The new Trump foreign policy team has brought a dizzying message to European allies on A.I., Ukraine and more. It has already left many angered and chagrined.
The great collision has begun.
As President Trump’s national security team arrived in Europe this week, very little about their hard-line message came as a surprise. But to the political and diplomatic leaders arriving in Munich on Friday for an annual security conference where fault lines in the Western alliance are always on display, it was the size and suddenness of the breach with the Trump administration that was shocking.
In sharp contrast to his first term, Mr. Trump began imposing tariffs before he began even cursory diplomatic negotiations, hitting allies and adversaries alike and wiping out years of trade agreements.
While Mr. Trump was signing executive orders, his vice president, JD Vance, arrived in Paris and told an assemblage of leaders debating the future of artificial intelligence that America would dominate the industry, make the most advanced chips on American soil, write the software there and set the rules. Europe could either get on board or get out of the way.
Then came Ukraine. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump’s new defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, told a meeting of allies in Brussels that Ukraine must give up its objective of recapturing all its lost territory in the war with Russia. Within hours, Mr. Trump was on the phone with the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, promising negotiations but having already conceded territory Russia occupies and an assurance to the Russian leader that Ukraine would never be in NATO. Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is in Kyiv to begin negotiating American rights to Ukraine’s untapped rare earth metals.
The declarations of unilateral concessions left European leaders, and of course President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, effectively sidelined, bystanders to the negotiations about the fate of Ukraine’s boundaries and, to some degree, Europe’s future. On Thursday they began pushing back against the new administration’s message, delicately, recognizing that to trigger Mr. Trump’s wrath could leave them in a deeper freeze.