Latest news with #TheNewWorld
Forbes
12 hours ago
- Business
- Forbes
A U.K. News Venture Is Seeking To Buck The Global Trend Of Declining Sales
The New World, founder and Editor in Chief., Matt kelly says willingness to act on gut instinct is ... More part and parcel of being an entrepreneur Question: How do you make a small fortune? Punchline: Easy. You start with a large fortune and then invest in a newspaper business. As jokes go, it's not side-splittingly funny, but it does reflect the realities of the newspaper industry. Globally, sales of national, regional and local newspapers have been in decline for around two decades. To make matters worse, advertisers have long since moved a significant portion of their spending online, a trend that has made life even tougher for publishers that retain a commitment to printed media. Looking ahead, it seems likely that sales and circulation figures will continue to fall. So, on the face of it, this does not seem like a particularly opportune time to take an entrepreneurial bet on a news-focused publication that was born out of the turmoil caused by the U.K.'s decision to leave the European Union. But that's what Matt Kelly, founder and Editor in Chief of The New World ( previously, The New European) is doing. With the backing of some high profile investors, he is rebranding the publication, with the aim of increasing its circulation and appeal at a time when the market tides seem to be running in the other direction. When I spoke to him, I was keen to get his view on the scope for entrepreneurship to flourish in a print media market that seems to be in continuing decline. Launched in 2016, The New European was intended to be a four-edition pop-up newspaper - a temporary exercise aimed at putting the pro-EU case and lobbying for a second referendum. Almost a decade later, it has achieved profitability on the back of about 33,000 paid sales per edition. Now rebranded as The New World, its focus has widened, and Kelly sees an opportunity to expand the subscriber base nationally and ultimately internationally. If the original brief was to counter the politics that drove Brexit, the new remit is to take a stance against what Kelly describes as global populism. As he acknowledges, changing a formula that is currently delivering a profit is an inherently risky undertaking. 'I feel this is an audacious thing to do,' he says. 'It gives me massive butterflies in my stomach. We have made the New European profitable, and now we are rolling the dice again. But it is a necessary boldness. Part and parcel of being an entrepreneur is a willingness to act on gut instinct and take a risk.' Standing still could be a bigger risk. While the publication found an audience, a continuing focus on reversing Brexit may not bring in new subscribers in the future, nor prevent existing readers from cancelling over time. The hope is that a rebrand will re-engage the existing audience and prove attractive to newcomers. If that kind of pivot makes sense, the move has to be seen against the realities of the U.K.'s newspaper market. According to a 2024 survey by media regulator Ofcom, 51% of British adults got most of their news from newspapers in 2018. By 2024, this had fallen to 34%, with only 22% using print and the rest favoring online editions. Meanwhile, there is also evidence that populations around the world are turning away from news. A global survey by the Reuters Institute for Journalism uncovered a trend towards disengagement, 39% of respondents sometimes or often avoided news. So, how do you counter that trend, particularly if you're a niche publisher, albeit one with a national reach. The short answer might be, you provide a product that resonates with the target audience. As Kelly recalls, there was no business plan for The New European until the first circulation figures came in. 'I would have been happy with six or seven thousand,' he says. 'The first week's total was 40,000. That showed there was a viable market for a niche magazine.' Initially, the title was owned by regional publisher Archant, which ran into financial problems and was bought out by private equity. At that point, Kelly sought investors to back his business plan and managed to attract some well-known names from tech and media. These included VCs Saul and Robin Klein, TransferWise founder Taavet Hinrikus and figures from the media, including CNN's Mark Thompson, former FT editor Lionel Barber and Ed Elliot of media firm Edelman. 'Some like Saul and Robin are VCs, but they are investing as angels,' says Kelly. 'We have also allocated 16,000 shares to people who have invested between £15 and £2,000. They are mostly readers.' The investors are aligned with the mission, so is this merely a good deed in wicked world rather than true investment? Kelly insists that is not the case. 'There is goodwill here, but this is a business. The investment isn't philanthropy,' he says. As he acknowledges, the investors probably won't see the 10x or 20x return demanded by VCs but if the time comes to sell the exit value could be driven by more than sales and revenues. 'I think any future buyer will be paying for influence,' Kelly says. The aim, therefore, is to ensure the publication becomes more influential.' Despite the pressures caused by the ongoing declining circulation trend, there has been a flurry of investment in the U.K. media market lately. A relative newcomer Tortoise Media has bought the venerable Observer newspaper from the Guardian for an undisclosed sum and political magazine, The Spectator has been purchased by Sir Paul Marshall for £100 million. Sir Paul was also an investor in right-leaning television startup GB News. So is this a good time for media entrepreneurship? Kelly is cautiously optimistic, arguing that after a period in which traditional publishing models were upended by the internet, business models are once again becoming clear. For its part, The New World sees subscription rather than advertising as the revenue driver. And the appetite of the audience is changing. So there is an opportunity for new entrants that can say we represent what you (the reader) are feeling.' And of course that's a principle that cuts in a lot of directions. While the The New World is designed to appeal to progressives, the GB News TV channel - another post-Brexit enterprise - is aimed at those who dress right. The common factor is giving a niche audience what it relates to . That's probably the space in which news media entrepreneurship can thrive in right now. From political YouTube channels to print and broadcast platforms, there are audience segments that are hungry for outlets that reflect their own outlook. For those who can keep costs down and clear focus, there can be money to be made, even if in the bigger media world, the commercial pressures are huge. I
CNN
13-02-2025
- Business
- CNN
US relations with Europe will never be the same after Trump's call with Putin
CNN — 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.' Trump is returning to the rationale used by many presidents wary of foreign entanglements from the start of the republic, saying Wednesday, 'We have a little thing called an ocean in between.' Hegseth's stunning bluntness It's long been clear that the second Trump administration would place new demands on America's European partners, which will now lead to agonized choices for governments that have chosen social spending over defense. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte told the European Parliament last month that Europeans must come up with more cash for their militaries. 'If you don't do it, get your Russian language courses or go to New Zealand,' he said. But Hegseth was still jarring. He formalized Trump's demand for alliance members to spend 5% of GDP on defense and said the US would prioritize its growing clash with China and the security of its borders over Europe's. 'The United States will no longer tolerate an imbalanced relationship which encourages dependency,' said the new Pentagon chief, who was wearing a stars-and-stripes pocket square. The tough new approach is not like Trump's fantasy of displacing Gaza's Palestinians to build the 'Riviera of the Middle East.' It's a rational response to changed political realities. The Greatest Generation that fought World War II and produced presidents who understood the dangers of a power vacuum in Europe is gone. Any American who has an adult memory of the Cold War against the Soviet Union is in their mid 50s at least. And the most powerful competitor to the United States is in Asia not Europe. So, it's fair for Trump to ask why the continent has still not taken over its own self-defense 80 years after the defeat of the Nazis. Successive American presidents and European leaders have failed to rethink NATO for the 21st century. In retrospect, the transatlantic alliance left itself badly exposed to the most transactional and nationalist American president since the 19th Century. Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested in a recent interview on 'The Megyn Kelly Show' on Sirius XM that the US should not be the 'front end' of European security but rather the 'back stop.' And he rebuked big European powers. 'When you ask those guys, why can't you spend more on national security, their argument is because it would require us to make cuts to welfare programs, to unemployment benefits, to being able to retire at 59 and all these other things,' Rubio said. 'That's a choice they made. But we're subsidizing that?' Trump's treatment of allies like Canada and Mexico, as well as his calls for Denmark to hand over Greenland, shows his disdain for the multilateral US foreign policy of old. He's always praising Putin and China's President Xi Jinping over their smarts and strength. It's obvious he thinks them the only worthy interlocutors for the tough leader of another great power, the United States. 'Trump's agenda isn't about European security: it's that he thinks the USA shouldn't pay for European security,' said Nicholas Dungan, founder and CEO of CogitoPraxis, a strategic consultancy in The Hague. 'This isn't a new era of transatlantic relations, it's a new era of global big-power relations replacing the deliberately institutional structures of the liberal international order.' The US message on Ukraine that Europe didn't want to hear The first test of this new US-Europe reality will come over Ukraine. Trump said that negotiations to end the Ukraine war will start 'immediately' after his call with Putin, who has been frozen out by the West since his illegal invasion of Ukraine, a sovereign democracy, three years ago. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was not included, in an alarming sign for the government in Kyiv. Zelensky was at the center of everything the Biden administration did on the war. Trump did call Zelensky later Wednesday, but the American president is already fueling fears he'll cook up a resolution that favors Russia. Asked by a reporter whether Ukraine would be an equal partner in peace talks, Trump replied: 'It's an interesting question,' and appeared to think carefully, before replying, 'I said that was not a good war to go into,' apparently buying Putin's line that the conflict was the fault of a nation brutally invaded by an authoritarian neighbor. Hegseth was just as blunt. He laid out US starting points for the negotiation: that Ukraine could not return to its pre-2014 borders before the invasion of Crimea, that it could not join NATO and that US troops would play no part of any security force to guarantee any eventual peace. Any peacekeeping force would have to be made up of European and non-European troops and would not be covered by NATO's mutual defense clause — meaning the US wouldn't bail it out in the event of a clash with Moscow's forces. Former President Joe Biden was also reticent about Ukraine getting a path to NATO membership, fearing a clash with nuclear-armed Russia that could morph into World War III. And Trump's insistence that European peacekeepers will not wear NATO uniforms will be seen as a similarly prudent move by many observers to avoid dragging the US into a conflict with Russia. But Wednesday was also the best day for Putin since the invasion, since it swept away many of Ukraine's aspirations. Hegseth argued that he was simply dispensing realism. And he has a point. No one in the US or Europe thought the clock could be turned back to 2014. And Ukraine was unable to win back its land on the battlefield despite billions of dollars in Western aid. Still, by taking such issues off the table, Trump, the supposed deal maker supreme, deprived the Ukrainians of a bargaining chip that could have been used to win concessions from his old friend Putin. As it stands, Trump seems to have no objection to Russia retaining the spoils of its unprovoked invasion. This is not surprising — since like Russia, America now has a president who believes great powers are entitled to expansionism in their regional areas of influence. But rewarding Russia with a favorable settlement would set a disastrous precedent. A chilling historical analogy The US-Russia call and a future summit with Putin in Saudi Arabia, which Trump said would happen soon, may be a hint that he's not just cutting Zelensky out of the deal – but Europe too. In a statement, France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Spain, the European Union, the European Commission, plus the United Kingdom and Ukraine, warned 'Ukraine and Europe must be part of any negotiations.' And they warned Trump, who seems to want a peace deal at any cost, that 'a just and lasting peace in Ukraine is a necessary condition for a strong transatlantic security.' Former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt is worried by the cozy call between Trump and Putin. 'The disturbing thing is of course that we have the two big guys, the two big egos … believing that they can maneuver all of the issues on their own,' he told Richard Quest on CNN International. Bildt evoked the most damning historical analogy possible — the appeasement of Adolf Hitler by Britain that allowed the Nazis to annex the Sudetenland. 'For European ears, this sounds like Munich. It sounds like two big leaders wanting to have peace in our time, (over) a faraway country of which they know little. They are preparing to make a deal over the heads of that particular country. A lot of Europeans know how that particular movie ended.' Trump's detailed strategy remains opaque. The dashing of many of Zelensky's aspirations means that Kyiv's agreement to any Putin-Trump deal cannot be taken for granted. And after his steady gains on the battlefield, there's no certainty that the Russian leader is as desperate for a swift settlement as Trump, who has long craved a Nobel Peace Prize. But the framework of a possible settlement has been a topic of private conversations in Washington and European capitals for months, even during the Biden administration. As Hegseth made clear, Ukraine's hopes of regaining all its lost land is unrealistic. What may emerge is a solution along the lines of the partition of Germany after World War II, with Russian-occupied territory frozen under its control with the rest of Ukraine — on the other side of a hard border – remaining a democracy. Perhaps the western edge would be allowed to join the European Union, like the old West Germany. But this time, US troops won't make it safe for freedom. 'The US position on Ukraine as articulated today should surprise no one in Europe: it's just what European insiders have been saying to me off the record, in back channels, behind the scenes for two years: West Ukraine and East Ukraine, like West Germany and East Germany but in this case – EU Yes, NATO No,' said Dungan.
CNN
13-02-2025
- Politics
- CNN
Analysis: 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.' Trump is returning to the rationale used by many presidents wary of foreign entanglements from the start of the republic, saying Wednesday, 'We have a little thing called an ocean in between.' It's long been clear that the second Trump administration would place new demands on America's European partners, which will now lead to agonized choices for governments that have chosen social spending over defense. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte told the European Parliament last month that Europeans must come up with more cash for their militaries. 'If you don't do it, get your Russian language courses or go to New Zealand,' he said. But Hegseth was still jarring. He formalized Trump's demand for alliance members to spend 5% of GDP on defense and said the US would prioritize its growing clash with China and the security of its borders over Europe's. 'The United States will no longer tolerate an imbalanced relationship which encourages dependency,' said the new Pentagon chief, who was wearing a stars-and-stripes pocket square. The tough new approach is not like Trump's fantasy of displacing Gaza's Palestinians to build the 'Riviera of the Middle East.' It's a rational response to changed political realities. The Greatest Generation that fought World War II and produced presidents who understood the dangers of a power vacuum in Europe is gone. Any American who has an adult memory of the Cold War against the Soviet Union is in their mid 50s at least. And the most powerful competitor to the United States is in Asia not Europe. So, it's fair for Trump to ask why the continent has still not taken over its own self-defense 80 years after the defeat of the Nazis. Successive American presidents and European leaders have failed to rethink NATO for the 21st century. In retrospect, the transatlantic alliance left itself badly exposed to the most transactional and nationalist American president since the 19th Century. Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested in a recent interview on 'The Megyn Kelly Show' on Sirius XM that the US should not be the 'front end' of European security but rather the 'back stop.' And he rebuked big European powers. 'When you ask those guys, why can't you spend more on national security, their argument is because it would require us to make cuts to welfare programs, to unemployment benefits, to being able to retire at 59 and all these other things,' Rubio said. 'That's a choice they made. But we're subsidizing that?' Trump's treatment of allies like Canada and Mexico, as well as his calls for Denmark to hand over Greenland, shows his disdain for the multilateral US foreign policy of old. He's always praising Putin and China's President Xi Jinping over their smarts and strength. It's obvious he thinks them the only worthy interlocutors for the tough leader of another great power, the United States. 'Trump's agenda isn't about European security: it's that he thinks the USA shouldn't pay for European security,' said Nicholas Dungan, founder and CEO of CogitoPraxis, a strategic consultancy in The Hague. 'This isn't a new era of transatlantic relations, it's a new era of global big-power relations replacing the deliberately institutional structures of the liberal international order.' The first test of this new US-Europe reality will come over Ukraine. Trump said that negotiations to end the Ukraine war will start 'immediately' after his call with Putin, who has been frozen out by the West since his illegal invasion of Ukraine, a sovereign democracy, three years ago. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was not included, in an alarming sign for the government in Kyiv. Zelensky was at the center of everything the Biden administration did on the war. Trump did call Zelensky later Wednesday, but the American president is already fueling fears he'll cook up a resolution that favors Russia. Asked by a reporter whether Ukraine would be an equal partner in peace talks, Trump replied: 'It's an interesting question,' and appeared to think carefully, before replying, 'I said that was not a good war to go into,' apparently buying Putin's line that the conflict was the fault of a nation brutally invaded by an authoritarian neighbor. Hegseth was just as blunt. He laid out US starting points for the negotiation: that Ukraine could not return to its pre-2014 borders before the invasion of Crimea, that it could not join NATO and that US troops would play no part of any security force to guarantee any eventual peace. Any peacekeeping force would have to be made up of European and non-European troops and would not be covered by NATO's mutual defense clause — meaning the US wouldn't bail it out in the event of a clash with Moscow's forces. Former President Joe Biden was also reticent about Ukraine getting a path to NATO membership, fearing a clash with nuclear-armed Russia that could morph into World War III. And Trump's insistence that European peacekeepers will not wear NATO uniforms will be seen as a similarly prudent move by many observers to avoid dragging the US into a conflict with Russia. But Wednesday was also the best day for Putin since the invasion, since it swept away many of Ukraine's aspirations. Hegseth argued that he was simply dispensing realism. And he has a point. No one in the US or Europe thought the clock could be turned back to 2014. And Ukraine was unable to win back its land on the battlefield despite billions of dollars in Western aid. Still, by taking such issues off the table, Trump, the supposed deal maker supreme, deprived the Ukrainians of a bargaining chip that could have been used to win concessions from his old friend Putin. As it stands, Trump seems to have no objection to Russia retaining the spoils of its unprovoked invasion. This is not surprising — since like Russia, America now has a president who believes great powers are entitled to expansionism in their regional areas of influence. But rewarding Russia with a favorable settlement would set a disastrous precedent. The US-Russia call and a future summit with Putin in Saudi Arabia, which Trump said would happen soon, may be a hint that he's not just cutting Zelensky out of the deal – but Europe too. In a statement, France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Spain, the European Union, the European Commission, plus the United Kingdom and Ukraine, warned 'Ukraine and Europe must be part of any negotiations.' And they warned Trump, who seems to want a peace deal at any cost, that 'a just and lasting peace in Ukraine is a necessary condition for a strong transatlantic security.' Former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt is worried by the cozy call between Trump and Putin. 'The disturbing thing is of course that we have the two big guys, the two big egos … believing that they can maneuver all of the issues on their own,' he told Richard Quest on CNN International. Bildt evoked the most damning historical analogy possible — the appeasement of Adolf Hitler by Britain that allowed the Nazis to annex the Sudetenland. 'For European ears, this sounds like Munich. It sounds like two big leaders wanting to have peace in our time, (over) a faraway country of which they know little. They are preparing to make a deal over the heads of that particular country. A lot of Europeans know how that particular movie ended.' Trump's detailed strategy remains opaque. The dashing of many of Zelensky's aspirations means that Kyiv's agreement to any Putin-Trump deal cannot be taken for granted. And after his steady gains on the battlefield, there's no certainty that the Russian leader is as desperate for a swift settlement as Trump, who has long craved a Nobel Peace Prize. But the framework of a possible settlement has been a topic of private conversations in Washington and European capitals for months, even during the Biden administration. As Hegseth made clear, Ukraine's hopes of regaining all its lost land is unrealistic. What may emerge is a solution along the lines of the partition of Germany after World War II, with Russian-occupied territory frozen under its control with the rest of Ukraine — on the other side of a hard border – remaining a democracy. Perhaps the western edge would be allowed to join the European Union, like the old West Germany. But this time, US troops won't make it safe for freedom. 'The US position on Ukraine as articulated today should surprise no one in Europe: it's just what European insiders have been saying to me off the record, in back channels, behind the scenes for two years: West Ukraine and East Ukraine, like West Germany and East Germany but in this case – EU Yes, NATO No,' said Dungan. Such a solution would conjure a cruel historical irony. Putin, who watched in despair from his post as a KGB officer in Dresden as the Soviet Union dissolved, may be on the verge of creating a new East Germany in 21st century Europe with America's help.
Yahoo
13-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
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.' Trump is returning to the rationale used by many presidents wary of foreign entanglements from the start of the republic, saying Wednesday, 'We have a little thing called an ocean in between.' It's long been clear that the second Trump administration would place new demands on America's European partners, which will now lead to agonized choices for governments that have chosen social spending over defense. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte told the European Parliament last month that Europeans must come up with more cash for their militaries. 'If you don't do it, get your Russian language courses or go to New Zealand,' he said. But Hegseth was still jarring. He formalized Trump's demand for alliance members to spend 5% of GDP on defense and said the US would prioritize its growing clash with China and the security of its borders over Europe's. 'The United States will no longer tolerate an imbalanced relationship which encourages dependency,' said the new Pentagon chief, who was wearing a stars-and-stripes pocket square. The tough new approach is not like Trump's fantasy of displacing Gaza's Palestinians to build the 'Riviera of the Middle East.' It's a rational response to changed political realities. The Greatest Generation that fought World War II and produced presidents who understood the dangers of a power vacuum in Europe is gone. Any American who has an adult memory of the Cold War against the Soviet Union is in their mid 50s at least. And the most powerful competitor to the United States is in Asia not Europe. So, it's fair for Trump to ask why the continent has still not taken over its own self-defense 80 years after the defeat of the Nazis. Successive American presidents and European leaders have failed to rethink NATO for the 21st century. In retrospect, the transatlantic alliance left itself badly exposed to the most transactional and nationalist American president since the 19th Century. Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested in a recent interview on 'The Megyn Kelly Show' on Sirius XM that the US should not be the 'front end' of European security but rather the 'back stop.' And he rebuked big European powers. 'When you ask those guys, why can't you spend more on national security, their argument is because it would require us to make cuts to welfare programs, to unemployment benefits, to being able to retire at 59 and all these other things,' Rubio said. 'That's a choice they made. But we're subsidizing that?' Trump's treatment of allies like Canada and Mexico, as well as his calls for Denmark to hand over Greenland, shows his disdain for the multilateral US foreign policy of old. He's always praising Putin and China's President Xi Jinping over their smarts and strength. It's obvious he thinks them the only worthy interlocutors for the tough leader of another great power, the United States. 'Trump's agenda isn't about European security: it's that he thinks the USA shouldn't pay for European security,' said Nicholas Dungan, founder and CEO of CogitoPraxis, a strategic consultancy in The Hague. 'This isn't a new era of transatlantic relations, it's a new era of global big-power relations replacing the deliberately institutional structures of the liberal international order.' The first test of this new US-Europe reality will come over Ukraine. Trump said that negotiations to end the Ukraine war will start 'immediately' after his call with Putin, who has been frozen out by the West since his illegal invasion of Ukraine, a sovereign democracy, three years ago. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was not included, in an alarming sign for the government in Kyiv. Zelensky was at the center of everything the Biden administration did on the war. Trump did call Zelensky later Wednesday, but the American president is already fueling fears he'll cook up a resolution that favors Russia. Asked by a reporter whether Ukraine would be an equal partner in peace talks, Trump replied: 'It's an interesting question,' and appeared to think carefully, before replying, 'I said that was not a good war to go into,' apparently buying Putin's line that the conflict was the fault of a nation brutally invaded by an authoritarian neighbor. Hegseth was just as blunt. He laid out US starting points for the negotiation: that Ukraine could not return to its pre-2014 borders before the invasion of Crimea, that it could not join NATO and that US troops would play no part of any security force to guarantee any eventual peace. Any peacekeeping force would have to be made up of European and non-European troops and would not be covered by NATO's mutual defense clause — meaning the US wouldn't bail it out in the event of a clash with Moscow's forces. Former President Joe Biden was also reticent about Ukraine getting a path to NATO membership, fearing a clash with nuclear-armed Russia that could morph into World War III. And Trump's insistence that European peacekeepers will not wear NATO uniforms will be seen as a similarly prudent move by many observers to avoid dragging the US into a conflict with Russia. But Wednesday was also the best day for Putin since the invasion, since it swept away many of Ukraine's aspirations. Hegseth argued that he was simply dispensing realism. And he has a point. No one in the US or Europe thought the clock could be turned back to 2014. And Ukraine was unable to win back its land on the battlefield despite billions of dollars in Western aid. Still, by taking such issues off the table, Trump, the supposed deal maker supreme, deprived the Ukrainians of a bargaining chip that could have been used to win concessions from his old friend Putin. As it stands, Trump seems to have no objection to Russia retaining the spoils of its unprovoked invasion. This is not surprising — since like Russia, America now has a president who believes great powers are entitled to expansionism in their regional areas of influence. But rewarding Russia with a favorable settlement would set a disastrous precedent. The US-Russia call and a future summit with Putin in Saudi Arabia, which Trump said would happen soon, may be a hint that he's not just cutting Zelensky out of the deal – but Europe too. In a statement, France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Spain, the European Union, the European Commission, plus the United Kingdom and Ukraine, warned 'Ukraine and Europe must be part of any negotiations.' And they warned Trump, who seems to want a peace deal at any cost, that 'a just and lasting peace in Ukraine is a necessary condition for a strong transatlantic security.' Former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt is worried by the cozy call between Trump and Putin. 'The disturbing thing is of course that we have the two big guys, the two big egos … believing that they can maneuver all of the issues on their own,' he told Richard Quest on CNN International. Bildt evoked the most damning historical analogy possible — the appeasement of Adolf Hitler by Britain that allowed the Nazis to annex the Sudetenland. 'For European ears, this sounds like Munich. It sounds like two big leaders wanting to have peace in our time, (over) a faraway country of which they know little. They are preparing to make a deal over the heads of that particular country. A lot of Europeans know how that particular movie ended.' Trump's detailed strategy remains opaque. The dashing of many of Zelensky's aspirations means that Kyiv's agreement to any Putin-Trump deal cannot be taken for granted. And after his steady gains on the battlefield, there's no certainty that the Russian leader is as desperate for a swift settlement as Trump, who has long craved a Nobel Peace Prize. But the framework of a possible settlement has been a topic of private conversations in Washington and European capitals for months, even during the Biden administration. As Hegseth made clear, Ukraine's hopes of regaining all its lost land is unrealistic. What may emerge is a solution along the lines of the partition of Germany after World War II, with Russian-occupied territory frozen under its control with the rest of Ukraine — on the other side of a hard border – remaining a democracy. Perhaps the western edge would be allowed to join the European Union, like the old West Germany. But this time, US troops won't make it safe for freedom. 'The US position on Ukraine as articulated today should surprise no one in Europe: it's just what European insiders have been saying to me off the record, in back channels, behind the scenes for two years: West Ukraine and East Ukraine, like West Germany and East Germany but in this case – EU Yes, NATO No,' said Dungan. Such a solution would conjure a cruel historical irony. Putin, who watched in despair from his post in Dresden as the Soviet Union dissolved, may be on the verge of creating a new East Germany in 21st century Europe with America's help.
CNN
13-02-2025
- Politics
- CNN
Analysis: 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.' Trump is returning to the rationale used by many presidents wary of foreign entanglements from the start of the republic, saying Wednesday, 'We have a little thing called an ocean in between.' It's long been clear that the second Trump administration would place new demands on America's European partners, which will now lead to agonized choices for governments that have chosen social spending over defense. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte told the European Parliament last month that Europeans must come up with more cash for their militaries. 'If you don't do it, get your Russian language courses or go to New Zealand,' he said. But Hegseth was still jarring. He formalized Trump's demand for alliance members to spend 5% of GDP on defense and said the US would prioritize its growing clash with China and the security of its borders over Europe's. 'The United States will no longer tolerate an imbalanced relationship which encourages dependency,' said the new Pentagon chief, who was wearing a stars-and-stripes pocket square. The tough new approach is not like Trump's fantasy of displacing Gaza's Palestinians to build the 'Riviera of the Middle East.' It's a rational response to changed political realities. The Greatest Generation that fought World War II and produced presidents who understood the dangers of a power vacuum in Europe is gone. Any American who has an adult memory of the Cold War against the Soviet Union is in their mid 50s at least. And the most powerful competitor to the United States is in Asia not Europe. So, it's fair for Trump to ask why the continent has still not taken over its own self-defense 80 years after the defeat of the Nazis. Successive American presidents and European leaders have failed to rethink NATO for the 21st century. In retrospect, the transatlantic alliance left itself badly exposed to the most transactional and nationalist American president since the 19th Century. Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested in a recent interview on 'The Megyn Kelly Show' on Sirius XM that the US should not be the 'front end' of European security but rather the 'back stop.' And he rebuked big European powers. 'When you ask those guys, why can't you spend more on national security, their argument is because it would require us to make cuts to welfare programs, to unemployment benefits, to being able to retire at 59 and all these other things,' Rubio said. 'That's a choice they made. But we're subsidizing that?' Trump's treatment of allies like Canada and Mexico, as well as his calls for Denmark to hand over Greenland, shows his disdain for the multilateral US foreign policy of old. He's always praising Putin and China's President Xi Jinping over their smarts and strength. It's obvious he thinks them the only worthy interlocutors for the tough leader of another great power, the United States. 'Trump's agenda isn't about European security: it's that he thinks the USA shouldn't pay for European security,' said Nicholas Dungan, founder and CEO of CogitoPraxis, a strategic consultancy in The Hague. 'This isn't a new era of transatlantic relations, it's a new era of global big-power relations replacing the deliberately institutional structures of the liberal international order.' The first test of this new US-Europe reality will come over Ukraine. Trump said that negotiations to end the Ukraine war will start 'immediately' after his call with Putin, who has been frozen out by the West since his illegal invasion of Ukraine, a sovereign democracy, three years ago. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was not included, in an alarming sign for the government in Kyiv. Zelensky was at the center of everything the Biden administration did on the war. Trump did call Zelensky later Wednesday, but the American president is already fueling fears he'll cook up a resolution that favors Russia. Asked by a reporter whether Ukraine would be an equal partner in peace talks, Trump replied: 'It's an interesting question,' and appeared to think carefully, before replying, 'I said that was not a good war to go into,' apparently buying Putin's line that the conflict was the fault of a nation brutally invaded by an authoritarian neighbor. Hegseth was just as blunt. He laid out US starting points for the negotiation: that Ukraine could not return to its pre-2014 borders before the invasion of Crimea, that it could not join NATO and that US troops would play no part of any security force to guarantee any eventual peace. Any peacekeeping force would have to be made up of European and non-European troops and would not be covered by NATO's mutual defense clause — meaning the US wouldn't bail it out in the event of a clash with Moscow's forces. Former President Joe Biden was also reticent about Ukraine getting a path to NATO membership, fearing a clash with nuclear-armed Russia that could morph into World War III. And Trump's insistence that European peacekeepers will not wear NATO uniforms will be seen as a similarly prudent move by many observers to avoid dragging the US into a conflict with Russia. But Wednesday was also the best day for Putin since the invasion, since it swept away many of Ukraine's aspirations. Hegseth argued that he was simply dispensing realism. And he has a point. No one in the US or Europe thought the clock could be turned back to 2014. And Ukraine was unable to win back its land on the battlefield despite billions of dollars in Western aid. Still, by taking such issues off the table, Trump, the supposed deal maker supreme, deprived the Ukrainians of a bargaining chip that could have been used to win concessions from his old friend Putin. As it stands, Trump seems to have no objection to Russia retaining the spoils of its unprovoked invasion. This is not surprising — since like Russia, America now has a president who believes great powers are entitled to expansionism in their regional areas of influence. But rewarding Russia with a favorable settlement would set a disastrous precedent. The US-Russia call and a future summit with Putin in Saudi Arabia, which Trump said would happen soon, may be a hint that he's not just cutting Zelensky out of the deal – but Europe too. In a statement, France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Spain, the European Union, the European Commission, plus the United Kingdom and Ukraine, warned 'Ukraine and Europe must be part of any negotiations.' And they warned Trump, who seems to want a peace deal at any cost, that 'a just and lasting peace in Ukraine is a necessary condition for a strong transatlantic security.' Former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt is worried by the cozy call between Trump and Putin. 'The disturbing thing is of course that we have the two big guys, the two big egos … believing that they can maneuver all of the issues on their own,' he told Richard Quest on CNN International. Bildt evoked the most damning historical analogy possible — the appeasement of Adolf Hitler by Britain that allowed the Nazis to annex the Sudetenland. 'For European ears, this sounds like Munich. It sounds like two big leaders wanting to have peace in our time, (over) a faraway country of which they know little. They are preparing to make a deal over the heads of that particular country. A lot of Europeans know how that particular movie ended.' Trump's detailed strategy remains opaque. The dashing of many of Zelensky's aspirations means that Kyiv's agreement to any Putin-Trump deal cannot be taken for granted. And after his steady gains on the battlefield, there's no certainty that the Russian leader is as desperate for a swift settlement as Trump, who has long craved a Nobel Peace Prize. But the framework of a possible settlement has been a topic of private conversations in Washington and European capitals for months, even during the Biden administration. As Hegseth made clear, Ukraine's hopes of regaining all its lost land is unrealistic. What may emerge is a solution along the lines of the partition of Germany after World War II, with Russian-occupied territory frozen under its control with the rest of Ukraine — on the other side of a hard border – remaining a democracy. Perhaps the western edge would be allowed to join the European Union, like the old West Germany. But this time, US troops won't make it safe for freedom. 'The US position on Ukraine as articulated today should surprise no one in Europe: it's just what European insiders have been saying to me off the record, in back channels, behind the scenes for two years: West Ukraine and East Ukraine, like West Germany and East Germany but in this case – EU Yes, NATO No,' said Dungan. Such a solution would conjure a cruel historical irony. Putin, who watched in despair from his post in Dresden as the Soviet Union dissolved, may be on the verge of creating a new East Germany in 21st century Europe with America's help.
