Europe’s Leaders Join Zelensky for High‑Stakes White House Talks After Trump–Putin Anchorage Pivot

Great‑power bargains struck without the smaller belligerent at the table invite fraught precedents: the 1994 Budapest Memorandum offered Ukraine “security assurances,” not guarantees, and collapsed in 2014; the 2015 Minsk II accords froze lines without resolving sovereignty, baking instability into the system. Talk of non‑NATO, “Article 5‑like” protections echoes past attempts to engineer off‑ramp security regimes—think Austria’s 1955 State Treaty neutrality plus implicit guarantees or the 1975 Helsinki process—arrangements that worked only when embedded in clearer balances of power and enforcement mechanisms. The present move also fits a longer arc: periodic swings from collective security to great‑power condominium (e.g., Yalta 1945, détente in the 1970s), with Europe struggling to assert agency while Washington pursues transactional de‑escalation. The media narratives reflect this tug‑of‑war: InfoWars frames a Western ‘establishment’ sabotaging peace; Fox elevates Putin’s validation of Trump; AP/BBC/NYT/ITV emphasize allied alarm and the risk of coerced concessions. On a century scale, what matters is whether this moment cements a tiered European security order—formal NATO members under true Article 5 and neighbors under ambiguous “guarantees”—or instead produces a durable settlement with enforceable constraints. A poorly defined pledge risks repeating Budapest’s ambiguity; a coerced land‑for‑peace deal risks a Munich‑style (1938) precedent that invites revisionism elsewhere. Either outcome would shape Europe’s security architecture for decades.