Europe invests in military while Trump spruiks Ukraine 'peace plan'

Shock and dismay are these days the all too standard responses to the various pronouncements, abuse, threats and changes in strategic direction that emanate daily from the Trump White House.

But two particular bouts of shock and dismay were notable this week in the way they reflected some of the underlying forces at work in the world at the moment.

The first related to the deal struck by Trump with Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to buy US F-35 jets.

Sure, there were concerns raised about whether this would eventually see the technology leaked to China.

And the deal was signed off amid the "things happen" moment in which the US president dismissed questions about his visitor's role in the killing and dismemberment of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, which the CIA concluded in 2018 had happened on the Crown Prince's orders by a hit team, which included members of his personal security detail.

Israel expresses concern

It all happened amid the president pushing Saudi Arabia to get closer to Israel, and the Crown Prince making it clear that wasn't going to happen unless there was a clear and guaranteed path to a Palestinian state.

But one of the most fascinating parts of the deal was the shudder that went through Israel at the sale of the jets.

The US has repeatedly committed to guaranteeing Israel's "qualitative military edge" in the region.

Until now, that has been guaranteed in part by the fact it is the only Middle East country operating the F-35, regarded as the most advanced warplane in the world.

Israel has therefore expressed concern in the past about sales of the jet to other countries in the region, and the Israeli Air Force is reportedly opposed to the Saudi Arabian sale.

The concern was apparently sufficient to prompt Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to play down the disquiet publicly.

"Regarding the F-35, I had a long conversation with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who reiterated his commitment that the United States will continue to preserve Israel's qualitative military edge in everything related to supplying weapons and military systems to countries in the Middle East," Netanyahu said.

But the sale of US military hardware is now a centrepiece of so much of Trump's attempts to square the circle of "America first" and its manufacturing base, and his constantly erratic foreign interventions.

He's now pledged to jointly build nuclear submarines with South Korea (which has somewhat more of a chance of achieving this, given its existing industrial base, than Australia).

And selling US military weapons to Europe — to pass on to Ukraine — seemed a perfect solution to the quandary of his attempts to get the Europeans to increase their defence spending.

A new 'peace plan'

Which brings us to the second notable bout of shock and dismay this week when media outlets were briefed about a new "peace plan" for Ukraine being drawn up by the Trump administration, without any input from Ukraine (and with Russian officials also suggesting they didn't know much about it either).

Under the terms of the agreement reported by various international media outlets, Ukraine would be forced to give up occupied territory in the east of the country, cut its military in half, and surrender some of its powerful weapons.

In other words, essentially everything Vladimir Putin has long wanted.

The Financial Times reported that "the Trump administration had told Zelenskyy and other people in his team that the White House was working to an 'aggressive' timeline to finalise the proposal in order to bring the war to an end before the close of the year".

The outlet reported that US officials expected Zelenskyy to sign the agreement "before Thanksgiving" on Thursday next week, to present a peace deal in Moscow later this month and wrap up the process by early December.  

The EU immediately rejected the plan, such as it apparently is, with its top diplomat Kaja Kallas saying that for any plan to succeed, "it has to be supported by Ukraine and it has to be supported by Europe".

"The pressure must be on the aggressor, not on the victim. Rewarding aggression will only invite more of it," she said.

You might think: "Well they would say that, wouldn't they?"

But there is more than just moral outrage involved here.

How much agency does Europe really have?

The Europeans had thought that the deal to buy US weapons on behalf of Ukraine gave them a seat at the table on the future of that war-ravaged country.

"How do Europeans have so little agency here even when we're now paying the entire bill?" the website Politico.eu quoted a senior European official saying.

And this of course is the question. The sense of menace from Russia in Western Europe has been growing in recent weeks, along with its increasing attacks on western Ukraine, thanks to the presence of drones in the air and Russian vessels around the coast.

Yet it does not seem able to harness enough clear direction to claim that agency even when so hard pressed.

US sanctions on Russia's biggest oil firms — which are generally predicted to inflict a lot more pain than many of the sanctions to date — are due to start soon.

But Ukraine is rapidly running out of money. And Zelenskyy is now facing an internal crisis over a massive corruption scheme.

That is only likely to have increased the difficulties for European allies who have been delaying a decision to release billions of dollars in loans to Ukraine on the back of Russian state assets frozen in European banks, particularly in Belgium.

Leaders are not due to discuss the issue again until just before Christmas, with Belgium making it clear it feels vulnerable to both legal action and the loss of other sovereign banking business if it does release the funds.

The question of how much agency Europe really has if it sets its mind to this does provoke the reverse question of exactly what agency Trump has here. Is he going to order that weapons sales to Europe — to be sold on to Ukraine — be stopped and deprive American military arms makers of sales?

The US's massive military industrial manufacturing capacity has given it, and gives it, as much of its strategic heft as its economic affluence.

The question is whether a medium- to long-term effect of his powerplays will actually be to erode that manufacturing heft.

Europe's military spending

In recent weeks, both France's Emmanuel Macron and Germany's Friedrich Merz have expressed the view that Europe should now be giving preference to purchases of European military hardware, as part of a needed build of self-reliance.

The EU's trade and economic security commissioner, Maros Sefcovic, who has been in Australia this week on trade talks, expressed a similar view in an interview with the ABC.

The decision taken at NATO to increase military spending to 5 per cent of GDP "means that we want not only to spend more but in a smart way", he said.

"If you look at our combined military budgets, it's a huge volume of money", but the fragmentation of national defence industries and budgets meant, "we are not always getting the best value for this procurement".

He was talking, amongst other things, about the so-called SAFE program (Security Action for Europe) which facilitates joint procurement of military hardware, a scheme designed in part to get around the tradition of Europe at one point famously having 17 different tank designs.

Sefcovic sees the plan as one "to get the armaments we need and of course to also put the military industry on the new stronger basis so we can rely on the power of the European industry to produce the arms we need in this volatile period".

Every day there are stories in the European and international media about the reconfiguring of European industry towards military production.

Just how fast this transition occurs will have much bearing on its agency in the future, and on that of the US. 

Laura Tingle is the ABC's Global Affairs Editor.