President Vladimir V. Russia’s Putin shocked the public at the Annual Security Conference in Munich in 2007 demanding the restoration of authoritarian American influence and the new balance of power in Europe more suitable for Moscow.
He didn’t get what he wanted – then.
Nearly two decades later, during the same conference, top officials from President Trump’s cabinet made one thing clear: Mr Putin found an American administration that could help him realize his dream.
Comments by Defense Minister Pete Hegseth and Vice President JD Vance have put fears between the participants under the new United States administration. It can be aligned with Russia and either attack Europe or abandon it completely.
Such a shift, analysts say, would give Mr Putin a previous unthinkable victory much more important to him than any goal in Ukraine.
“From the dawn of the Cold War in the late 1940s, the Kremlin dreamed of promoting America from its role as a cornerstone of European security,” said Andrew S. Weiss, Vice President for study at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Putin is definitely enough I understand to bounce in any openings provided by the new administration.”
The presence of US troops was the support of 80 years of peace in Western Europe since the end of World War II. But in a speech in Warsaw on Friday, before his arrival at the conference, Mr Hegseth warned European leaders that they should not assume that the United States will be there forever.
Later on the day, at the Munich Congress, Mr Vance gave an even more frightening message to many European participants: the enemy he sees is not Russia or China, but Europe itself.
Mr Vance has put an attack on European nations for the use of those called anti -democratic methods to limit far -right parties that have in some cases supported by Russia. She claimed that Epirus had to recognize the wishes of her voters, stop trying to mitigate misinformation in anti -democratic ways and allow such parties to thrive as the will of the people.
“If you are running with the fear of your own voters. There is nothing that America cannot do for you,” Mr Vance said. “Nor, on this issue, there is something you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump.”
Mr Vance hit Romania, where the country’s constitutional court in December canceled a presidential election that an ultraviolet supported by an obvious Russian influence campaign seemed ready to win. The elections have been rescheduled for May.
“If your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising by a foreign country, then it was not very strong to start,” he said.
The Kremlin has been trying to weaken Europe for years, reinforcing the parties that Mr Vance has supported must be allowed to bloom. On the same day as his observations at the conference, Mr Vance met with the leader of the Extreme Right Movement of Germany, which challenges the national elections this month, reinforcing a party that Russia has sought to legitimize.
Moscow also tried to lead a wedge between the United States and Europe, realizing that the destruction of the long-term Euro-Atlantic alliance would lead to a world where Moscow can exert much more power.
Nathalie Tocci, director of the Institute of International Affairs in Rome, attended Mr Vance’s speech and interpreted the message as an immediate threat from the United States to the European Union, which the highly right Europeans and Kremlin seek to disassemble. He called it a twist from the United States.
“The plot is that we are out there to destroy you,” Mrs Tocci said.
“The issue is not even Ukraine,” he added. “The point is the deliberate weakening, if not a disaster, of Europe, of which Ukraine is a part.”
Ms Tocci described Mr Vance’s observations as an attack on the European Republic that twisted the language of the Republic itself, how Russia often makes when it sows division within Europe.
A dramatic reorganization of power in Europe seemed like a pipe dream for Mr Putin back when his vision in 2007 at the Munich Congress. Robert M. Gates, the US Secretary of Defense at the time, was sitting in the audience and later rejected the observations as a return to the Cold War.
The Russian leader, however, has unexpectedly stuck in his vision, making the central point of his argument in the months leading to war: that the West must be willing to discuss not only Ukrainian sovereignty but also the entire European security device, which claimed omitted Moscow and put it in existential danger.
Mr Putin threw his invasion of Ukraine as a wider battle against the West and the values ​​he depicts as anodes, some of the same arguments made by Europe’s right -wing leaders and Europe in power in their countries.
Mr Putin believed that the United States and Europe would bend him, Alexander Baunov, a colleague at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, wrote in a recent analysis.
The United States is changing, wrote Baunov and today’s Washington “is approaching Moscow not for the sake of Europe, but for its sake – and even a little to make Europe.”
The challenge for Europe comes as Germany and France, the two largest countries in the European Union, both suffer from leadership crises, partly because of the growing political movements that surpass the same rhetoric as Mr Trump. In 2015, Germany and France took the lead in negotiating Mr Putin’s first invasion of Ukraine.
The United Kingdom, which abandoned the European Union because of the campaign that Mr Trump was publicly supported, has seen its influence on Epirus to be significantly weakened.
How far will Mr Trump’s agreement with Mr Putin will go unclear and the budding approach between Washington and Moscow could easily evaporate during Ukraine negotiations, which are about to start with a meeting between Americans. and Russian representatives in Saudi Arabia. week.
However, foreign leaders have managed to record Mr Trump in places favorable to them before, and so far Russia has reached benefits from the new administration.
The Kremlin has put a number of wins since Mr Trump returned to the White House.
Less than a month after his second term, Mr Trump has dumped USAID, the US Foreign Aid Service that was far removed from Moscow. He has pushed the cabinet officials that are regularly circulating at the Kremlin’s talk points, including the new head of US intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. It has exacerbated the disagreement in relations with Europe, threatening Washington’s closest allies by trade war. He has authorized and increased Elon Musk, who is spreading falsely beneficial to Moscow in X and publicly supports Germany’s far -right movement.
Mr Trump will now affect, possibly without European leaders, how the greatest conflict in Epirus in World War II is resolved, with consequences that could overcome Ukraine itself to influence the broader balance of security security. in Europe.
These leaders, who see the guerrillas right populist movements as a threat to the European Union and Freedom in Epirus, are concerned, especially given the apparent alignment of Mr Trump and Mr Putin against them.
“This is the moment when we are the most vulnerable,” Tocci said.
“If in the end what you are trying to do is destroy this project,” he added, referring to the EU, “this is the time to do it.”
