CNN
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The United States isn’t the only country with a former TV star president who knows how to put on a show.
Consider this rebuke to NATO countries on Tuesday.
“All European countries must be willing to spend as much on security as is truly needed, not just as much as they’ve gotten used to during years of neglect. If it takes 5% of GDP to cover defense, then so be it, 5% it is.”
This might sound like Donald Trump but isn’t.
The demand for Europe to pony up comes from a sometime Trump antagonist, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — and it shows how the new US president is already turning things upside down across the world.
Speaking to Europe’s elites at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Zelensky laid into many of the European countries that have helped keep Ukraine afloat since the Russian invasion, chiding them for not taking their own defense and the threat from Moscow sufficiently seriously.
So, what was he up to?
Zelensky clearly watched Trump’s news conference Monday when he firmed up his demand for NATO states to up their target for defense spending from 2% of GDP to 5%. (This will be almost impossible for most states in slow-growth Europe to reach but may be an opening bid.) The new president also noted that Zelensky had told him he was open to a peace deal, and intriguingly, started to troll Russian President Vladimir Putin in a bit of pre-summit positioning. Trump argued that Putin was “not doing so well” in Ukraine and that he should end the war because it was “destroying Russia.”
The Ukrainian president is among the nimblest of foreign leaders in adapting to the world represented by Trump’s return to office. “Most of the world’s now thinking – so, what’s going happen to their relationship with America?” Zelensky said in Davos. “What will happen to alliances? To support? To trade? How does President Trump plan to end wars?”
Zelensky is smart to curry favor with Trump since he must shape the US president’s push to end the war if he’s to secure the best possible terms for his country. No doubt Trump will approve of him giving the Europeans a tongue lashing.
But Zelensky is being cruel to be kind, not least to himself.
Any peace deal with Putin will require security guarantees that might demand the costly deployment of troops from European NATO members on Ukrainian soil. And the Ukrainians have learned what many states on the continent still prefer to ignore: the Russian invasion signals there’s a new and belligerent threat in the East that will require a far more robust Western defense posture. And with Trump back in the White House, there’s no guarantee the US is going to stick around.
“Will President Trump even notice Europe? Does he see NATO as necessary? And will he respect EU institutions?” Zelensky said. He went on: “Will President Trump listen to Europe, or will he negotiate with Russia and China without Europe? … Europe needs to learn how to fully take care of itself, so that the world can’t afford to ignore it.”
This – from a nation that craves EU membership – is not a message that will go down especially well in Brussels, especially given the huge military and diplomatic support that Europe has offered to Kyiv over the last three years. It’s not that different, however, from French President Emmanuel Macron’s frequent calls for Europe to pack more of a national security punch notwithstanding his government barely making NATO’s 2% spending threshold.
Zelensky’s true intent was revealed when he said: “Right now, it’s not clear whether Europe will even have a seat at the table when the war against our country ends.”
Ukraine really needs a strong, united Europe because Trump might be tempted to give Putin anything he wants just to end the war. The 47th president has long coveted a Nobel Peace Prize after all.
“I think Zelensky is trying to give Europe spine and they need it,” Beth Sanner, a former senior US intelligence official, told CNN.