President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia shocked the public at the Annual Conference on Monaco’s security in 2007 asking for the rollback of the overbearing American influence and a new balance of power in Europe most suitable for Moscow.
He didn’t get what he wanted – then.
Almost two decades later, during the same conference, the best officials of President Trump’s cabinet clarified one thing: Putin found an American administration that could help him realize his dream.
The comments of the Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the vice president JD Vance raised fears among the participants who under the new administration the United States could align with Russia and take Europe or abandon it completely.
Such a change, analysts say, would give Mr. Putin a previously unthinkable victory much more important for him than any goal in Ukraine.
“From the dawn of the Cold War in the late 1940s, the Kremlin dreamed of pushing America from its role as a milestone of European security,” said Andrew S. Weiss, vice -president for studies at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Putin is certainly expert enough to jump on any opening provided by the new administration.”
The presence of American troops has been the basis of 80 years of peace in Western Europe since the end of the Second World War. But in a speech in Warsaw on Friday, before his arrival at the conference, Hegseth warned the European leaders who should not suppose that the United States will be there forever.
Later, at the Monaco conference, Vance delivered an even more frightening message for many European participants: the enemy he sees is not Russia or China, but Europe itself.
Vance began to attack European nations for using those who called non -democratic methods to retain the far -right parties that in some cases have been supported by Russia. He argued that the continent had to recognize the wishes of his voters, stop trying to moderate the disinformation in non -democratic ways and instead allow these parts to thrive as the will of the people.
“If you are running in the fear of your own voters, there is nothing that America can do for you,” said Vance. “Nor, moreover, there is something you can do for the American people who elected me and elected the president Trump.”
Vance has affected Romania in particular, where the country’s constitutional court in December canceled the presidential elections that an ultra -annualist supported by an apparent Russian influence campaign seemed ready to win. The elections were reprogrammed for May.
“If your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising by a foreign country, it was not very strong to begin with,” he said.
For years, the Kremlin tried to weaken Europe by increasing the parts that Mr. Vance has claimed that it must be authorized to thrive. On the same day of his observations at the conference, Vance met the leader of the extreme movement of Germany, which disputes the national elections of this month, increasing a party that Russia has tried to legitimize.
Moscow has also tried to guide a wedge between the United States and Europe, realizing that a destruction of long-standing Euro-Atlantic alliance would lead to a world in which Moscow can exercise much more power.
Nathalie Tocci, director of the Institute for International Affairs of Rome, observed the speech of Mr. Vance and interpreted the message as a direct threat from the United States to the European Union, which European and Kremlin European Championships both try to disassemble. This was called a touch of the plot from the United States.
“The plot is that we are out there to destroy you,” said Mrs. Tocci.
“The point is not even Ukraine,” he added. “The point is the weakening deliberated, if not the destruction, of Europe, of which Ukraine is part.”
Mrs. Tocci described the observations of Mr. Vance as an attack on European democracy that has perversally distorted the language of the same democracy, the way in which Russia often does when trying to sow division in Europe.
A dramatic reorganization of power in Europe seemed like a pipe dream for Mr. Putin when he obtained his vision in 2007 at the Monaco conference. Robert M. Gates, the secretary of the American defense at the time, sat down between the public and later fired the observations as a return to the past to the Cold War.
The Russian leader, however, stood insignificantly to his vision, making him a central point of his argument in the months that led to the war: that the West must be willing to discuss not only of Ukrainian sovereignty, but of the entire Europe security apparatus, who said that Moscow omitted and put it at an existential risk.
Putin has launched his invasion of Ukraine as a wider battle against the West and awake values that portrays as an anathema, some of the same topics that the extreme leaders of Trump and Europe have made to snatch power in their countries.
Putin believed that in the end the United States and Europe would bend to him, Alexander Baunov, a member of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, in a recent analysis.
The United States are changing, Baunov wrote, and the current Washington “is approaching Moscow not for the good of Europe, but for himself – and also a little to despise Europe”.
The challenge for Europe comes as Germany and France, the two largest countries of the European Union, both suffer from leadership crises, in part due to the increase in political movements that branded Trump’s rhetoric itself. In 2015, Germany and France took the command of negotiating Mr. Putin’s first invasion of Ukraine.
The United Kingdom, which left the European Union due to a campaign that Trump has supported publicly, saw his influence on the significantly weakened continent.
Until what is not clear the realization of Trump with Mr. Putin, and the nascent rapprochement between Washington and Moscow could easily evaporate during the negotiations on Ukraine, which will begin with a meeting between American and Russian representatives in Saudi Arabia Week.
But foreign leaders managed to woo Mr. Trump in favorable positions before, and so far Russia is collecting benefits from the new administration.
The Kremlin has collected a series of victories since Mr. Trump returned to the White House.
Less than a month after his second term, Trump has disseminated Usaid, the US foreign aid agency for some time insulted by Moscow. He crossed the cabinet officials who regularly traffic in the Cremlin discussion points, including the new head of American intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. He exacerbated the discord in relations with Europe, threatening the closest allies of Washington with a commercial war. He has enhanced and high Elon Musk, which spreads beneficial falsehoods in Moscow on X and publicly supported in favor of Germany’s far -right movement.
Trump will now influence, probably without the European leaders present, how the greatest conflict is resolved on the continent from the Second World War, with implications that could go beyond Ukrainian itself to influence the wider balance of security in Europe.
Those leaders, who see the rebel -right populist movements as a threat to the European Union and freedom on the continent, are worried, in particular given the apparent alignment of Trump and Mr. Putin against them.
“This is the moment when we are our most vulnerable,” said Mrs. Tocci.
“If in the end what you are trying to do is destroy this project,” he added, referring to the EU, “this is the time to do it”.