This is not the way EU politics is meant to be conducted, but the Paris format lays bare the severity of the geopolitical shock that is currently roiling the continent. The streamlined summitry is a sign that patience is running thin with the EU’s exasperating Council meetings, where countries often fail to agree on proposals, or water them down to near irrelevance.
The task for those gathered in the Elysée Palace was to sketch out a plan for adapting to the brutal new realities of life without American protection. How can Europe help Ukraine win the best peace deal possible? And how can European nations continue to defend themselves against Russia now Donald Trump is walking away?
These are questions that officials and politicians from EU member countries have been chewing over for much of the past two years. Yet somehow they were still stunned when Trump announced last week that he had spoken to Vladimir Putin and would be opening negotiations on ending the war “immediately.”
The pared-down gathering in Paris was an eloquent indictment of the limitations of the EU’s burdensome, consensus-driven processes when it comes to core foreign policy. In the bloc’s search for unanimous agreement on Russian sanctions, Hungary’s Orbán has been a repeated obstacle to new measures since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago.
Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who currently holds the rotating presidency of the EU, put the rationale for a slimmed-down process most clearly. “For several days now, as you can imagine, consultations have been underway on the convening of this mini-summit, bringing together the largest and most engaged European countries in international and geopolitical matters.”
An official from Macron’s office explained that the summit (which they didn’t want to call a “summit”) marked just the start of a conversation. “For reasons of, say, practicability,” the official continued, the discussions would begin “with a limited number of partners and then will possibly continue in other capitals, with others.”
