face-to-face meetings, hundreds of phone calls, and secure video conferences sharing intelligence and other information with key leaders, Mr. Biden’s campaign appears to be paying off as Mr. Putin takes his first steps in what the Pentagon and military experts say could be a full invasion of Ukraine.

One concrete example: On Tuesday, Germany announced that in response to Mr. Putin’s recognition Monday of two separatist regions of eastern Ukraine, it would halt all moves toward operation of the new Nord Stream 2 pipeline set to deliver natural gas from Russia to Western Europe.

Also, on Tuesday, the European Union announced it was setting in motion the steps for imposing stiff sanctions on Russia. President Biden followed suit in the afternoon at the White House, telling reporters gathered in the East Room of new sanctions targeting key Russian financial institutions and Russia’s ability to finance its debt in Western markets.

Attempt to sow divisions

After the Biden team’s very public adoption of the reassuring and inclusive mantra “nothing about Europe without Europe” – meaning the U.S. would not negotiate anything about Europe with Mr. Putin without European allies – observers on both sides of the Atlantic say transatlantic trust is not just on the mend, but growing stronger.

And that will be important, they add, in dealing with Mr. Putin from a position of strength rather than disunity and debilitating second-guessing.

“From the outset, Putin has approached this crisis by trying to split the United States from its European partners and to sow divisions among Europeans, the point being to divide and weaken the Western alliance by fundamentally undermining trust,” says Andrew Lohsen, a fellow in the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

“But after the intense diplomacy we’ve seen from the Biden administration and the nonstop efforts to build a united front,” he adds, “I think it’s pretty clear that, at least so far, the Russian government’s efforts to create mistrust and fracture the alliance have not been successful.”

Mr. Biden has kept up an intense schedule of bilateral and multilateral calls with European leaders, sharing a level of intelligence that presidents have not always been willing to divulge, officials say. On Friday, the president spoke with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz hours before a televised address in which he asserted that intelligence suggested Mr. Putin had already taken the decision to invade Ukraine.

Indeed President Macron has emerged both as Europe’s de facto leader in the Ukraine crisis and as perhaps Mr. Biden’s closest transatlantic ally.

“The coin of the realm”

Vice President Kamala Harris was also at the Munich Security Conference that Secretary Blinken attended. Among several side meetings, the vice president sat down with leaders of the Baltic States, who have been nervous about Russia’s proliferating military actions in the region and Mr. Putin’s assertions of a Russian “sphere of influence” over the countries of the former Soviet Union.

Trust may sound to some like a secondary factor in a confrontation pitting global powers against each other. But many seasoned diplomats say a sense of trust among allies will be essential in the weeks ahead – whether Mr. Putin launches a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, or ultimately stops at “defending” the two separatist regions of Luhansk and Donetsk while continuing Russia’s smothering pressure on an already reeling Ukraine.

One of America’s greatest diplomats, the late George Shultz, considered trust – whether among allies or adversaries – an indispensable feature of diplomacy and a critical element in avoiding war.

Without trust, the Cold War secretary of state believed, diplomatic relations would be unfruitful, doubts among allies would hinder forging a strong common front, and tension-reducing accord would remain hard to come by. (Mr. Shultz told this reporter in a 2020 interview that “Trust is the coin of the realm” of international relations.)

Maintaining trust among transatlantic partners has not always seemed a top priority of the Biden administration.

Europe’s faltering confidence in the U.S. tumbled to new lows under former President Donald Trump, who spoke disparagingly of Western allies – especially Western Europeans and Canada – and threatened to pull the U.S. out of an “obsolete” NATO.

But there was genuine surprise in European capitals last year when President Biden failed to quickly put transatlantic relations back on track.

In the eyes of many, the successive blows to mutual trust only confirmed the assessment offered by then German Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2018 that “we [in Europe] are going to have to learn to make our own way” without a protective and doting Uncle Sam.

Challenges ahead

The Ukraine crisis and Mr. Putin’s targeting of Western unity appear to have reversed a deepening estrangement – a point Mr. Blinken seemed to relish in comments he made Friday alongside German Foreign Minister Annalena Boerbock.

“I think President Putin has been a little bit surprised at the solidarity Annalena talked about ... at the way that NATO has come together, the European Union has come together,” he said. “As long as we maintain that solidarity ... whichever path President Putin chooses, we will be ready to respond.”

Others caution that what looks like trust-based unity now could start to break up as the Ukraine conflict deepens and starts to affect European countries differently.

“The longer this goes on, the more difficult it’s going to be for everybody to remain on the same page,” says Mr. Lohsen, a former monitoring officer with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Ukraine mission. “We’ll have to keep a close watch on the glimmers of mistrust that remain out there.”

Among the indicators he’ll be watching: How does Germany, which looked like the weak link in transatlantic unity early on, evolve as the conflict drags on? How does the U.S. address Ukraine demands for Western solidarity while keeping European allies united?

And how far will Mr. Macron take his suggestion he reportedly offered early in the crisis that a “Finlandization” of Ukraine – or what Mr. Lohsen calls “enforced neutrality” barring Ukraine from ever achieving NATO membership – might be the best way to avoid war in the heart of Europe?

Continued U.S. role

Some insist that, just as it was the U.S., as leader of the Western alliance, that had to act first and most strongly to reestablish transatlantic trust to confront Russia, it’s going to fall largely to the U.S. to keep the unity on track.

“It was organizing principles like democratic governance, solidarity, free trade, and free association of open economies that brought the United States and Europe together during the Cold War. And that can be the basis for putting [transatlantic] relations back on track and enabling Western powers to take on the rising rogue authoritarian powers in both Beijing and Moscow,” says Harry Kazianis, a specialist in foreign and defense policy at the Center for the National Interest in Washington.

A “haphazard” U.S. foreign policy over the past decade that has swung between priorities and sown global confusion about America’s superpower status and commitment to its postwar values is at the root of mistrust of the U.S. in Europe, Mr. Kazianis says.

The deliberate campaign the Biden administration has undertaken to reassure allies and recommit to those principles will be a key element in creating an enduring alliance to confront the world’s rising authoritarians and illiberal tendencies, he says.

“Once we make it clear we’re not going to abandon Europe again once the Ukraine crisis is over, and that we’ve calibrated our pivot to Asia in a way that also keeps us committed to Europe, I think the reassurance that comes out of that can put an alliance based on those founding principles on track,” he says.

“The trust reestablished,” he adds, “I think our European partners with stick with us and follow.”