Michael J. Green
The Region Lacks Leaders Who Connect With the U.S. President
South Korean President Lee Jae-myung meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., August 2025 Brian Snyder / Reuters
MICHAEL J. GREEN is CEO of the U.S. Studies Centre at the University of Sydney and Henry A. Kissinger Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
In August, just days after U.S. President Donald Trump had welcomed Russian President Vladimir Putin to a summit in Alaska, a remarkable image emerged from the White House. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had scrambled to Washington to meet with Trump and shore up U.S. support for Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s invasion. But Zelensky was not alone: joining him at his meeting with Trump were the leaders of Finland, France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom, as well as the European secretary-general of NATO and the president of the European Commission. A photo of the entire group provided a corrective of sorts to the images that had emerged of Trump and Putin greeting each other warmly in Anchorage.
The European leaders’ decision to accompany Zelensky reflected a combination of courage and pragmatism. It would have been easier to condemn Trump for welcoming Putin onto U.S. soil, or to hold a countersummit in Europe and avoid the potential domestic political embarrassment of paying homage in the Oval Office. But those options would have required the European leaders to believe that they can prevent a Russian victory in Ukraine (and guarantee their own countries’ security) without U.S. military, economic, and diplomatic power. And they know that they cannot do so.
So instead, they leveraged their strengths—Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s ideological proximity to Trump, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s relatively frequent contact with him, and Finnish President Alexander Stubb’s unique rapport with him (based in no small part on Stubb’s golfing prowess)—to charm, cajole, and push the disruptive U.S. president more or less in the right strategic direction. The result was an agreement to ship advanced U.S. weapons systems to Ukraine via NATO purchases, with Trump even considering Kyiv’s request for Tomahawk missiles.
For European leaders, this collaborative effort to spur Trump to stick with U.S. allies—and with the alliance system the United States itself had built—represented a sharp departure from his first term. Back then, European leaders played supporting parts at best: their voters disdained Trump, and their personal temperaments limited their ability to connect with him. While they struggled, the leading role of “Trump manager” within the U.S. alliance network was played by Asian leaders—most masterfully by Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister at the time. A famous photo taken at the G-7 summit in Quebec in 2018 captures Abe’s approach. In it, German Chancellor Angela Merkel appears to impatiently confront a defiant or dismissive Trump while French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minster Teresa May seem to be backing Merkel. Meanwhile, a pained Abe stands by Trump’s side, mimicking the U.S. president’s body language and perhaps looking for an opportunity to diffuse the tension.
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