They are passing the mandate already.
The first victim of Donald Trump’s second term as US president is likely to be Ukraine.
In a piece for London's 'The Guardian', Timothy Garton Ash writes :
"The only people who can avert that disaster are us Europeans, yet our continent is in disarray. Germany’s coalition government chose the day we woke up to news of Trump’s triumph, of all days, to fall apart in bitter rancour.
Unless Europe can somehow rise to the challenge, not just Ukraine but the whole continent will be left weak, divided and angry as we enter a new and dangerous period of European history."
The article says : - ".... there’s a 90% to 95% chance that he (Trump) will do exactly what he’s repeatedly said he’ll do, and try to end the war by imposing a settlement on Ukraine.
In July, he told Fox News: “I would tell Zelenskyy: no more. You’ve got to make a deal” –
although he did add that he would threaten to give Kyiv “a lot more” aid in order to bring Putin to the table.
But the terms envisaged by his vice-president, JD Vance – accepting the current territorial division of Ukraine and compelling it to concede neutrality – would be a great victory for Putin.
However, the writer also says ="I would say there’s a five to 10% chance that the “surprise-man” 47th US president will threaten to increase support for Ukraine in order to strong-arm Vladimir Putin into a peace deal, as some of his prominent pro-Ukrainian supporters such as former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo have urged."
In reality, Timothy Garton Ash says:
"...there is probably no deal that both Putin and Zelenskyy would currently accept. In a rare true statement, Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov has observed: “You can’t end the Ukraine conflict overnight.”
However, it is presumed that what the incoming US president can do, however, is to reduce US economic and military support so dramatically that Kyiv is compelled to seek a ceasefire from a position of weakness.
Worse still, this might create what the military expert Jack Watling has called a Brest-Litovsk scenario, with Ukraine scrambling to secure a deal from such a weak position that even the threat of a new enemy offensive might compel it to make more concessions, as happened to Russia itself when negotiating the 1918 Brest-Litovsk treaty with imperial Germany and its allies, he notes.
Another interesting twist in the tale comes from Paris.
"Intellectually, many Europeans recognise that, sandwiched between an aggressively advancing Russia and an aggressively withdrawing America, Europe needs to do more for its own defence.
The French intellectual Emmanuel Macron, who also happens to be president of France, reacted to Trump’s victory by informing the X-Twittersphere that he had spoken to German chancellor Olaf Scholz and they would work together for a “more united, stronger, more sovereign Europe in this new context”.
ends
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