Is it time to call the bully's bluff?

After the melt-down in the White House, can Europe's leaders rediscover their capacity for independent action?

Why on earth were we surprised?

When a man we know is a bully and a thug behaves like a bully and a thug, why do we throw up our hands in shock?

Most of us will presumably have some memories from our days in the school playground, when a big bully (or bullies) swaggered about with their coterie in attendance, while the rest of us hovered in nervous anticipation.

Will they come for me, or will they turn their attention to someone else? Will it be with a fake smile (‘Well, hello there, so how are we doing today?’), or with a scowl and clenched fists? (‘There’s something you and I need to discuss, and we need to discuss it NOW.’)

That’s the thing with bullies: you never know when they’ll turn on you. So you have to choose one of two options: there’s the Macron/Starmer option (‘Hi, wow, you look great! You’re amazing!’), or the Zelensky option (‘Look, I know you’re bigger than I am, but sorry, this is mine, and I’m not going to hand it over either to you or to your mate Putin.’)

And then you get in a huddle with all your friends (Keir Starmer and Volodymyr Zelensky will be meeting 16 other European leaders in London tomorrow) and ask yourselves this question: Do we carry on trying to deal with the thug and the bully, or do we call his bluff, and tell him we can manage without him?

Zelensky seems to favour the first option: ‘America’s help has been vital in helping us survive, and I want to acknowledge that. Despite the tough dialogue, we remain strategic partners.’

Some European leaders, however, are tempted by Option 2. Among them, the incoming German chancellor Friedrich Merz (‘It is clear that the Americans, at least this part of the Americans, this administration, are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe’) and the EU’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas (‘Today, it became clear that the free world needs a new leader.’).

The stakes — first and foremost for the people of Ukraine, but also for the whole of Europe — couldn’t be higher. Writing in Prospect, the Canadian historian and former Liberal party leader Michael Ignatieff warns that unless Europe’s leaders get it right, the continent’s future could be bleak.

‘The east, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, will fall back under a Russian sphere of influence, subject to electoral manipulation, subversion and energy blackmail. Soon after that, the entire post-1989 project of European unity will collapse, and the continent will fracture into 27 feuding micro-states. None of these outcomes is certain but however it turns out, the result does not depend on the Trump regime. It depends on whether European leaders can rediscover their capacity for independent action.’

And it’s not only the future of Europe, he suggests, that depends on how this crisis is resolved. ‘Once they discover just how unreliable the US has become, Brazil and India, who have been placing two-way bets on the imperial rivals, China and the US, will likely line up with Beijing.’

It is possible, of course, that Friday’s unprecedented (yes, it’s that word again) White House row — in which Zelensky seems to have walked into a trap set jointly by Trump and his mini-me, JD Vance — will blow over. It is possible that tempers will cool, that the soothing words of Starmer and Macron will calm the storm.

Hoping for the best, however, is a policy option only when it is twinned with preparing for the worst.

So suppose Trump really does pull the plug on Ukraine and orders an immediate halt to all further military aid. Would it spell the end of effective Ukrainian resistance?

My former BBC colleague Mark Urban, who knows a thing or two about bombs and bullets, quotes Western officials as saying that more than half Ukraine’s military resources these days are domestically produced, with about a quarter coming from its European allies, and one-fifth from the US.

What that means, he says, is Yes, they could fight on without further US assistance, but probably only for months rather than years.

All of which, needless to say, is music to Putin’s ears. His calculation all along has been that with Trump back in the White House, the balance would shift in his favour. Europe is in disarray, NATO split asunder, Ukraine itself no longer sure which of its friends it can still rely on.

And yesterday, it was reported that the US defence secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered U.S. Cyber Command to suspend all its planning against Russia. A well-connected friend in the US emailed me to say: ‘Either Team Trump are the most naive and dangerous leaders we’ve ever had - or they really are Russian spies…’

It’s quite possible, of course, that they are both.