Many critical issues were left uncertain — including the fate of Ukraine — at the end of Europe’s first encounter with an angry and impatient Trump administration. But one thing was clear: An epochal breach appears to be opening in the Western alliance. After three years of war that forged a new unity within NATO,…
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia shocked the audience at the annual security conference in Munich in 2007 by demanding the rollback of domineering American influence and a new balance of power in Europe more suitable to Moscow. He didn’t get what he wanted — then. Nearly two decades later, during the very same conference,…
The top foreign policy official for the European Union had a blunt assessment on Friday of the Trump administration’s apparent willingness to give Russia’s leader, Vladimir V. Putin, much of what he wants in Ukraine, even before negotiations to end the three-year war begin. “It’s appeasement,” the official, Kaja Kallas, declared at the Munich Security…
The great collision has begun. As President Trump’s national security team arrived in Europe this week, very little about their hard-line message came as a surprise. But to the political and diplomatic leaders arriving in Munich on Friday for an annual security conference where fault lines in the Western alliance are always on display, it…
Vice President JD Vance told The Wall Street Journal on Thursday that all military and economic options were on the table if Russia did not agree to negotiate in good faith to end the war in Ukraine. “There are economic tools of leverage, there are, of course, military tools of leverage” available to the United…
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine was already facing a daunting week as foreign officials gathered in Europe for talks about his country’s future. The Trump administration was demanding $500 billion in Ukrainian mineral rights, it canceled Ukraine’s exemption from U.S. tariffs on steel, and a leading American skeptic of military assistance for Kyiv, Vice President…
Students at North Carolina’s public universities can no longer be required to take classes related to diversity, equity and inclusion to graduate. The University of Akron, citing changing state and federal guidance, will no longer host its “Rethinking Race” forum that it had held annually for more than two decades. The University of Colorado took…
A return to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is “an unrealistic objective” and an “illusionary goal” in the peace settlement between Ukraine and Russia that President Trump wants to accomplish, the U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Wednesday at a NATO meeting in Brussels. In his first meeting with NATO and Ukrainian defense ministers, Mr. Hegseth…
Vice President JD Vance told European and Asian leaders in Paris on Tuesday that the Trump Administration was adopting an aggressive, America First approach to the race to dominate all the building blocks of artificial intelligence, and warned Europeans to dismantle regulations and get aboard with Washington. On his first foreign trip since taking office,…
The US Senate on Friday (local time) confirmed Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary in a razor-thin vote Thursday, with Vice President JD Vance breaking a 50-50 tie. Hegseth, a former Fox News host and National Guard veteran, was nominated by President Donald Trump in November to lead the Department of Defense. His confirmation process was…