We are on the eve of modern Europe’s most humiliating defeat. Donald Trump is pushing ahead with his peace plan for Ukraine, and there are no Europeans in the room. I am not surprised. The Europeans have no strategy of their own to end the war. All they want is to frustrate the peace process, for they have no agreed strategy to deal with post-war Ukraine.

How did Europe get in a position where it has no strategic choices left? It is quite a reversal. Machiavelli, an Italian, was one of the early architects of modern strategic thinking. Strategic diplomacy reached a peak with Metternich and Talleyrand, the foreign ministers of Austria and France: each played an instrumental role in the Congress of Vienna. This was the ultimate peace conference, one that provided Europe with stability and security for a century. After the Second World War, the diplomatic giants were mostly Americans such as George Marshall, George Kennan and Henry Kissinger.

Beside the chess-board type diplomatic strategist, there is another kind: the long-term strategic actor. The most successful modern example is China. China’s transformation began with the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee in 1978, at which Deng Xiaoping launched his economic reforms. It took three or four decades until these reforms translated into geopolitical power. During the transformation, uninformed Western opinion held that China was becoming more Western. The genius of the Chinese project was that it led others to underestimate it.

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I find it personally painful to watch Kaja Kallas, the EU’s high representative for foreign and security policy, make a fool of herself with variably informed war-mongering discourse that lacks any strategic content. But she is not the only one. I have yet to identify a single official in any national capitals, including London, who has a strategy to end the Ukraine war. There is no one who has done the maths of the military capabilities Ukraine would need, on the logistics of how to produce or procure it. There is also no strategy whatsoever on how to finance it.

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Do European leaders believe their meagre contributions can deliver a Ukrainian victory? A dead giveaway is the overuse of the passive tense. They don’t say: “We will do whatever it takes to defeat Putin.” They do say: “Putin must be defeated”. In other words: We want Ukrainian soldiers to die and American taxpayers to pay. In a rare moment of candour, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, admitted only last week that the European taxpayer is not going to pay for it. Indeed.

When Trump came to power, he demanded that the Europeans increase their defence spending from just under 2% of GDP to 5%. The Europeans agreed immediately. And they are raising the money through debt.

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Ultimately, defence spending is called spending for a reason. It is not investment. Trying to fund it through debt is self-defeating. Considering that we are talking about a defence strategy, this approach is monumentally stupid. A strategic thinker asks: What sacrifices do we make so we can match Russia’s military capability? A European military planner asks: how much do we need to borrow to get ahead in the defence spending league tables? Defence spending targets are what you end up with when you have no strategy.

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When people don’t have strategies, they often seek refuge in procedures — to a point where the procedures take on a life on their own. Since the war began, the EU has passed 18 packages of sanctions against Russia. The sanctions have been an abject failure, but Brussels refuses to acknowledge it. The officials did not think this through. They are shocked to see that China supported Russia, that sanctioned goods flow through Kazakhstan. Some EU countries still buy Russian oil and gas because they are dependent on it. Partly as a result, the Russian economy has massively outperformed that of Europe since the start of the war. Whereas Europeans are drowning in debt, Russia is an example of fiscal strength. Unwilling to make cuts to their bloated welfare spending, the Europeans have identified the frozen Russian assets as the only way to finance the war. Even with that money, they do not have a strategy to end the war, either through victory or peace. The simple goal is to keep the show on the road. That’s what non-strategic procedural thinking does to you.

It also makes you dependent. By outsourcing all strategic thinking, the Europeans have become dependent on the US for defence and trade. Now they get angry with Trump for excluding them from meetings.

Trump, like the Europeans, is not a strategic actor of the kind I describe, but this is for different reasons. Trump’s politics are transactional. He likes peace because war is bad for business. Trump could not care less about whether Putin broke international law. To the European diplomats who huddle in the antechambers of the peace process, Trump’s attitude is disturbing and alienating.

The Germans, with their special business relationships with Russia, used to be more like Trump. German politicians had their own private channels with Russian counterparts, just as Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy, does today. The Germans used to be the largest crowd in the St Petersburg International Economics Forum, Russia’s answer to Davos. Now I am hearing that the hotels in Moscow and St Petersburg are filled with Americans hoping to strike lucrative deals with Russia. It is an ironic twist of fate, for it was the US that tried to force Germany to abandon the Baltic Sea gas pipeline between Russia and Germany. Now there is talk of the Americans injecting themselves as the middleman to sell Russian gas to Germany. You could not make this up.

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Like no US president before him, Trump exposes Europe’s delusions, its lack of a strategic thinking and action. This is why the Europeans hate him so much. And to no avail. It promises to be another bad week for Kallas et al.

Vir: Wolfgang Munchau, UnHerd