THE ALLIANCE

America turns on Ukraine and courts Russia, and 80 years of the Western order crack in a fortnight

The new administration opened talks with Moscow that excluded Ukraine and Europe, blamed Kyiv for the war, and called Zelensky a dictator. At Munich, the vice-president told Europe its real enemy was within. The transatlantic alliance, the bedrock of the postwar world, is breaking.

The foundation of the Western world shifted this fortnight with a speed that left Europe reeling. The Trump administration opened direct negotiations with Russia over the war in Ukraine, in talks held in Saudi Arabia on February 18 from which Ukraine itself, and Europe, were pointedly excluded, signalling that the fate of the continent would be decided over the heads of the people whose continent it is. President Trump went further, echoing Kremlin talking points by suggesting Ukraine had started the war, and calling President Zelensky "a dictator without elections," an extraordinary inversion that cast the invaded democracy as the villain and the invading autocrat as the partner. And at the Munich Security Conference on February 14, Vice-President Vance stunned an audience of Europe's leaders by lecturing them not on the Russian threat but on their own alleged failures of democracy and free speech, telling them, in effect, that the enemy they should fear was within their own societies.

Europe understood, this fortnight, that something 80 years old had broken. Since 1945 the security of Western Europe had rested on a single foundation: the American guarantee, the promise that the United States would defend its allies, that the transatlantic alliance was permanent, that Europe could shelter under the American umbrella and need not fully provide for its own defence. That guarantee, this fortnight, was revealed to be conditional, transactional, perhaps gone, as an American administration treated its oldest allies as marks and its old adversary as a partner. European leaders, who had spent decades assuming the umbrella would always be there, confronted the vertiginous reality that it might not, that they had outsourced their existential security to a patron who no longer felt bound to provide it, and that they now had to build, at desperate speed and enormous cost, the defence they had assumed they would never need to build alone. The war in Ukraine reached its third anniversary this fortnight. The alliance that had opposed the invasion reached, perhaps, its end.

GERMANY

Voters turn right, and the far right doubles

Germany, Europe's largest economy and its anxious anchor, held an election on February 23 that produced a government of the mainstream right under Friedrich Merz but delivered a shock beneath the result: the far-right Alternative for Germany doubled its vote to around 20 percent, its best result since the Second World War, becoming the second-largest party and confirming that the nationalist surge sweeping the West had reached deep into the German heartland. Merz, who will lead a fragile coalition, faces the task of governing a country economically stagnant, strategically exposed by the American retreat, and politically fracturing, at the worst possible moment for the continent he is meant to help lead.

IN BRIEF

A chainsaw for the state; a pope gravely ill; a new model

Elon Musk, wielding an actual chainsaw on stage at a conservative conference, celebrated his effort to slash the federal government, which has torn through agencies, fired tens of thousands of workers, and moved with a speed and disregard for law that the courts are only beginning to check. Pope Francis, 88, was hospitalised on February 14 with double pneumonia and was, by the Vatican's own grave account, in critical condition, fighting for his life. And the AI race pressed on beneath the geopolitics, Elon Musk's xAI releasing a new model, Grok 3, that it claimed rivalled the best of its competitors.

The Column

The umbrella that was always built on someone else's rain

Europe discovered this fortnight that the security it took for granted for eighty years was borrowed, and that the lender has decided to call in the loan. The shock is real. But a security you did not build and cannot sustain alone was never a possession. It was a dependency wearing the costume of an alliance.

By Zainab Zaheer

Europe woke this fortnight to a cold fact it had spent eighty years arranging not to think about: that the security it experienced as a permanent condition of the world was in truth a loan from a single lender, and that the lender has decided the terms no longer suit him. The American turn against Ukraine and toward Moscow did not merely betray a partner; it revealed a structure, the structure of a continent that outsourced its own protection so completely and for so long that it forgot the protection was outsourced, and mistook a dependency for a possession. The betrayal is real and I do not minimise it. But the deeper story is not the lender's faithlessness. It is the borrower's long, comfortable forgetting.

Tony Judt, in his history of postwar Europe, described the settlement that made the continent's prosperity possible with an unsentimental clarity that its beneficiaries preferred to soften: that Western Europe was able to build its enviable social democracies, its long peace, its high culture of rights and welfare, in significant part because it had been relieved of the ruinous cost of its own defence, which the United States assumed, for its own Cold War reasons, leaving Europe free to spend on hospitals what it would otherwise have spent on divisions. This was not a gift and it was not a theft; it was a bargain, and like all bargains it had a hidden price, which was strategic dependency, deferred and invisible for as long as the lender found the arrangement useful. Judt saw, and said, that a Europe which had never had to be responsible for its own survival had developed a politics that could not quite imagine survival as its own responsibility, and that this was a vulnerability disguised, for decades, as a virtue.

The counterargument deserves real weight, because the alliance was not merely a transaction and to call it one is its own distortion. NATO was built on genuine shared values, the memory of a war fought together against real evil, and a mutual interest that ran both ways; America did not protect Europe purely from charity or purely from self-interest but from a mixture that included real solidarity, and Europeans who fought and died alongside Americans in the alliance's wars are entitled to resent the reduction of all that to "dependency." I grant it. The bonds were real, the values were shared, the sacrifice was mutual. But a relationship can be genuine and still be structurally unequal, and the test of which it was comes precisely at the moment one party decides to walk, because it is then that you discover whether you held a partnership of equals or a protection you could not replace. Europe is discovering, this fortnight, that it cannot quickly replace it, and that discovery is the definition of dependency, however warm the alliance felt while it held.

I write this as someone whose own part of the world has never had the luxury of forgetting where its security came from or on whose sufferance it rested, and I will confess a complicated feeling watching Europe's shock, something short of sympathy. The peoples of the global south have spent the modern era acutely aware that their safety was contingent on the interests of powers far away, that the umbrella over their heads was held by another's hand and could be tilted or withdrawn as that hand saw fit, and there is a hard clarity in that condition that Europe, sheltered and forgetful, was spared and is now, abruptly, receiving. Welcome, one is tempted to say, to the knowledge most of the world has always carried: that a security you do not control is not security but permission, and permission can be revoked.

None of this makes the American betrayal defensible; it makes it predictable, which is worse, because predictable things can be prepared for and Europe chose not to prepare. The lesson is not that alliances are worthless or that the lender was always a villain waiting to strike. It is that a continent, or a person, or a people, that lets another hold the umbrella will one day stand in the rain at the holder's discretion, and that the only cure, an expensive and unglamorous one, is to build your own, in advance, while the sun still shines and the borrowed umbrella still holds. Europe did not, for eighty years, because it was cheaper and more pleasant not to, and the bill for that pleasantness has now, without warning and without appeal, arrived.

The Ledger

The AI race continues beneath the geopolitical earthquake; xAI's Grok 3 joins the frontier scrum. But the fortnight's real technology lesson is strategic: Europe's dependence on American security is mirrored by the world's dependence on American AI, and both dependencies suddenly look less safe.

Data centers & power

The European awakening extends to technology: a continent that outsourced its defence also outsourced much of its digital infrastructure and AI capability to American firms, and is now confronting the same dependency question across every domain at once.

Rates

Trade-war uncertainty and the geopolitical rupture unsettle markets; the Fed holds, navigating an environment where the political shocks now outweigh the economic data in driving volatility.

Real estate

US 30-year mortgage 6.85 percent (February 20). Range-bound amid the turmoil; the domestic housing market strangely becalmed while the international order convulses.

India tech

India watches the transatlantic rupture with a strategic eye: a world where American guarantees are conditional is one where India's own hedging, its refusal to fully align with any bloc, its insistence on strategic autonomy, looks vindicated. Depend on no single patron was always Delhi's instinct.

What we called wrong

Nothing to retract. The European column extends this paper's oldest theme, the danger of depending on what you do not control, to its largest possible subject: an entire continent discovering its security was borrowed. We have written it about vendors and suppliers for two years. This fortnight it is about the survival of nations.

The Back Page

The old man in the far islands, fighting

Some readers may recall a back page from a while ago, about an ageing, frail Pope Francis undertaking the longest journey of his papacy, in a wheelchair, in pain, to the far islands of the Catholic world, the poor and forgotten peripheries, choosing to spend his failing strength on the people the powerful never visit. This fortnight that old man lay in a Rome hospital, 88 years old, gravely ill with double pneumonia, fighting, by the Vatican's own account, for his life. There is something fitting, and something sad, in the timing: as the powerful of the world spent the fortnight tearing up the alliances and guarantees that have held the peace for 80 years, courting autocrats, abandoning allies, wielding chainsaws at the machinery of the state, the one figure on the world stage who had spent his last strength insisting on the dignity of the powerless lay dying, or nearly, in a hospital bed. He may recover; he has surprised before. But whether he does or not, his illness this fortnight felt like a punctuation mark, the possible passing of a particular kind of moral voice at exactly the moment the world seems least interested in hearing it, most enamoured of strength and contempt and the deal. He went, when he was strong enough, to the far islands, to sit with those who had nothing. This fortnight the far islands, and everyone else, prayed for the old man who had come to sit with them. In a fortnight of the powerful behaving terribly, it was worth remembering that a different kind of greatness had recently walked, and now perhaps was leaving, among us.