After European leaders stepped up military spending, President Trump aligned himself more closely with them on the war. But his tariffs threats have left bruises.
President Trump seems to have grasped that Russia will not stop its war in Ukraine until it is too costly to continue. Selling sophisticated American weapons to aid Ukraine will help Kyiv defend itself, European officials and analysts say, and is an important shift, at least for now, in Mr. Trump’s thinking about Russian aggression.
The president has come around on Europe, too. He has decided, as he said on Monday, that “having a strong Europe is a very good thing.” He declared that “Europe has a lot of spirit for this war,” a view he said he did not share until recently.
Indeed, NATO’s more active role in arming Ukraine is the latest sign that European countries are adopting a more aggressive approach to their security after decades of reliance on the United States. Even if Mr. Trump is newly criticizing President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, European leaders have signaled that they cannot count on the president to back them unreservedly.
“People want to believe he’s hardening his position,” said Daniela Schwarzer, a German foreign policy analyst and executive board member of the Bertelsmann Foundation, a nonprofit institute devoted to civic participation, “and there may be a bit of wishful thinking, but people don’t think he’ll solve the problem for us.”
Some European officials see Mr. Trump’s threat to punish Russia economically within 50 days unless it agrees to a cease-fire as unlikely to change the mind of Mr. Putin, who believes he will outlast the West and win the war.
