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Europe’s photo-op in Downing Street wasn’t unity. It was panic.

Merz, Macron, and Starmer didn’t rush to London out of strength. They rushed because Washington quietly, bluntly, is negotiating an endgame with Moscow without them. The war they turned into a unholy moral crusade… pic.twitter.com/Bm3vBkMXqb

— THE ISLANDER (@IslanderWORLD) December 8, 2025

Europe’s photo-op in Downing Street wasn’t unity. It was panic.

Merz, Macron, and Starmer didn’t rush to London out of strength. They rushed because Washington quietly, bluntly, is negotiating an endgame with Moscow without them. The war they turned into a unholy moral crusade is now a bargaining chip on someone else’s table.

So Merz with the courage of a mouse squeaks that he's “skeptical” of the U.S. plan. Macron claims Europe has “cards in our hands" (with a serious face). Starmer demands a “just and lasting ceasefire. Translation: a peace partially shaped in Washington terrifies them more than a war collapsing in Ukraine. Because a peace they don’t control is an admission they never controlled the war and that they will wear the humiliation.

And the timing isn’t accidental. Ukraine is staring at a €71.7 billion budget hole next year, a hole European leaders can’t fill and Washington doesn’t want to. Speeches are cheap. War is not. You could feel that arithmetic haunting the red carpet. The best the EU and London can conjure up is to complete the suicide pact by blowing up remains of the post WWII financial order. So yes Macron is right, they have cards to play, really bad cards to play.

Trump’s plan is crude, transactional, self-interested, but it does one thing Europe has never dared admit: an admission that Russia has won, and no amount of European moral poetry changes the map. Trump negotiates from reality albeit crudely, but not from Brussels’ hallucinations. And that’s why the EU fears him, he strips away the illusions they’ve built their reputations on, the illusions that let Europe pretend it was directing history rather than being dragged behind it. The lie sold to Europeans to have them eat austerity and mortgage their future, while Europe's elite gorged with their oligarch puppets on the corpse of Ukraine.

Zelensky knows it too. His quotes are the loudest alarm bell yet: “no unified view… sensitive issues… things we can’t manage without Americans.” That’s not diplomatic language. That’s the language of a man caught between patrons who are no longer aligned, a puppet being stretched across two diverging exit strategies.

Meanwhile, Europe talks about “destiny” and “collective security” while salivating for ways to raid frozen Russian assets just to keep the war on life support. Not to win, simply to delay the reckoning. A peace plan that acknowledges battlefield reality threatens them more than escalation, because it exposes every myth they sold their own people.

This is the real divide now:

Washington is trying, however clumsily, to close a war it knows is long lost. Europe is trying to prolong a war it cannot afford to lose, but has lost and is terrified of European streets.

London wanted a show of unity. Instead, it revealed a fault line, the kind that appears just before the plebs storm the palace gates and demand accountability for the betrayal of Europe.

History won’t remember this moment as resolve. It will remember a cornered Europe clutching its rhetoric like a shield, trapped in a shrinking circle of its own making, as reality, from the trenches to the negotiating table, slipped from its grasp and a peace shaped in Moscow and Washington left Europe staring at the bill for a war it insisted on moralizing, but lost in humiliating fashion.