LONDON — As Europe grapples with its deepest security crisis since 1945, a small group of the continent’s leading powers took a radical step: They dumped the traditional craving for 27-nation consensus at Brussels summits and tried to sort out the mess themselves.
French President Emmanuel Macron’s mini-summit in Paris on Monday brought together the leaders of Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland, Denmark and even the United Kingdom — which left the European Union five years ago.
But there was no invitation for Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Slovakia’s Robert Fico — or others deemed too sympathetic to Moscow to be helpful in an emergency. Smaller EU states such as Latvia and Estonia were also excluded, even though they’re among the bloc’s most hawkish members on dealing with Russia.
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.”
The French official, who declined to be named when discussing sensitive diplomatic matters, insisted “the question of format is completely open.”
The EU’s two most senior figureheads — Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, and António Costa, the president of the European Council, representing other countries’ leaders — were both invited, though as fellow guests rather than to spearhead the talks.
Von der Leyen signaled she understood the stakes as she arrived in Paris: “Europe’s security is at a turning point. Yes, it is about Ukraine — but it is also about us. We need an urgency mindset. We need a surge in defense. And we need both of them now.”
It’s not the first time the most powerful countries in the EU have given up on the bloc’s formal processes to get things done when it mattered. And it’s always been divisive.
When the “E3” — Germany, France and the U.K. — joined together as signatories of the Iran nuclear deal, the Spanish and Italians were furious, said Professor Anand Menon, director of the UK in a Changing Europe think tank.
“The problem is always: Who do you invite, who don’t you invite?” Menon said. “I would have thought it made more sense to get everyone together and agree and then decide who does the heavy lifting in terms of Ukraine. This is a rather divisive way of going about it.”
But the EU legal system is “cumbersome” and the Brussels institutions deal with economic issues primarily, and are not set up to decide military plans, he added. Military action typically falls to “coalitions of the willing” — such as in 2011, when the U.S., France and Britain led a military intervention in Libya — or to NATO.
Macron launched a new concept on Monday: The coalition of the invited.
But after three-and-a-half hours of talks, his guests did not magically produce a solution to Europe’s security nightmare, or come up with a plan to keep Ukraine out of Putin’s grasp.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer had already gone out of his way to offer to put U.K. soldiers on the ground in Ukraine to police a future ceasefire. He will head to Washington in the coming days to try to convince Trump, who has demanded that Europeans take the lead, that American forces must still have a role.
But several EU leaders, notably Poland’s Tusk and Germany’s Olaf Scholz, voiced their reluctance to send troops as peacekeepers. On the wider question of exactly how Europe can reinforce its own defenses without American military power, agreement still seems far off.
Even if Macron’s coalition of the invited can eventually design a common strategy, it may already be too late. Defense procurement takes years, and Russia’s entire economy is already geared up for war. As Menon put it: “If we had wanted to prepare for Trump 2, we should have started during Trump 1.”