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There is an odd sense of paralysis in Brussels, the capital of the European Union. Everyone is waiting for the presidential election in the United States, and the confirmation hearings of a new European Commission.
But there’s someone who does not have to worry about being paralyzed by strictures of democratic politics: Vladimir Putin.
His war of aggression on European soil rages on, with Iranian drones and North Korean artillery shells — and possibly even North Korean troops.
Little by little, he is succeeding.
As one official put it in a group conversation on my trip to Brussels, the “small tactical gains” that NATO admits Russians are making may well add up to one large strategic gain.
Conversely, while Ukraine’s continued control of Russian territory in the Kursk region is an impressive feat, the offensive has failed at one of its key objectives: to relieve the frontline in the Donbas by forcing Russians to respond to the incursion.
America’s Eastern European allies understand that they are next should Putin prevail in Ukraine. Border crossings from Lithuania and Latvia to Russia have been mined and secured with dragon teeth.
Everyone says they want peace — but the only person who can deliver it instantly is Putin himself.
Unless he loses the will to fight, Ukraine and its Western partners have to defend themselves.
Even if a prospective President Trump could broker a deal to stop the fighting, possibly by threatening Russia with a dramatic increase in Ukraine’s access to cutting edge, NATO-grade weapons, the question is whether an agreement will stick.
Most observers in Europe and in the United States, expect an eventual settlement to take a form similar to the 38-parallel solution that ended the Korean War.
But that Korean has been kept with America’s strength. To this day, the United States keeps some 32,000 troops in South Korean to deter Kim’s regime.
Ukrainians are not naïve. After the infamy of the Budapest Memorandum and the Minsk Agreements, they understand that anything short of NATO membership or other explicit military alliances with the United States, ideally with the promise of a forward presence of allied troops on their territory, would be just a prelude to a future war.
Unless Trump is willing to give that to Ukraine, his deal will be short-lived.
There is one even more worrying question. NATO membership must be both backed by force and backed by a political determination to fight if need be.
Today, both the US military and those of our European allies fall short of the many commitments that we have around the world.
According to a recent study by the Kiel Institute, if Germany’s Bundeswehr had been shooting 10,000 artillery and missile rounds each day — which is roughly what the Russians are doing in Ukraine — it would have run out of stocks in 70 days.
And, frankly, it does require a certain suspension of disbelief to imagine Chancellor Scholz authorizing German military action against Russia — even if one of the current members were under attack.
Increasing either aid to Ukraine or the US and European defense budgets is a tough political sell. But if that’s the case, would the collective West have the will to come to Ukraine’s defense should it become a NATO ally?
If there are reasons to doubt that commitment, then the prospect of any kind of lasting deal, especially a US-brokered one, becomes even more distant.
The answer to this conundrum, on both sides of the Atlantic, is leadership. A compelling voice must break through the complacency and wake up those who continue to believe, as Neville Chamberlain did about Czechoslovakia in 1938, that Ukraine is a distant land about which we know little.
But it may be, just like in the Second World War, that such leadership will not emerge until things take a turn for the worse.
Dalibor Rohac is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC. Twitter: @DaliborRohac.