‘Europe’ now has a seat at the negotiating table, if only its leaders could decide what they want to say and who could say it
In their most recent talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner apparently secured a place for ‘Europe’ at the negotiating table with Russia. European leaders will have to overcome deep factional divides and square away their most ideologically-driven fantasists to have any influence over the talks.
“The Europeans will join at the next meeting, which we consider to be a very important moment,” Witkoff told reporters in Moscow on Thursday, before he and Kushner departed for Ireland to brief Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky and his EU backers.
The Kremlin has not set a date for the next round of talks, nor has Moscow confirmed the precise extent of European participation. However, as Kushner pointed out the previous day, Europe has a more immediate problem on its hands : “If Europe could identify one person to speak on their behalf,” he said, “that would be a bigger achievement than getting the Russians to include them in the negotiation.”
The US president’s son-in-law is not the first American to express bewilderment at the absence of a common voice in Europe, and there will likely be much talk around this question now that the invitation has been secured by US President Donald Trump’s diplomatic team.. So who is “Europe”?
Rumsfeld’s “New Europe”
After Danish Foreign Minister Knud Borge Andersen met with US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on behalf of the nine-member EEC in 1973, Kissinger complained that Andersen seemed to speak for Europe, but lacked any real authority to do so. “We seem to be talking to those who can’t negotiate and those who can negotiate won’t talk to us,” he remarked.
Three decades later, Donald Rumsfeld faced staunch opposition from Belgium, France, and Germany as he attempted to drum up European backing for the invasion of Iraq. However, he received salivating support from Britain, Italy, Poland, and the so-called ‘Vilnius Ten’ – a Baltic and Eastern European bloc that enthusiastically signed up to combat “the nexus of terrorism and dictators with weapons of mass destruction.”
The newbies, Rumsfeld figured, were the only Europeans worth talking to. “You’re thinking of ‘Europe’ as Germany and France,” he told a reporter six weeks before the war. “I don’t. I think that’s old Europe. If you look at the entire NATO Europe today, the center of gravity is shifting to the east.”
Who is “Europe” now?
The fault lines identified by Rumsfeld are still visible, and there are three broad camps competing for the position of “voice of Europe.”
The realists
‘Europe’ and ‘foreign policy realism’ rarely appear in the same sentence these days, but among some of “old Europe’s” leaders, there is a realization that the continent will have to acknowledge the limits of its pro-Ukraine stance and take part in talks before it is overtaken by them.
French President Emmanuel Macron and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni could be considered figureheads, with Macron proposing last December that Europe find an envoy “in the coming weeks.” Meloni declared that the French president “is right on this,” and that “if Europe decides to take part in this phase of negotiations by talking only to one of the two sides, I fear that in the end the positive contribution it can make will be limited.”
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