For a brief moment last week, the Europeans deluded themselves into thinking they had stood up to Donald Trump. But then geopolitical reality caught up with them over the weekend, when diplomats from Ukraine, Russia and the US sat down in Abu Dhabi for peace talks. The Europeans were not even invited to wait in the antechamber.
This is hardly a surprise. The EU has shown an utter disinterest in hard-nosed diplomacy. If the bloc had really wanted to be a strategic actor during the Russia–Ukraine war, it would be orchestrating the peace talks rather than leaving Trump and his team in charge.
Diplomacy was a state art the Europeans themselves invented. It was the Americans, however, who transported it into the modern age. During the Yom Kippur war in 1973, Henry Kissinger, who was Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor and Secretary of State at the time, maintained close contact with Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to the US. The US supported Israel while the Soviet Union sided with Egypt and Syria. According to records later released by the US, Kissinger warned Dobrynin in a telephone conversation that he had received intelligence that Egypt and Syria were about to attack Israel. Then he said: “The President believes that the US and USSR have a special responsibility to restrain our respective friends.” It was the kind of thing that neither he nor Nixon could have said in public. Diplomacy often sounds very undiplomatic. Keeping channels open is not about being polite. It is about preventing accidents and finding solutions.
The Kissinger–Dobrynin exchange is a quintessential example of backchannel diplomacy. Effective diplomacy does not have to happen at the official level. Kissinger and Dobrynin were not even direct counterparts. If Kissinger had insisted on only talking to the Russian foreign minister, he would not have got as far as he did.
In the first few weeks of the Ukraine war the Europeans tried top-level diplomacy through a series of progressively frustrating meetings. Four days after Russia’s invasion on 24 February, 2022, official delegations from Russia and Ukraine met for talks in Belarus, in a place close to the Ukrainian border. After three rounds of discussions, the talks moved to Antalya, Turkey, where the foreign ministers met on 10 March. The two sides then held talks in Istanbul on 29 March, after which they exchanged draft texts for a few weeks. The Russians insisted that Ukraine become a permanently neutral state and end its plans for EU membership. In exchange, Ukraine would receive security guarantees from a group of countries, including the UN Security Council members. The status of Crimea would be addressed through talks over 10 to 15 years. That was a better deal than what is on the table today.
The process stalled around mid-April and never resumed. Around that time, contact between the Europeans and the Russians also came to a close. Neither the Biden administration, nor the Europeans, maintained a Kissinger–Dobrynin style backchannel.
One of the important questions for historians to address is the extent to which European governments pushed Ukraine towards rejecting a peace deal four years ago. My reading has always been that the Europeans did not want to settle for anything less than a total Russian withdrawal from the occupied Ukrainian territories. They wanted to see Russia defeated — for their own security too — and were happy to let Ukraine fight on their behalf. But they had no strategy for a Ukrainian victory. And since they ended all diplomacy, they had no strategy for peace either. This, in a nutshell, is why Ukraine is losing the war.
Recently, Emmanuel Macron and Giorgia Meloni have suggested that Europe resume diplomacy with Putin. Neither France nor Italy can afford an ongoing war, now that the bloc cannot fund its support for Ukraine by sequestering the frozen Russian assets. Meloni and Macron are right. The Europeans made a monumental error of judgement when they ended the communication that still happened in the early phase of the war. To be fair to Macron, he tried harder than others.
It would, however, be unwise to resume diplomacy at the level of heads of government or even foreign ministers. The stars of the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which laid the ground for one of the more peaceful centuries of modern European history, were four diplomats: Klemens von Metternich from Austria, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand from France, Viscount Castlereagh from Britain, and Karl August von Hardenberg from Prussia. With the exception of Russian Tsar Alexander I, Europe’s emperors stayed in the background. Peace is hard, detailed work.
Today, by contrast, Trump’s much-maligned emissary Steve Witkoff is a businessman, with no previous experience in diplomacy. I recall a scene in the Elysee Palace where the German ambassador to Paris laughed at him for comparing the grand ornaments in the Salon des Ambassadeurs to those of the Mar-a-Lago beach club. The President’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who has played a key role in the peace talks, is much the same. They are the kind of Americans who bring out the worst in Europeans, but the former have ultimately been more successful than the latter. If there is a deal, the Americans will have been the one to have prepared it. When Witkoff went to Moscow, he spent hours in detailed negotiations with Kirill Dmitriev, who heads the Russian sovereign wealth fund. Business can unlock problems that are not solvable through classic diplomacy.
So, who is Europe’s Witkoff? Given that Kissinger was a morally compromised person who was excellent at his job, I would probably pick one of the many morally compromised Germans. Perhaps Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor who knows Putin, but maintains loyalty to his home country. You do not want to give that job to Kaja Kallas, the EU’s chief diplomat. She loses no moment to tell us that Putin must be defeated but has never given us a convincing plan on how to do this.
A politician who is sometimes mentioned as a potential interlocutor is Alexander Stubb, the President of Finland, who is more of a political realist than Kallas. The EU might be a place in which politicians from small countries play important roles, but that doesn’t mean they can suitably represent Europe in geopolitical power battles. Just look at Vivian Motzfeldt, the Greenland foreign minister, who broke down in a live TV interview after meetings with JD Vance and Marco Rubio. The EU sometimes likes to think of itself as a big country, but when it comes to foreign policy, it really is a collection of minions.
“The EU sometimes likes to think of itself as a big country, but when it comes to foreign policy, it really is a collection of minions.”
The restoration of diplomatic ties would be an opportunity for the UK to offer leadership, but the four prime ministers since the start of the war have shown no interest. Yvette Cooper, the current foreign secretary, has thoroughly rejected the idea of reestablishing talks with Putin. “I think what we need is evidence that Putin actually wants peace and at the moment, I’m still not seeing that,” she recently proclaimed. Is it not the whole point of backchannel diplomacy to get people to create the evidence? Diplomacy is not about sitting back and waiting for things to happen.
War and diplomacy are two sides of the same coin as the German military historian Carl von Clausewitz reminded us. You talk. You fight. Then you talk some more. The Second World War was the exception, not the rule. The Western allies did not maintain backchannel diplomacy with the Nazis. They did, however, have a strategy for victory, and they won. It is unfortunate that the Western commentary continues to draw so many parallels today with a war that could not be more different.
Based on the imperfect information we have today, the best outcome for Ukraine would have been a deal based on the draft that circulated after the meetings in Istanbul. The second best outcome would be a deal based on what Witkoff and Kushner are currently negotiating.
Yet it is possible that the peace process fails. Russia is seeking to gain full control of the Donbas region, including land in the east it does not occupy. Ukraine is unwilling to hand it to them on a platter. We could be looking at some really bad scenarios. Russia may seize more Ukrainian territory than it currently claims. Ukraine may lose its independence or be reduced to a small rump state surrounded by Belarus in the north, Russia in the east and the south, and cut off from the Black Sea. This is not the most likely scenario, but it’s more probable than glorious victory. Without some dirty diplomacy, I don’t see a good outcome of the Russia-Ukraine war.
Remember, though, the Kissinger–Dobrynin channel was arranged within a few weeks of President Nixon’s inauguration. That was almost five years before the Yom-Kippur diplomacy was masterminded. Even if the Europeans started to regrow a diplomatic brain, it would take time. We should not expect miracles. But if they don’t start now, they will forever stay where they are today: out of the reckoning.
