The shock is violent, but it has a virtue. Europeans are coming out of denial. They understood in one day in Munich that the survival of Ukraine and the future of Europe are in their hands and that they have three imperatives.
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Accelerate military aid to Ukraine to compensate for the American abandonment, so that it holds, and of course to impose its presence and that of Europe in any negotiation.
This will be expensive. It will be necessary to end the taboo of the use of frozen Russian assets. It will be necessary to circumvent Moscow’s accomplices within Europe itself by a coalition of only the willing countries, with of course the United Kingdom.
Second, demand that any agreement be accompanied by the return of kidnapped children, prisoners and absolute security guarantees. After Budapest, Georgia and Minsk, we know what agreements with Putin are worth. These guarantees require sufficient military force to prevent a new invasion.
Finally, and this is the most urgent, because it is what will take the most time, we must build the neglected European defence, to the benefit of the American umbrella since 1945 and scuttled since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Friedrich Merz has just declared that Europe needs its own military alliance. This is to recognize that France has been right for decades in arguing for strategic autonomy.
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