Forget about NATO and the EU. Western leaders are building a new diplomatic framework to deal with the White House’s alignment with Moscow.
As host of Wednesday’s talks, Macron pushed back against Trump and insisted that Russia started the war, rather than Zelenskyy, as Trump claimed. | Amaury Cornu/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images
February 19, 2025 9:22 pm CET
PARIS — Forget NATO. Forget the EU.
A new coalition of nations is emerging to deal with the greatest security crisis to hit Europe in decades, as President Donald Trump on Wednesday squarely aligned U.S. interests with the Kremlin’s by unleashing excoriating tirades against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whom he branded a “dictator.”
The new grouping is made up of all the countries that once saw themselves as indefectible allies of the United States, but are now questioning the very foundations of that relationship as Washington embraces Russia and ramps up its attacks against NATO allies.
The group started taking shape this week in the wake of the Munich Security Conference when French President Emmanuel Macron invited a small number of like-minded countries to Paris on Monday to discuss the implications of Washington’s embrace of Russia over Ukraine.
By Wednesday, that initial group — composed of the leaders of France, the United Kingdom, Poland, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Denmark, plus the heads of NATO, the European Commission and Council — had more than doubled, widening to 19 nations including Canada. Non-EU countries such as Norway and Iceland attended as well.
As host of Wednesday’s talks, Macron pushed back against Trump and insisted that Russia started the war, rather than Zelenskyy, as Trump claimed. The French president said the new grouping sought Ukrainian involvement in the talks and insisted on the need for security guarantees for Kyiv.
Most critically, Macron said it was unacceptable for the U.S. and Russia to negotiate over European leaders’ heads. “The security concerns of the Europeans will have to be taken into account,” he stressed.
“There’s an ideological dimension to this group, post-Munich,” said Luuk van Middelaar, founding director of the Brussels Institute for Geopolitics. “The fact that we are talking in this format one week after the Trump-Putin phone call is a sign of how fast things are changing in the world.”
The list of the attendees largely overlaps with the membership of NATO and the European Union, but with a few major differences. The United States isn’t a part of it, and neither are Russia-aligned Hungary and Slovakia. Nor is NATO member Turkey, though several commentators have called for Ankara to be included in future talks.
NATO would traditionally be the go-to forum for any discussion concerning major security challenges facing Western countries, not least the Ukraine war. But in the wake of Trump’s embrace of Moscow and his escalating attacks on Zelenskyy, Western countries are grasping for new configurations.
“Politicians in times of crisis, we talk in all kinds of configurations among friends and allies, and that’s a good thing,” said Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski.
Van Middelaar said the Paris format should be compared to a “crisis response unit.”
“When a crisis hits, you always get formal or informal inner circles,” he added. “In situations like this, you have to balance the desire for inclusivity against the need for swift action. Formal decisions won’t be taken in these formats, but they will be prepared.”
Indeed, the emergence of the Paris group — alongside the “Weimar” format (of Paris, Berlin and Warsaw), or the Nordic-Baltic group — underscores the failure of EU formats to address the scale of the crisis.
Normally, the EU’s 27 leaders come together as the European Council to address shared challenges. But the president of that institution, António Costa, has so far held off on calling a meeting in that format, unsure of being able to show tangible results, according to two EU diplomats who were granted anonymity to discuss the private deliberations.
Instead of a formal European Council, EU ambassadors have gathered twice this week in the so-called Coreper format to talk about sending arms to Ukraine and boosting defense.
But those discussions were overshadowed by the leaders’ huddles on Monday and Wednesday — with ambassadors discovering in the midst of one of their meetings this week that Macron called for a second round of talks among leaders, according to one EU official.
“We are outside the core of the EU’s functioning,” said a third EU diplomat. “This is something that is happening outside and around the machinery in Brussels.”
Jacopo Barigazzi contributed reporting from Brussels.