Wrapped in a flag and clutching a beer, Marc Fogel looked understandably overwhelmed. The 63-year-old teacher from Pennsylvania was safe at last, freed via prisoner exchange from the Russian jail where he served three and a half years for possessing the marijuana his family says he took for back pain. His homecoming this week was just the kind of heartwarming scene Donald Trump needs to show ordinary Americans that cosying up to Vladimir Putin’s murderous regime could pay off, and the president himself said he hoped it marked “the beginning of a relationship where we can end that war” in Ukraine.
Or to put it another way, hours later his new defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, was in Brussels dictating the effective terms of Ukraine’s surrender, over Ukrainian heads and on terms that a former head of MI6 has called a “golden opportunity” for Putin to walk away.
An American family reunited; a country that to most of their compatriots must seem far away, seemingly sold down the river. Small victories for those back home tired of shouldering the world’s burdens; anger and disbelief among allies. “It’s appeasement. It has never worked,” said the Estonian EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, choosing words ominously freighted with history. We are starting to see what “America first” looks like in practice, as a superpower that once prevailed by building alliances across the west dramatically reorientates itself.
The US is too preoccupied with China and with patrolling its own borders to be “primarily focused” on Europe, Hegseth explained: put bluntly, the war will have to end, and what happens next is mostly Europe’s problem. All pretence that it’s for Ukraine as a sovereign nation to negotiate its own future disappeared with the news that Trump had already telephoned Putin, and apparently conceded most of what he wants before even opening talks.
The self-styled greatest dealmaker believes Russia should keep some of the territory it forcibly seized – they had, he reasoned, lost “a lot of soldiers”, as countries do when invading a neighbour unprovoked – and Ukraine shouldn’t join Nato. Already Putin’s aggression seems amply rewarded, but there’s more: American troops won’t be deployed to keep the peace, and any European force can’t operate under Nato’s umbrella – meaning the US wouldn’t be obliged to come to its aid if attacked. And if Trump is reluctant to defend Ukraine, he seems keen on a deal to extract rare earth minerals needed by hi-tech US industries from whatever is ultimately left of it.
Welcome to a new age of empire, except this time with Britain at the sharp end. It’s the new imperial powers of US, China and Russia that now display the telltale ambition to expand territorially and hoover up raw materials needed for the next industrial revolution, plus the military strength to redraw borders at will. And while this week has clearly been most devastating for Ukraine, a country that sacrificed its children to this brutal war and deserved so much better, it shatters some comforting British illusions, too.
This country has punched above its weight in foreign policy because we never punched alone. With US firepower behind us, we could bluff our enemies but also perhaps lie to ourselves. We didn’t have to face what we had become, namely a small island with grandiose ideas about itself whose regular army would – as the defence minister Alistair Carns recently warned – be wiped out within six months of fighting something like the Ukraine conflict. Working on the assumption that we would never again fight anything but a small, localised war without the US alongside us, we built our defences around interoperable kit and the quiet assumption that American troops could fill the gaps we no longer could. Preparing for a world in which the US may no longer be a dependable ally doesn’t just mean spending more – though Hegseth argued European governments should now earmark 5% of GDP for defence, double the 2.65% Rachel Reeves is reportedly telling British chiefs of staff we can’t afford – but something more like unscrambling an omelette into its component eggs.
There was always going to come a time, 80 years on from the last world war and with new threats emerging, when the US, not unreasonably, concluded that Europe should stand on its own two feet. But what could have been a gradual transition has become a panicky scramble, with consequences for which the public is woefully ill-prepared. You may well be tired of the trade-offs made for US protection, of being dragged into dubious US wars. But all those who have cordially loathed the US acting as world policeman might consider what happens to neighbourhoods from which policing suddenly retreats.
Some will argue that Britain can simply ride this turbulent time out by abandoning its delusions of grandeur, keeping its head down, and spending the defence budget on hospitals instead. But trouble still finds even those who don’t go looking for it, as Ukraine sadly discovered. The danger is of becoming Russia’s or China’s poodle instead of America’s; or at the very least feeling powerless to help our friends.
We had a taste of how that felt in Afghanistan in 2021, where a sudden US withdrawal in the face of a Taliban surge forced allied troops (who could not have sustained the mission without them) into a chaotic exodus. The shame and the betrayal of having to abandon Afghan interpreters and fixers to their fate has stayed with serving and former soldiers. Something similar may now be happening in Ukraine, where EU leaders who vowed sincerely to stand always with Zelenskyy are now struggling with the harsh reality that it is effectively over once the US pulls the plug.
That Trump has done so should surprise nobody. Washington’s focus was shifting to China long before he reached the Oval Office, and he has never wavered either from his belief that Uncle Sam is getting taken for a sucker on defence, or from his closeness to Putin. We can’t say we weren’t warned, and there has at least been some time to prepare. But as with the tariff war Trump kept threatening to start, somehow when it happens it’s still a shock.
On trade, Trump has tended to make dramatic threats before backing off when sufficiently mollified, and perhaps something similar may happen over defence. But on both counts, uncertainty alone is corrosive. It forces us to invest time and money we don’t have on contingency planning, and emboldens those who wish us harm. We look, and feel, more vulnerable because, in truth, we are. This is a different world, and Britain will emerge a different country from it.
• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
• The illustration on this article was amended on 14 February 2025 to make clear that Ireland and the United Kingdom are not one entity.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
