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      The US and Europe are at a crossroads. A new world order is emerging

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      Over the past week, the foundations of US-European relations shifted dramatically.In a series of highly controversial interventions, Donald Trump’s administration outlined a new US approach to Europe. It revolves around negotiating a rapid end to the war between Ukraine and Russia, handing Europe the lead responsibility for its own defense, and forging a new transatlantic alliance of populist forces on the right. After 25 years of working on transatlantic relations, I am aware of the tendency of crisis moments like this to fade and relationships to trend back toward historical norms. But this time is different.At the Munich Security Conference, Trump officials hurled a series of rhetorical bombs at their European counterparts. As the electricity crackled through the cramped rooms of Munich’s Bayerischer Hof hotel over the weekend, the historic stakes were clear. Would Europe manage, after years of talk, to pull together and defend itself or would it simply be a pawn in the US and Russia’s larger game? Would Ukraine avoid being overrun by the Russian army and emerge with its sovereignty intact? For the rest of the world, what would it mean for the west to truly fracture, Russia to be rehabilitated, and the war in Ukraine to end?The reverberations began last Wednesday when the US president announced that he and Vladimir Putin had made a plan to negotiate an end to the war. Europe and Ukraine were frightened to the bone that the future of their security would be decided without them.Meanwhile, Pete Hegseth, the US secretary of defense, said at Nato headquarters in Brussels that Europe would need to provide for Ukraine’s defenses once the war was over – and with only limited support from the United States. Europeans fear they are woefully unprepared for this task. In a reversal of official US policy, Hegseth added that Ukraine would not join Nato. Ironically, it was the Republican George W Bush who had first insisted that it would in 2008 – over the objections of his German and French counterparts, who thought doing so would provoke Russia.When the US vice-president, JD Vance, strode on to the Munich stage, the throng in the Bayerischer Hof thus waited with bated breath. What, exactly, was Trump’s plan for Ukraine? What they got instead will go down as one of the most controversial speeches an American political leader has ever given in Europe.With little discussion of Ukraine’s future, Vance launched into a harangue that alleged that Europe was repressing free speech and undermining democracy by holding back rightwing nationalist movements like the Alternative für Deutschland. This dropped like molten lead. Here was a vision of democracy sharply at odds with his audience’s.Vance clearly aimed to shock. Whether he aimed to insult is unclear, but in the end he did both.Afterward, European leaders hastily rewrote their own remarks to attack Vance’s and call for European unity in the face of American betrayal. Some were more realistic than others about what they might achieve.On the realistic side was Finland’s president, Alexander Stubb, who spoke publicly in many forums about the need to turn a possible Yalta moment, in which Russia and the US remake European security without Europe’s input, into a Helsinki moment, in which the principles for a future peace and detente are put in place.Others, however, still in a state of shock, continued to call for Europe to push back against the US, go its own way, and win the war for Ukraine on its own. Talking points like these worked well three years ago, but their unrealistic nature today risks undermining Europe’s ability to pull together and ensure its vital interests are protected.View image in fullscreenMeanwhile, Asia’s two giants – China and India – watched this remaking of the west with optimism. China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, took a tranquil, almost beneficent tone in his remarks as he surveyed the chasms that had emerged. China, after all, has itself long sought to provoke such divides. India’s foreign minister, S Jaishankar, was perhaps more circumspect, but still optimistic. For these countries, the crackup of the west is only another sign that the rest of this century will be theirs.The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has since met in Saudi Arabia with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, to prepare the way for Putin and Trump’s next discussion on the future of Ukraine – and by extension Europe. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has convened European heads of state in the hope of forging the consensus they will need to protect their world in this moment of crisis. This will be very hard.Years as an observer and participant in the making of Europe’s relations with the US leave me innately wary of ever judging a single crisis to mark a definitive shift. The structural features of the transatlantic relationship are deep and often guide us away from crises toward a median line – whether over Iraq, Libya or Iran. The challenges to negotiating an end to this war are moreover enormous and history could cleave in more directions than one as the process unfolds.The United States is not decoupling from Europe, but this past week must be viewed as the opening salvo in a major US effort to renegotiate the terms of its bond with Europe. How far the Trump administration will get cannot be known, but this foundational relationship of US statecraft, which was born in the moment of the US’s rise to global superpower status, will change in fundamental ways. With it, the future of modern democracy, itself born of Europe and sustained by the transatlantic bond for decades, is in play. A new world order is emerging.

      Christopher Chivvis is senior fellow and director of the American statecraft program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He served as the US national intelligence officer for Europe from 2018 to 2021 More

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      The Guardian view on Trump’s diplomacy: when the US knows the price and ignores values | Editorial

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      The Trump administration did not take red lines on Ukraine to its talks with Russia in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday: it cares about the bottom line. The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, underscored that when he said the two sides would create a team, not only to support Ukraine peace talks but also to explore the “incredible opportunities” to partner with Moscow geopolitically “and, frankly, economically” that might result.Kyiv and other European capitals are still reeling at the full extent of Donald Trump’s cynicism when it comes to world affairs, and callous disregard for the people caught up in them. But it should be no surprise that business dealings were high on the agenda. Vladimir Putin would dearly love to end his country’s economic isolation. Russia is making the case that American energy firms and others could profit handsomely by doing business with it again.For Mr Trump, his two key interests – money and power – are not only interrelated but fungible, just as US goals and his personal interests often appear indistinguishable to him. (This is a man who launched his own cryptocurrency token days before returning to the White House, and as he sought to ease regulation of the industry).When he talks of the future of Ukraine or Gaza, he speaks not of human rights and security, lives and homes, but of laying US hands on $500bn of minerals and a “big real-estate site” respectively. He believes in cutting deals, not making peace. At the heart of his foreign policy team is Steve Witkoff, not a diplomat but a billionaire real-estate developer and golf buddy. Mr Witkoff was first appointed as Middle East envoy and then dispatched to negotiate with Moscow. The head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, Kirill Dmitriev, was also in Riyadh – while Ukraine and European allies have been denied a seat.Mr Trump’s merging of wealth and strength were obvious even before he took office the first time. He suggested he could use Taiwan as leverage with China on issues including trade. John Bolton, who became his national security adviser, later said (though Mr Trump denied it) that the president pleaded with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, to ensure he would win the next election, “stress[ing] the importance of … increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome”.Mr Trump’s Middle East policy is not only pleasing to his evangelical Christian supporters. His repugnant proposal to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza, allowing the construction of an American-owned “Riviera”, is shocking but in many ways builds upon ideas long held by businessman friends as well as Israeli settlers. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a former real-estate developer charged with overseeing Middle East policy in Mr Trump’s first term, suggested last year that Gaza’s “waterfront property” could be “very valuable”. (Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, incidentally, became a major investor in Mr Kushner’s private equity firm after he left the administration.)Volodymyr Zelenskyy tried to capitalise on Mr Trump’s economic transactionalism by offering access to Ukraine’s resources, notably minerals, in exchange for security. He got Mr Trump’s attention – but the terms of the resulting US demand make it look less like diplomacy than extortion. The US president prices up everything and knows the value of nothing. Others must now endeavour to show him that his plans will not come as cheaply as he believes.

      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. More

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      Ukraine will never accept Russia’s ultimatums, Volodymyr Zelenskyy says

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      Ukraine reacted with gloom and dismay on Tuesday to the meeting between the US and Russia in Saudi Arabia, with Volodymyr Zelenskyy saying he would never accept Russia’s ultimatums.The high-stakes negotiations between the two delegations got under way in Riyadh just hours after Russia attacked Ukraine with dozens of drones. At least two people were killed and 26 injured in strikes across the country.One drone hit the top floor of a high-rise residential building in the central city of Dolynska, in the Kirovohrad region. A mother and her two children were injured and taken to hospital. “A difficult night,” said the local governor, Andriy Raikovych.Soon after the talks concluded in Riyadh, air raid sirens wailed across the capital, Kyiv. Millions of Ukrainians were told by text message to seek shelter because of a threat from Russian ballistic missiles.Speaking in Ankara after a meeting with Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Zelenskyy said Ukraine would not accept the results of talks on how to end the war with Russia that were held “behind Ukraine’s back”.“It feels like the US is now discussing the ultimatum that Putin set at the start of the full-scale war,” Zelenskyy told reporters. He added: “Once again, decisions about Ukraine are being made without Ukraine. I wonder why they believe Ukraine would accept all these ultimatums now if we refused them at the most difficult moment?”Zelenskyy also said he would seek the return of occupied eastern and southern towns and villages via diplomatic means, emphasising: “They will be Ukrainian. There can be no compromise.”Reuters reported that Zelenskyy has postponed a visit to Saudi Arabia planned for Wednesday to avoid giving the US-Russia talks “legitimacy”.It was absurd for Moscow to talk about peace while killing Ukrainians, said Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the head of Zelenskyy’s office. The latest salvo of 176 drones fired at Ukraine represented Russia’s actual “negotiating position”, he posted.Without criticising the Trump administration directly, he said the high-level US-Russia talks had not been properly prepared, adding that they were merely a forum for more Russian “ultimatums”.“Encouragement rather than coercion, a voluntary and bizarre renunciation of strength in favour of disheartening and unmotivated appeasement of the aggressor,” Podolyak wrote, summing up Kyiv’s negative reaction.There is widespread scepticism that Russia would abide by any ceasefire deal unless it was underpinned by security guarantees – from the US and other western powers. Podolyak said there was no point in having a “fake peace” that would lead to “an inevitable continuation of the war”.Ukrainians have bitter memories of two deals signed with Russia in the Belarus capital, Minsk, after Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea in 2014 and began a covert invasion of the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. Russia repeatedly violated both ceasefires.There are fears that a quick deal between Washington and Moscow would amount to Minsk 3 – another agreement that Russia would swiftly break. Speaking at the Munich Security Conference last weekend, Zelenskyy said Russia was ready to expand its invasion and “wage war” against Nato.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMore immediately, there were concerns that a Trump-Putin deal would demand that Ukraine hold elections immediately after a ceasefire came into force, and before any final agreement was reached. The goal, Ukrainian commentators suggested, would be to replace Zelenskyy with a weaker leader, or even a pro-Russian candidate.Ukraine is not obliged to hold elections under martial law. Few Ukrainians think they are practical at a time when Russia’s invasion has forced millions of citizens to flee abroad and when soldiers are fighting and dying on the frontline. European embassies in Kyiv agree.The White House excluded Kyiv and European nations from its direct talks with Russia, the first bilateral contact between the two sides since before Moscow’s 2022 invasion.Ukraine’s former foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba said he did not expect a truce with Russia any time soon, telling the BBC: “Peace is not even visible on the horizon.” Kuleba said it was in Ukraine’s interest to resist US pressure for a speedy solution and to instead engage with Trump over a sustained period.Kuleba said: “Peace isn’t visible for one simple reason: because Putin still believes that he can outwit everyone, that time is on his side, fate is on his side, the west has wavered, America is retreating, Europe is not able to take the field instead of America, or … is not ready to put on the captain’s armband.”He added: “The key question now is, actually, where is Putin in this scheme? In my opinion, he believes that he will win. Victory for him is all of Ukraine. He didn’t come for some piece of land. He came for Ukraine.” More

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      A Trump-Putin carve-up of Ukraine is indefensible | Letters

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      I look with horror and outrage not only at the patronising and hypocritical words of JD Vance in Munich (JD Vance stuns Munich conference with blistering attack on Europe’s leaders, 14 February) but also at the apparent attempt by Donald Trump to effect peace between Ukraine and Russia without including either Ukraine or Europe more generally (Trump says he has spoken to Putin and agreed to negotiate Ukraine ceasefire, 12 February).A peace that prevents any more bloodshed can only be a good thing, but it cannot be a carve-up in which Vladimir Putin achieves the victory that Ukrainians have so gallantly deprived him of on the battlefield. Or in which Ukraine is impoverished and emasculated by a greedy US and irredentist Russia.Moreover, if Europe and, by extension, the UK, are to be excluded from negotiations on the future of Ukraine and the continent, under no circumstances should British or other European troops be used in a peacekeeping role.The idea that Trump thinks he can cut a deal with Putin, rob Ukraine of her mineral wealth and then leave Europe to pick up the pieces is disgraceful beyond belief. We should not fall for it.It is unacceptable that British lives be risked for the knavery of Trump and his acolytes. If the US wants European troops on the ground, we get a place at the negotiating table. No ifs, no buts. No taxation without representation: is that not a founding principle of US democracy?William SeafordNewport If Donald Trump is determined to upend post-1945 international structures, as seems likely given his vice-president’s speech, then both sides of the Atlantic need to contemplate the full meaning of a transactional approach to security. Maybe British politicians will stop kidding themselves about the so-called special relationship, which has only ever been special to the Americans when it suited them. At the same time, perhaps someone can inform Trump that it is a mistake to evaluate defence alliances like real-estate deals.Should the president pay a visit to the UK, as Keir Starmer seems to hope, I suggest he be taken to visit the Iraq and Afghanistan memorial in Victoria Embankment Gardens, London, where he’ll be reminded of the 626 UK military personnel who died in furtherance of American wars in those countries between 2001 and 2014. Given the popular reverence for veterans in the US, the Maga movement might find our military sacrifice is one of the few aspects of the North Atlantic alliance it can’t easily dismiss.If Trump then still ditches Europe in favour of deals with Putin, it needs to be made clear that self-interest works on both sides. The US won’t be able to expect its former allies to fall in line behind it in the same way it has commanded since the end of the second world war.Mark CottleMaesygwartha, Monmouthshire As Simon Tisdall pointed out a year ago in the Observer, the UK cannot maintain its Trident nuclear deterrent without the active support of the United States. There now appears a high risk that the US will want to be able to veto the use of Trident by the UK and/or to extract a high price for any continued support. Isn’t it time to think about mothballing Trident and redirecting that funding to conventional defence capacity in Europe?Simon RewLondon More

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      Netanyahu seeks to draw Trump into future attack on Iranian nuclear sites

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      Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed that, with Donald Trump’s support, his government will “finish the job” of neutralising the threat from Iran, amid US reports that Israel is considering airstrikes against Iranian nuclear sites in the coming few months.Trump has said he would prefer to make a deal with Tehran, but also made clear that he was considering US military action if talks failed, and his administration has laid down an early maximalist demand: Iranian abandonment of its entire nuclear programme.“All options are on the table,” the US national security adviser, Michael Waltz, told Fox News on Sunday. The new administration will only talk to Iran, Waltz added, if “they want to give up their entire programme and not play games as we’ve seen Iran do in the past in prior negotiations”.Earlier this month, Trump offered the Iranian regime a stark choice.“I would like a deal done with Iran on non-nuclear,” he told the New York Post. “I would prefer that to bombing the hell out of it.”In politics as in business, Trump’s vaunted “art of the deal” has relied heavily on bluster and threats, but analysts question how well that will work with Tehran. They also warn that the window for a diplomatic resolution to the standoff with Tehran will get narrower with each passing month, as Iranian nuclear capabilities progress, and Netanyahu works to persuade Trump to participate in joint strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities while it is at its most vulnerable.Israel’s prime minister has tried and failed to convince successive US administrations to take part in military action against Iran, including Trump’s. During his first term in the White House, Trump declined, in line with his aim of keeping the US out of foreign wars.In 2018, however, Trump did fulfil another Netanyahu request, withdrawing the US from a three-year-old multilateral agreement that had constrained Iran’s programme in return for sanctions relief. Since then, Iran has pushed forward with nuclear development and now produces increasing amounts of 60%-enriched uranium, which means it is a small technical step away from the production of weapons-grade fissile material.Tehran insists it has no intention of making a nuclear weapon and remains a member of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, but the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, could upend that policy if Iran’s nuclear sites came under threat.Israel and Iran launched a series of tit-for-tat attacks on each other last year, culminating in substantial Israeli airstrikes on 25 October that inflicted significant damage on Iran’s air defences.That damage, combined with Israel’s crippling campaign over the past year against Iran’s most important ally in the region, Hezbollah, has left Iran in its most militarily vulnerable state for decades.View image in fullscreenStanding alongside the new US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, on Sunday, Netanyahu made clear he wanted to take advantage of that vulnerability.“Over the last 16 months, Israel has dealt a mighty blow to Iran’s terror axis. Under the strong leadership of President Trump, and with your unflinching support, I have no doubt that we can and will finish the job,” he said.US intelligence agencies have been briefing reporters over the past week that they believe Israel is likely to attack Iranian nuclear sites in the first half of 2025. But the intelligence assessments also underlined Israeli reliance on US support in the form of aerial refuelling, intelligence and reconnaissance. US officials also said such strikes would, at most, set back Iran’s programme by a few months, and could trigger Tehran’s decision to take the decisive step towards making weapons-grade uranium.Whatever the misgivings in Washington, the Trump administration approved the sale earlier this month of guidance kits for bunker-busting BLU-109 bombs, likely to be essential in inflicting damage on Iran’s most deeply buried enrichment plant at Fordow.Netanyahu was the first foreign visitor to be invited to the White House after Trump’s re-election, and according to the Washington Post, the two leaders discussed “several possible levels of American backing, ranging from active military support for a kinetic strike – such as intelligence, refuelling or other assistance – to more limited political backing for a coercive ultimatum”.Raz Zimmt, a research fellow and Iran expert at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, said there was another clock ticking on diplomacy with Iran. Under the 2015 nuclear agreement, its remaining signatories, including the UK, France and Germany, can trigger a “snap back” of all international sanctions on Iran, but that leverage expires in October this year, giving European capitals the options of “use it or lose it”. If the mechanism is triggered, it could lead to a further escalation, Zimmt said.“I think there is a very limited diplomatic window of opportunity until August or September, to reach some kind of settlement between Iran and the US,” he said. “If there is no agreement by then … I think it will be much easier for Netanyahu to get not just a green light [from Washington] but perhaps some kind of military capabilities which will make it easier for Israel to achieve a broader and more effective impact.”Netanyahu regularly describes Trump as the “best friend” Israel ever had in the White House, a description echoed by Rubio and other administration officials, but that friendship will be put to a decisive test as Israel continues to press the case for an attack on Iran.Ariane Tabatabai, a Pentagon policy adviser in the Biden administration, said it would fuel “tension between the ‘restraint’ camp in the administration and the more traditional Republicans who are more inclined toward a more forceful approach to Iran”.“It’s not clear yet in these early days which group will have more influence in the inter-agency process and ultimately drive policy, but that’ll be a factor as well.” Tabatabai said.Trump prides himself in keeping the US out of foreign wars, but he has shown himself ready to take military action against Tehran, ordering the assassination by drone of a Revolutionary Guards commander, Qassem Suleimani, in Baghdad in January 2020.Saudi Arabia is reportedly offering to mediate to avoid a conflagration, but even if Trump wanted to hammer out a deal, argued Alex Vatanka, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, Trump’s browbeating style of negotiation could easily backfire when it came to Tehran.“The Trump style is he goes in heavy,” Vatanka said. “But Ali Khamenei has to be extremely careful how he responds to Trump so his personal image is not damaged.”“Iran has been weakened in the region – no doubt about it – but they still claim to be leading proponents of the Islamic cause who stand up to western bullying,” he added. “So what might work with certain countries in Europe or in Latin America will not necessarily work with the Iranian regime.” More

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      ‘The US is ready to hand Russia a win’: newspapers on Europe’s Trump shock

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      This year’s Munich security conference exposed the chasm in core values separating the Trump administration from most Europeans and sparked deep alarm at US efforts to control the Ukraine peace process and exclude European governments from it.Here is what some of the main European and US newspapers had to say about it.Le MondeThrough JD Vance, its vice-president, the US has “declared ideological war on Europe”,wrote Sylvie Kauffmann for the French title. If Vladimir Putin turned on the US in a famous 2007 speech at the conference, in 2025 it was the US that turned on Europe.In a “virulent diatribe against European democracies he accused of stifling freedom of speech and religion”, Vance said the greatest threat to the continent was not Russia or China but Europe’s own retreat from some of its “most fundamental values”.Worse, his relative silence on “the topic Europe most wanted to hear him on”, Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, “prolongs the incomprehension and confusion over Trump’s initiative aimed at ending the war”, Kauffmann said.“A thick fog now surrounds Washington’s intentions; between the public statements of Vance and the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, and the various interviews followed by denials, contradictory positions have multiplied,” she said.New York TimesThe US administration had done nothing less than “offer what may be a preview under Mr Trump of a redefinition of a transatlantic relationship built on postwar bonds of stability between allied governments”, the paper said.It too reminded readers of Putin’s 2007 speech in which the Russian president “demanded the rollback of American influence and a new balance of power in Europe more suitable to Moscow”, adding that he “didn’t get what he wanted – then”.Now, top Trump officials had “made one thing clear: Putin has found an American administration that might help him realise his dream”. The comments raised fears the US may now “align with Russia and either assail Europe or abandon it altogether”.Such a shift, the paper said, would amount to “a previously unthinkable victory far more momentous for [Putin] than any objectives in Ukraine”.Süddeutsche ZeitungCommentator Daniel Brössler said in the Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung that Vance had not come to the German city to give “a friendly wake-up call”, but as “an arsonist”. The US vice-president’s mission was “the triumph of rightwing populism – with the backing of America’s billionaire chief Elon Musk”.His silence on security policy was because “work has already begun on a deal with Putin at the expense of Ukraine, but also of Europe … This much is clear: Trump will make the deal, and the Europeans will have to pay and secure peace militarily.”Europe, Brössler said, was being attacked “by Putin, who has come a good deal closer to his goal of revising the European order in recent days. And by Trump, who no longer even recognises common interests – and certainly not common values.”On the one hand, the US “is demanding Europe finally become capable of defending itself against Russia. On the other, it is backing Putin’s henchmen and appeasers”, from Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, to the Alternative für Deutschland co-leader Alice Weidel.The continent, he said, “will have to rise above itself”. Editorialist Detlef Essinger said Vance had deployed “a trick that populists and authoritarians have used for years … The principle is: accuse others of exactly everything that you do yourself.”This “confuses them. It puts you on the offensive, and your opponents on the defensive. It gives you sovereignty over the terms. And a debate is not won by the person who has the better arguments, but by the person who owns the terms.”The Kyiv Independent“The US administration is ready to hand Russia a win in its brutal war against Ukraine. That’s the only conclusion we can make,” the paper said in a blunt editorial. The words and acts of Trump and his team go “beyond appeasement”.But, it added, while the US may be “the biggest and richest ally Ukraine has”, it is far from the only one: “That means all eyes are on you, Europe. The real decision on whether Russia wins the war doesn’t actually sit with Trump now – it’s with Europe.”Europe’s leaders, if they are “real leaders of their nations and not political opportunists, need to recognise the urgency of the situation, and act now. After all, if the US is out and Ukraine falls, Europe will be left to face Russia one on one.”Russia, the paper said, “is not at war with Ukraine, it’s at war with the west. And if a significant part of the west deserts, the rest needs to make sure to show up for battle.” Nobody, it said, wanted the war to end more than Ukrainians do.“But we understand that any compromise with Russia won’t be the end of the war. There can’t be a compromise in this war. Russia wins – the west loses. The west wins – Russia loses. Europe, the time is now.” More

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      Trump’s comments on Canada prompt surge of patriotism – in a Canadian way

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      A lone figure takes to the stage, a giant maple leaf flag rippling on a screen behind him as he gingerly approaches the microphone.“I’m not a lumberjack, or a fur trader,” he tells the crowd. “I have a prime minister, not a president. I speak English and French, not American. And I pronounce it ‘about’ – not ‘a boot’.”The crowd, indifferent at first, grows increasingly enthusiastic as the man works his way through a catalogue of Canadian stereotypes, passing from diffidence to defiance before the climactic cry: “Canada is the second largest landmass! The first nation of hockey! And the best part of North America! My name is Joe! And I am Canadian!”The ad, for Molson Canadian beer, was immensely popular when it aired in 2000. And now, with Canada’s identity and sovereignty under threat, it has roared back into the public consciousness.In recent weeks, Canadian patriotism has surged in response to Donald Trump’s suggestion that the US could annex its northern neighbour. His threats have prompted an outpouring of disbelief and defiance, but – in a very Canadian way – they has also revived questions over the complexities of national identity.View image in fullscreenTrump began his campaign of diplomatic trolling before he had even assumed office, questioning Canada’s viability as a nation, suggesting that it could become the 51st American state, and deriding the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, as a “governor”.In response, Canadians have taken to acts of patriotism, small and large: one pilot flew his small plane in the shape of a maple leaf; sports fans have booed US teams; hats insisting “Canada is not for sale” have gone viral; consumers have pledged to buy only Canadian-made products – a pledge skewered in a viral sketch in which one shopper berates another for buying American ketchup.“What the hell are you doing?” he asked “We’re in a trade war, you traitor!”“It’s been absolutely crazy and overwhelming,” said Dylan Lobo, who runs MadeInCa, a website that catalogues products made in-country. “We’re struggling to keep up with all the listings. People are really frustrated and they want to find a way to support Canadian and buy Canadian.”Politicians, aware of a looming election, have wrapped themselves in the flag. And in a show of bipartisan unity, five former prime ministers have called for Canadian unity.“We all agree on one thing: Canada, the true north, strong and free, the best country in the world, is worth celebrating and fighting for,” the leaders wrote in a statement.A recent poll found pro-Canadian sentiment has surged in recent weeks – with the biggest leap towards patriotism found in francophone Quebec, a region historically ambivalent towards federal patriotism.View image in fullscreenThe shift marks a dramatic rebound from 2020, when the divisive policies of the coronavirus pandemic shifted how many Canadians viewed the flag – especially after the maple leaf was appropriated by the by far-right Freedom Convoy protests in Ottawa.At the same time, new stress has been put on Canadian national identity amid growing recognition of the historical injustices perpetrated against Indigenous peoples. Statues of monarchs and founding statesmen have been pulled down, and buildings renamed amid a heated national discussion about the legacy of colonial rule.“Trump’s comments on annexation have certainly awakened something in people,” said Wilfred King, the chief of Gull Bay First Nation. “But I think we also need to remember on both side of the border, that Indigenous people in Canada are the only ones that can really speak about true sovereignty in this country.”Unlike in other colonial conquests, King said, the Crown made alliances with Indigenous peoples in what is now Canada. “There was no surrender to outside forces.”“When crisis and conflict came, we answered the call. Indigenous people volunteered more than any other group to fight alongside their allies in both world wars,” said King, whose father served in the second world war. “When they returned home, they were marginalized. They saw what it was like to be betrayed by a friend.”And so the fraught nature of Canada’s relationship with the US is jarringly familiar to the country’s first peoples. “They’re only feeling what we’ve been feeling for the last 175 years. It’s how the government has treated First Nations in Canada.”View image in fullscreenFor Jeff Douglas, who played Joe Canada in popular the 2000 ad campaign, the recent surge of nationalism has brought mixed feelings.“Patriotism wasn’t something that ever really resonated with me and I was very ignorant about the totality of Canadian history when we made the ad,” he said.Douglas, who later became an acclaimed radio host for the CBC, says decades spent meeting different groups across the country has deepened his understanding of Canada’s complicated, and dark, history.“I think that we can still be proud. We just have to be aware – and then being aware of the wrongs of the past and the continuing wrongs in the present doesn’t mean that we can’t be proud to be Canadian. Pride in being Canadian cannot come at the cost of that awareness,” he said.And while he says a “blind” shift towards patriotism doesn’t serve the broader goals of fixing injustices, it also reflects the “dynamic” nature of people’s relationship with their country.“There are going to be times where you’re going to need to just say, ‘We need to be strong and face forward if that’s what the country needs to get through the existential threat we’re facing,’” he said.Douglas is hopeful the current fixation on buttressing Canadian identity in the face of threats to the country will serve a broader purpose.“My love of the country, or rather the people of the country, is a love of what we potentially could achieve, and it is richer when I understand the complexity of where we’ve been and where we are. We can grow. But it’s important to remember that you can love something that’s imperfect.” More

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      ‘They may be Russian some day’: was this the week that changed the war in Ukraine?

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      Volodymyr Zelenskyy has had some tough weeks in the past three years, but this past one may be up there with the worst of them.Back on Monday, in an hour-long interview with the Guardian at his Kyiv offices, the Ukrainian president was in a cautiously optimistic frame of mind. He said he had received “positive signals from the Americans” over upcoming negotiations. His team was working to fix a date for a meeting with Donald Trump, he said, and he was sure that the US president understood the importance of coordinating his position with Kyiv before talking to Russia.Zelenskyy’s main message, which he returned to several times in the interview, was that it was vital for the US to play a key role in enforcing any potential peace settlement. If Ukraine was to be denied Nato membership, it at least required Nato-style guarantees that would deter Vladimir Putin from coming back to bite off more chunks of the country in a year or five. “Security guarantees without America are not real security guarantees,” he said, unequivocally.But the reality of Trump’s second term can come at you fast. By Wednesday, the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, had ruled out both Nato membership for Ukraine and any US role in enforcing a peace deal. Later that day, in a surprise announcement, Trump said he had conducted a 90-minute phone call with Putin, and gave a press conference afterwards during which he proceeded to rip up three years of US rhetoric on supporting Ukraine.In Kyiv, the announcements hit with a shock as jarring as the wall-shaking booms from Iskander missiles that had been shot down on the outskirts of the city in the early hours of that morning.It had been a “bad war to get into” for Ukraine, said Trump, suggesting it was Kyiv’s choice to be invaded. He declined to say that Ukraine would be an equal partner in future negotiations, disparaged Zelenskyy’s poll ratings and repeatedly emphasised that his priority was regaining the money the US had spent on aid to Ukraine over the past few years, bandying around figures that appeared to have been plucked from thin air.View image in fullscreenHe doubled down on Hegseth’s insistence that Ukraine restoring its territorial integrity was unlikely, and even suggested that Russia might in some way deserve to keep the occupied territory because “they took a lot of land and they fought for that land”. The readout of the call said Trump and Putin had talked about the “great history” of their respective nations and discussed the second world war, all of which will have been music to Putin’s ears.Perhaps the Trump comment that caused the most anger in Ukraine was the casual remark in a television interview that “they may be Russian some day, they may not be Russian some day, but we’re gonna have all this money in there and I said I want it back.” It was a flippant dismissal of Ukraine’s existential fight to defend itself from Russian occupation, wrapped up in a demand for cash.In response, Zelenskyy has been walking an unenviable diplomatic tightrope. He knows that if he starts even to gently criticise the US president, it could make things worse for his country. On Monday, he offered careful compliments, tipping his hat to Trump’s “decisiveness”. He repeated the description on Friday at the Munich Security Conference, when JD Vance, the US vice-president, made the keynote speech and hardly mentioned Ukraine, and when there were surely many different words in Zelenskyy’s private thoughts.There is a depressing sense of deja vu to the situation. In the early months of Zelenskyy’s presidency, back in 2019, he got dragged into an impeachment drama after Trump tried to pressure him to investigate Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine. When Trump released a memo of the call, Zelenskyy appeared to be trying to sidestep entering a criminal conspiracy by flattering Trump. (“You are absolutely right. Not only 100%, but actually 1,000%,” he said, when Trump criticised European support for Ukraine.)This time, with the stakes even higher and Ukraine’s survival as a state on the line, Zelenskyy’s team has come up with a “victory plan” designed to catch Trump’s eye. Instead of appealing to shared values or European security, neither of which get Trump excited, they instead suggested joint exploitation of Ukraine’s “rare earths” and potentially lucrative contracts for US companies in the reconstruction of postwar Ukraine.“Those who are helping us to save Ukraine will [have the chance to] renovate it, with their businesses together with Ukrainian businesses. All these things we are ready to speak about in detail,” Zelenskyy said on Monday.The pitch worked, and on Wednesday, the US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, arrived in Kyiv with a draft agreement on natural resources. But reports of the contents suggest it requires Ukraine to hand over 50% of its mineral wealth without being provided with any security guarantees in return. “It made people quite upset,” said one source in Kyiv. Zelenskyy has so far declined to sign.For some officials from other allied nations, many of whom have become deeply personally invested in Ukraine’s fight to throw off Russian domination, the crumbling of US support over the last week has felt like a betrayal.The EU ambassador to Ukraine, Katarína Mathernová, wrote on Facebook that she had attended the funeral of two Ukrainian soldiers in the western city of Lviv on Friday, and “cried like a child” as they were laid to rest. “How can a deal about Ukraine be made without Ukraine? How could such an agreement ever be explained to the families of the thousands of Ukrainian soldiers who have fallen defending the integrity of their homeland?” she asked.Many Ukrainians say they are willing to see concessions made for the sake of a peace deal, after three long years of disrupted lives and thousands of deaths. But the key question of what security guarantees could enforce such a deal looks even harder to answer satisfactorily for Kyiv after Trump’s comments this week.On the other hand, if no deal is done, Ukraine will face an extremely difficult situation militarily. Late last month, the Ukrainska Pravda news outlet quoted Kyrylo Budanov, the head of military intelligence, as telling a closed parliamentary committee that if negotiations did not begin in earnest by summer “dangerous processes could unfold, threatening Ukraine’s very existence”. Budanov later denied making the remarks, and the SBU security service opened an investigation to try to discover the outlet’s sources, showing the sensitivity of the topic.Several sources in Kyiv said that while the frontline has stabilised since late last year, by the beginning of the summer Ukrainian forces may be in trouble, particularly if US military aid deliveries cease. The army is currently dealing with a desertion problem, difficulty in mobilising new troops and intense exhaustion among those at the frontline.View image in fullscreenHowever, some caution against the dangers of rushing into a quick deal, especially now that the spectrum of possibilities on offer from Trump appears to be so troubling. “The earlier we get to the table the worse the outcome will be,” said Vadym Prystaiko, a former foreign minister. “It’s counterintuitive, and I know it’s painful. But there are still ways. We don’t have to give up. There is a Ukrainian saying: ‘Don’t fall down before you’re shot,’” he said.Prystaiko said there ought to be ways to engage Europe more forcefully in the context of a Trump retreat, notably by finally pushing through an agreement on sending Ukraine money from frozen Russian assets. And while the outcomes for Ukraine may look bleak now, many Ukrainians remind outsiders that the country has been written off before. In February 2022 many observers expected the Russian army to overrun Kyiv in days. Instead, the capital remained standing and the population launched a fightback.“Ukraine survived for three years and Russia is still fighting for some villages in the Donbas. It’s a miracle,” said one senior security source. “I don’t believe the front will collapse, but it will get harder. We have time, but we are paying heavily for that time, first of all in the lives of our people.”As well as the future of Ukraine, Zelenskyy has his own political future to consider in the coming weeks. Both Trump and his envoy Keith Kellogg have raised the question of elections, a topic also frequently mentioned by the Kremlin as a supposed reason why they cannot negotiate with him, after his official term ended last year.In the interview on Monday, Zelenskyy bristled and came the closest to a direct criticism of the Trump administration when asked about these demands. “It’s an internal question… nobody, not even someone with a very serious position, can just say, ‘I want elections tomorrow.’ That’s the sovereign right of Ukraine and Ukrainians,” he said.Zelenskyy pointed out the challenges of holding an election in the current climate. Martial law precludes it, and even if there were a ceasefire it is hard to imagine how the logistics of a countrywide vote would work, given the millions of voters living in occupied territories, frontline areas and abroad as refugees.“Will the elections be only when we’ve solved everything in 20 years’ time? No. But we cannot just shout loudly, ‘We want elections.’ Let’s be honest, today our people would see this as something shocking,” he said.Increasingly strident criticism of Zelenskyy can be heard from some Ukrainians, amid complaints about his leadership style and a centralisation of power in the presidential administration. There was also confusion and anger over an ill-timed move this week to place financial sanctions on former president Petro Poroshenko, in what appears to be an act of political revenge. But there are few voices who think that now is the time for a vote.“Our position is that during a war there is no room for politics and especially not for elections,” said Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, an MP from the Fatherland party of former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko and a former head of the SBU security agency. “It would be the end for Ukraine. To start political or election activity would mean Putin’s victory the next day.”If some kind of sustainable peace deal is concluded in the coming months, elections might happen later in the year, analysts suggest. The big question will be whether Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the popular former army commander who now serves as ambassador to London, would stand. If he does, informal polls suggest he is likely to win; against other candidates, Zelenskyy has a much better chance.It is widely assumed that Zelenskyy himself plans to stand for another term, although when asked, he claimed that – like so much else in Ukraine – that will depend on what happens in the coming months. “That’s really a rhetorical question for me… I really don’t know. I don’t know how this war will finish,” he said. More