Too many European elites believe that small increases in defence spending and serious-sounding summits such as the Munich Security Conference (which starts Friday) deserve the Trump administration’s gratitude. They further suggest that the President newly outlined peace strategy for Ukraine is a foolish surrender to Vladimir Putin.

Trump spoke with both Putin and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday, stating that both leaders had expressed openness towards constructive negotiations.

Former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt summed up the European discontent, saying it is “certainly an innovative approach to a negotiation to make very major concessions even before they have started”. He continued: “Not even Chamberlain went that low in 1938. That Munich ended very bad anyhow.” Others lamented what they described as proof that Trump had abandoned both Ukraine and the historic transatlantic alliance. This rhetoric is very intellectually lazy, belying two key points.

First, it ignores the fact that almost all European members of Nato except Poland continue to neglect defence spending 11 years after a Nato summit in which all members explicitly pledged to move towards 2%-of-GDP defence budgets. In 2024, more than two years after the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, 19 of Nato’s 32 members spent either less than 2% of GDP on defence or between 2% and 2.15% of GDP on defence.

From the American perspective, European economic difficulties are no excuse for this freeloading. If the threat Russia poses to Europe’s democratic sovereignty and stability is real, and it is, then Europe must respond in kind. If that requires cuts to welfare budgets to pay for strengthened militaries, so be it. America expects to fight a terrible war with China over Taiwan by 2030. It rightly refuses to risk losing that war simply because Keir Starmer and his EU counterparts want to spend more on housing and health services.

The second key rebuttal to the European malaise is that Trump’s opening gambit towards peace with Ukraine is not nearly as much of a gift to Putin as it is now being presented. Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth outlined this gambit on Wednesday. Hegseth pledged that “We want, like you, a sovereign and prosperous Ukraine”. But he warned that any peace strategy could not include the “unrealistic objective” of a restoration of Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders (meaning the evacuation of Russian forces from Crimea and southeastern Ukraine). He added that “the United States does not believe that Nato membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement.” Is this so outrageous? Is this truly a pathetic moral and strategic submission to Putin?

I think not. No one seriously expects Ukraine to restore all of its pre-2014 borders as part of any peace deal. It lacks the military capacity to do so and the West — Europe most certainly included — lacks the armaments and political resolve to support that agenda. This doesn’t mean that Ukraine won’t get any territory back as part of a deal, just that it won’t get all of it.

Still, this is only one side of the coin. Because Hegseth also explicitly outlined a prized interest for Ukraine as part of any final status peace deal. As he put it: “A durable peace for Ukraine must include robust security guarantees to ensure that the war will not begin again. This must not be Minsk 3.0.” That’s a righteously derisive reference to former German Chancellor Angela Merkel (absurdly overrated by the Western media) of her Minsk 2 accord. That agreement saw Russia make and then systematically break its peace obligations following its 2014 invasion of Crimea and the Donbas.

Hegseth then made public that which is well known in private. Namely, that European military forces led by the United Kingdom, France, and likely Poland will provide the boots on the ground to uphold any peace deal. And while Hegseth said no US troops would be involved in ground force operations, he very notably made no mention of US Air Force and intelligence activities that would almost certainly support any European deployment.

This push by the Trump administration for a robust European peacekeeping force is crucial. And it matters so much for Ukraine’s credible peace for the same reason that Putin will be so desperate to avoid it. Namely, that such a force would deter Russia from future offensive action at the risk of its forces being embarrassingly annihilated by superior Western forces supported by the US military.

In short, the Europeans should look in the mirror and take a breath. America is not abandoning Ukraine or Europe. Instead, it is starting peace talks from a position of practicality with a mind to achieving what European leaders such as Merkel and Starmer have utterly failed to do: end a brutal war in a manner that preserves Ukraine’s democratic sovereignty while preventing a return to war a few years down the road.

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Tom Rogan is a national security writer at the Washington Examiner

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