"The US has reversed its alliances to side with Russia against Europe!" This is the idea that many commentators in Britain, France and Germany have been hammering in for the past week.
The Washington Post went even further: "For Europe, this is a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency moment. The United States, which has guaranteed European security against Russia for 80 years, appears to have switched sides under President Donald Trump."
Apparently sharing that analysis, the European Union organized two summits that included Great Britain as an ad hoc member.
France devoted a six-hour long parliamentary debate to the subject, with Prime Minister François Bayrou and leaders of half a dozen parties advertising their rhetorical talents with florid, virtue-signaling but substance-free speeches.
Loose talk about doubling defense budgets, dispatching troops to Ukraine, creating a pan-European army that includes Turkey and reducing NATO to a relic buzzed across the media and cyberspace.
Needless to say, John Bolton - once National Security Advisor to Trump in his first term - was in overdrive in European media with his prophecy that the man he once served will disengage the US from NATO.
Needless to say, Moscow was jubilant, with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov fantasizing about a return to days when the US and the USSR dominated a bipolar world, and implicitly promising to help Trump rein in the mullahs of Tehran.
You may wonder what caused all that commotion.
The answer is the Oval Office meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which morphed into a reality-TV show co-starring Vice President JD Vance, half a dozen other officials and a handful of reporters as a chorus.
By classical diplomatic standards, this was a hastily concocted encounter that did not meet the well-established protocols for top level meetings, many of which were developed and propagated by the US since World War II.
In the meeting where Zelensky was roasted, there was no scripted and agreed agenda. To complicate matters, Zelensky, cast as a war-leader, seemed to have no clue about what to do in a tight-spot and rose to the bait cast by Vance.
Had the meeting had a clear agenda and been organized in a professional manner, both sides might have benefited from the agreement that Trump had suggested.
Ukraine could have had an implicit security guarantee because, as Trump noted, if American companies and citizens are present on Ukrainian soil, Russia might think twice before pursuing its bombing campaign. The US would have benefited, too, by recovering at least part of the $54-$60 billion "gift" -- routinely cited by the media in Europe as opposed to the Trump figure of $350 billion -- that President Joe Biden granted Zelensky to continue fighting.
Politically, Trump would also benefit from emerging as peacemaker, the first US president in 100 years not to have triggered a new war and the second after Clinton in the Balkan Wars of the 1990s to end a European war without American boots on the ground.
So why was the meeting botched?
One reason may be the "revolutionary" style that the new administration has adopted, which requires ignoring dusty protocols invented by dead diplomats and upheld by a State Department that the MAGA movement sees as a den of idlers specialized in spending American money on politically correct projects. (Elon Musk is firing scores of those idlers who write agendas and promote protocols.)
Trump has quoted Napoleon as saying, "he who serves his country need not be always bound by the rules". Thus, he thinks that the way he behaves is justified by his intention to make America great again.
On the Ukrainian side, Zelensky's ambassadress Oksana Markarova is reputed to be a nice lady but a novice in diplomacy. Having worked as an investment banker, her only diplomatic experience before Washington was an envoy to Antigua. As far as we know, she is yet to meet Secretary of State Marco Rubio, or the MAGA joker-in-the-pack Musk.
On Tuesday, Zelensky came back with apologies to Trump, promising to return to Washington to sign a deal on minerals and offered a ceasefire, implicitly admitting his part in the mini-disaster in the Oval Office.
The Europeans made a big mistake by hastily over-reacting to an ill-prepared meeting.
The European leaders should have taken a deep breath and refrained from seeking kudos by casting the continent's oldest and strongest ally as a potential adversary. Nor should they have spread pipe-dreams about a European army and military industry that could replace in a jiffy what the US provided for eight decades. In all its history, the US has never been on the side of those who start wars.
Over 200 years of close ties between the US and Europe can't evaporate with a reality TV show. The US has suspended -- not ended -- military aid to Ukraine. Ukraine already has all it needs to continue fighting throughout 2025 and there is ample time to go back to Washington and repair whatever damage was done.
In politics, haste always makes waste.
Last week, European leaders behaved as Barack Obama always did when facing a crisis: make a flowery speech and quickly return to a fantasy world cuddling his Nobel Peace Prize.
Amir Taheri was the executive editor-in-chief of the daily Kayhan in Iran from 1972 to 1979. He has worked at or written for innumerable publications, published eleven books, and has been a columnist for Asharq Al-Awsat since 1987.
Gatestone Institute would like to thank the author for his kind permission to reprint this article in slightly different form from Asharq Al-Awsat. He graciously serves as Chairman of Gatestone Europe.
