When EU leaders met in Brussels on February 6 to discuss the war in Ukraine, French President Emmanuel Macron called this time “a turning point in history.” Western leaders agree that this is a historic moment when decisive action is needed, but what kind of action depends on their interpretation of the nature of this moment.

Is this the beginning of a new Cold War between the United States, NATO and Russia or the end of one? Will Russia and the West remain implacable enemies for the foreseeable future, with a new iron curtain between them through what was once the heart of Ukraine? Or can the US and Russia resolve the disputes and hostility that led to this war in the first place, so as to leave Ukraine with a stable and lasting peace?

The Cold War repeats itself

Some European leaders see this moment as the beginning of a long struggle with Russia, akin to the beginning of the Cold War in 1946, when Winston Churchill warned that “an iron curtain has descended” across Europe.

On March 2, echoing Churchill, European Council President Ursula von der Leyen declared that Europe must turn Ukraine into a “steel porcupine.” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he wants up to 200,000 European troops on the eventual ceasefire line between Russia and Ukraine to “guarantee” any peace agreement. He insists that the US provide a “backstop,” meaning a commitment to send US forces to fight in Ukraine if war breaks out again.

Russia has repeatedly said it won’t agree to NATO forces being based in Ukraine under any guise. “We explained today that the appearance of armed forces from the same NATO countries, but under a false flag, under the flag of the European Union or under national flags, does not change anything in this regard,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on February 18. “Of course this is unacceptable to us.”

But the UK is persisting in a campaign to recruit a “coalition of the willing,” the same term the US and UK coined for the list of countries they persuaded to support the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. In that case, only Australia, Denmark and Poland took small parts in the invasion. Costa Rica publicly insisted on being removed from the list, and the term was widely lampooned as the “coalition of the billing” because the US recruited so many countries to join it by promising them lucrative foreign aid deals.

Far from the start of a new Cold War, US President Donald Trump and other leaders see this moment as more akin to the end of the original Cold War, when US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev met in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1986 and began to bridge the divisions caused by 40 years of Cold War hostility.

Like Trump and Putin today, Reagan and Gorbachev were unlikely peacemakers. Gorbachev had risen through the ranks of the Soviet Communist Party to become its General Secretary and Soviet Premier in March 1985, in the midst of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. He didn’t begin to withdraw Soviet forces from Afghanistan until 1988. Reagan oversaw an unprecedented Cold War arms build-up, a genocide in Guatemala and covert and proxy wars throughout Central America. And yet Gorbachev and Reagan are now widely remembered as peacemakers.

While Democrats deride Trump as a Putin stooge, in his first term in office, Trump was actually responsible for escalating the Cold War with Russia. After the Pentagon had milked its absurd, self-fulfilling “War on Terror” for trillions of dollars, it was Trump and his psychopathic defense secretary, General “Mad Dog” Mattis, who declared the shift back to strategic competition with Russia and China as the Pentagon’s new gravy train in their 2018 National Defense Strategy. It was also Trump who lifted President Barack Obama’s restrictions on sending lethal weapons to Ukraine.

The dissolution of European peacemaking

Trump’s head-spinning about-face in US policy has left its European allies with whiplash and reversed the roles they each have played for generations. France and Germany have traditionally been the diplomats and peacemakers in the Western alliance. Meanwhile, the US and UK have been infected with a chronic case of war fever that has proven resistant to a long string of military defeats and catastrophic impacts on every country that has fallen prey to their warmongering.

In 2003, France’s Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin led the opposition to the invasion of Iraq in the UN Security Council. France, Germany and Russia issued a joint statement to say that they would “not let a proposed resolution pass that would authorize the use of force. Russia and France, as permanent members of the Security Council, will assume all their responsibilities on this point.”

At a press conference in Paris with then-German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, French President Jacques Chirac said, “Everything must be done to avoid war… As far as we’re concerned, war always means failure.”

As recently as 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, it was once again the US and UK that rejected and blocked peace negotiations in favor of a long war, while France, Germany and Italy continued to call for new negotiations, even as they gradually fell in line with the US long war policy.

Former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder took part in the peace negotiations in Turkey in March and April 2022 and then flew to Moscow at Ukraine’s request to meet with Putin. In a 2023 interview with German newspaper Berliner Zeitung, Schröder confirmed that the peace talks only failed “because everything was decided in Washington.”

With Biden blocking new negotiations in 2023, one interviewer asked Schröder, “Do you think you can resume your peace plan?”

He replied, “Yes, and the only ones who can initiate this are France and Germany… Macron and Scholz are the only ones who can talk to Putin. Chirac and I did the same in the Iraq war. Why can’t support for Ukraine be combined with an offer of talks to Russia? The arms deliveries are not a solution for eternity. But no one wants to talk. Everyone sits in trenches. How many more people have to die?”

Since 2022, President Macron and a Thatcherite team of iron ladies — European Council President von der Leyen; former German Foreign Minister Analena Baerbock and former Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, now the EU’s foreign policy chief — have promoted a new militarization of Europe, egged on from behind the scenes by European and US arms manufacturers.

Has the passage of time, the passing of the World War II generation and the distortion of history washed away the historical memory of two World Wars from a continent that was destroyed by conflict only 80 years ago? Where is the next generation of French and German diplomats in the tradition of de Villepin and Schröder today? How can sending German tanks to fight in Ukraine, and now in Russia itself, fail to remind Russians of previous German invasions and solidify support for the war? And won’t the call for Europe to confront Russia by moving from a “welfare state to a warfare state” only feed the rise of the European hard right?

So are the new European militarists reading the historical moment correctly? Or are they jumping on the bandwagon of a disastrous Cold War that could, as Biden and Trump have warned, lead to World War III?

A US–Russian plan to restore relations

When Trump’s foreign policy team met with their Russian counterparts in Saudi Arabia on February 18, ending the war in Ukraine was the second part of the three-part plan they agreed on. The first was to restore full diplomatic relations between the US and Russia, and the third was to work on a series of other problems in American–Russian relations.

The order of these three stages is interesting because, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio noted, it means that the negotiations over Ukraine will be the first test of restored relations between the US and Russia.

If the negotiations for peace in Ukraine are successful, they can lead to further negotiations over restoring arms control treaties and nuclear disarmament. Perhaps they could even spur cooperation on other global problems that have been impossible to resolve in a world stuck in a zombie-like Cold War that powerful interests will not allow to die.

It was a welcome change to hear Rubio say that the post-Cold War unipolar world was an anomaly and that now we have to adjust to the reality of a multipolar world. But if Trump and his hawkish advisers are just trying to restore US relations with Russia as part of a “reverse Kissinger” scheme to isolate China, as some analysts have suggested, that would perpetuate America’s debilitating geopolitical crisis instead of solving it.

A chance for change

The US and our friends in Europe have a new chance to make a clean break from the three-way geopolitical power struggle between the US, Russia and China that has hamstrung the world since the 1970s. They can find new roles and priorities for our countries in the emerging multipolar world of the 21st century.

We hope that Trump and European leaders can recognize the crossroads at which they are standing, and the chance history is giving them to choose the path of peace. France and Germany in particular should remember the wisdom of de Villepin, Chirac and Schröder in the face of American and British plans for aggression against Iraq in 2003.

This could be the beginning of the end of the permanent state of war and Cold War that has held the world in its grip for over a century. Ending it would allow us to finally prioritize the progress and cooperation we so desperately need to solve the other critical problems the whole world faces today. As US General Mark Milley said back in November 2022 when he called for renewed negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, we must “seize the moment.”

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.