The price of Trump first

Volodymyr Zelenskyy dared to criticise Washington's diesel arrangement with Vladimir Putin, an arrangement that could replenish Russian revenues while Moscow continues its assault on Ukrainian cities and Trump's response is to suggest that Ukraine should get a new …president.

 

Apparently, in the magnificent new world of American deal-making, the victim is expected to remain grateful while the aggressor receives the invoice. Welcome to America First, where the slogan is simple, American interests come first, American political embarrassment comes second, and everybody else's survival is negotiable.

Trump's message to Zelenskyy could hardly be clearer. Stop attacking Russian oil refineries, stop questioning the American president's arrangements with Putin, and stop behaving as though the country being invaded has some independent say in how it defends itself. Otherwise, perhaps Ukrainians should find themselves a leader more agreeable to Washington.

This is not merely an argument about diesel. It is an argument about sovereignty, loyalty and the increasingly dangerous assumption that American assistance entitles the White House to dictate the political behaviour of an ally.

Ukraine did not ask Russia to invade. Ukrainians did not choose to have their homes destroyed, their power infrastructure attacked or their children grow up beneath the sound of incoming missiles. Yet, somehow, the diplomatic pressure keeps circling back to Kyiv, as though the principal obstacle to peace is the country refusing to surrender its leverage.

Putin must be watching this spectacle with considerable satisfaction. He has spent years trying to divide Western allies, weaken sanctions and convince the world that supporting Ukraine costs too much. Now he watches Washington offer Russian diesel an easier route to the market while publicly questioning the leadership of the country Russia invaded.

One could hardly design a more convenient propaganda gift for the Kremlin. The disturbing part is not that governments sometimes negotiate with adversaries. They must. Nor is it that energy prices matter. They matter enormously, particularly to farmers, truckers, workers and families struggling with the rising cost of living. Any serious government has a responsibility to protect its citizens from economic shocks.

The problem is the apparent willingness to treat the economic consequences of one crisis as a reason to weaken the response to another, without demonstrating what strategic benefits will follow. If easing sanctions helps stabilise fuel markets, Washington must explain how that benefit outweighs the risk of providing Moscow with additional revenue for its war. If a negotiated settlement is the objective, why should Ukraine be expected to halt attacks on Russian energy infrastructure without securing a reciprocal commitment to protect Ukrainian energy facilities and civilians?

Peace cannot be a collection of instructions delivered to the weaker party while the stronger aggressor waits for concessions. Zelenskyy has his own political responsibilities, and no president should be beyond criticism. His decisions can be debated, his strategy examined and his government held accountable. But the legitimate question of Ukrainian leadership belongs to Ukrainians, not to an American president irritated because a foreign leader refuses to follow his preferred script.

Elections are not personnel changes in a corporation owned by the White House. That distinction matters because Ukraine's struggle is about more than territory. It is also about whether a sovereign country can determine its own future without a neighbouring power imposing its will through military force. To suggest that its president should be replaced because he resists an American diplomatic preference risks undermining the very principle Western governments claim to defend.

And what exactly is the lesson for America's other allies? If loyalty means accepting whatever arrangement Washington makes, even when that arrangement benefits an adversary threatening your national security, then the word has lost its meaning. Alliances cannot survive indefinitely as relationships in which one partner issues instructions and the other is expected to obey out of gratitude.

Europe should pay particular attention. Today, the pressure is on Ukraine to accommodate Washington's energy calculations. Tomorrow, another ally may discover that its security commitments are negotiable whenever American domestic politics demands a convenient headline.

A credible alliance requires consultation, consistency and mutual respect. Without those foundations, even the most impressive military partnership begins to resemble a temporary business contract whose terms can change with the next presidential mood.

Trump may believe that a new Ukrainian president would make a better deal. But a deal is not necessarily peace simply because somebody signs it. An agreement that rewards aggression, leaves Ukraine vulnerable to another invasion or sacrifices Ukrainian sovereignty for short-term economic relief would not resolve the conflict. It would postpone its consequences.

And Putin understands the value of postponement. The brutal irony is that Trump presents himself as the master negotiator, yet his approach risks teaching America's adversaries that persistence works and its allies that resistance carries a price. The more Washington pressures Kyiv while accommodating Moscow, the harder it becomes to persuade anyone that American commitments are guided by consistent principles rather than immediate convenience.

Zelenskyy has now received a lesson in what America First can mean when the interests of an ally collide with the priorities of the White House. It does not necessarily mean America stands first among the defenders of democracy. It can mean America stands first in the queue for whatever it wants, while its partners are told to wait patiently and behave themselves.

That is not leadership. It is transactional power masquerading as diplomacy. And if the price of American diesel is Ukrainian political obedience, then the world should ask who is really paying the bill.

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The rent revolt

For years, European governments have treated housing as an irritating technical problem for housing ministers, economists and property developers. Build a few thousand apartments, announce another investment programme, subsidise a mortgage, blame planning regulations and congratulate yourself on having done something.

 

Meanwhile, rents climb, house prices become obscene and an entire generation is being told that adulthood is apparently an unaffordable luxury. This is no longer a housing crisis. It is a political crisis wearing a mortgage. Spain is only one of the clearest warnings. When housing policy becomes powerful enough to destabilise governments and trigger political confrontation, the message should be screaming across every European capital: people do not riot over architecture. They riot when they believe the system has decided that their lives are less important than somebody else's balance sheet.

And politicians still don't get it. They keep talking about "the housing market" as if they are discussing potatoes. Housing is not just another market. A person can live without a new car. They can postpone buying a television. They can survive without the latest smartphone.

Try postponing the need for a roof. Housing is the foundation underneath employment, family life, education, health, security and dignity. Without it, the rest of society becomes a grotesque exercise in pretending that everything is functioning.

Europe has created cities where the people who actually keep those cities alive increasingly cannot afford to live in them. Nurses commute ridiculous distances. Teachers struggle to rent near schools. Young workers remain trapped with parents. Couples postpone children. Students compete for tiny rooms at absurd prices. Elderly people fear losing homes they have occupied for decades.

And then the political class produces another PowerPoint presentation about productivity. Enough. The European housing system has become a machine for transferring wealth upward while politicians stand beside it holding a microphone and explaining that market forces are complicated.

Of course they are complicated. So is poverty. So is homelessness. So is watching your salary disappear into rent while someone who already owns five apartments becomes richer without lifting a finger.

The most poisonous consequence is not even economic. It is democratic. People who cannot afford to participate in society eventually stop believing society belongs to them. When the young are told that ownership is for their parents' generation and stability is for people who already possess capital, democracy starts looking less like representation and more like an exclusive club with elections every four years.

That is political dynamite. And the far right is perfectly happy to pick it up. The extremists do not need to manufacture people's anger. Governments are manufacturing it for them. All they have to do is point at immigrants, refugees, Brussels, foreigners, environmental regulations, universities or whatever convenient enemy happens to fit the day's propaganda.

The tragedy is that the original grievance is often completely legitimate. A young European who cannot afford an apartment does not need a lecture about tolerance. They need an apartment. A family crushed by rent does not need another speech about competitiveness. They need security.

A nurse who cannot afford to live anywhere near the hospital does not need politicians praising essential workers. She needs somewhere to live. This is where Europe's supposedly sophisticated political establishment has become intellectually bankrupt. It has treated housing as an investment opportunity when it should have treated it as national infrastructure.

Nobody argues that roads should exist only where property developers can make money. Nobody suggests that hospitals should be built exclusively for the wealthy. Nobody tells soldiers that national defence should depend entirely on whether private investors find missiles sufficiently profitable.

Yet when it comes to housing, suddenly the sacred invisible hand must be protected from the vulgar demands of ordinary human beings. That is ideological nonsense. Markets have a role. Property owners have rights. Private construction matters. But when the market systematically produces a society where working people cannot afford to live where work exists, governments have a responsibility to intervene.

Not with another committee. Not with another glossy strategy. Build homes. Public housing. Social housing. Affordable rental housing. Cooperative housing. Serious long-term planning. Land policies that stop cities becoming casinos for property speculation. And policies that recognise housing as infrastructure rather than another playground for wealth accumulation.

Because this is no longer about whether Europeans can buy their dream home. It is about whether Europeans can afford to remain Europeans in their own cities. Ignore that question and the consequences will not arrive politely through parliamentary procedure. They will arrive through elections, protests, rage and political extremism. The European political establishment should understand one brutally simple fact: People can tolerate many things.

They can tolerate bad governments. They can tolerate bureaucracy. They can even tolerate politicians lying to them. But when you take away the possibility of having a home, you are no longer asking them to tolerate bad policy. You are asking them to tolerate humiliation. And humiliation is where democratic patience goes to die.

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The Balkans running dry

Brussels likes its Balkans in chapters. Chapter 23: judiciary. Chapter 24: justice, freedom, and security. Chapter 27: environment. Chapter 35: other issues. Tick the boxes, reform the institutions, pass the laws, appoint the committees, produce the paperwork and Europe will eventually open the door.

 

Meanwhile, the water is disappearing. That is the absurdity at the heart of the European Union’s enlargement conversation in 2026. Ursula von der Leyen is touring the Western Balkans again, talking about accession, reforms, integration and the €6 billion Growth Plan. The language is familiar: momentum, movement, membership. And yes, democratic institutions, functioning courts, and accountable governments matter. But there is something rather more primitive that tends to escape bureaucratic Brussels: people need water to live.

Look at Lake Koroneia in northern Greece. Once a major wetland, a refuge for migratory birds, and a source of livelihoods, it has collapsed to less than a tenth of its former size after years of declining rainfall, rising temperatures, and excessive irrigation. The lake is not presenting Brussels with a legal problem; it is presenting Europe with a warning.

And that warning is screaming. The Balkans are one of Europe’s climate pressure points. Droughts, wildfires, floods, soil degradation, water scarcity, and agricultural disruption do not respect borders, accession chapters, or the Schengen timetable. A river does not stop at a customs post because one country is an EU member and the other is waiting outside. A wildfire does not ask whether a government has completed its judicial reforms.

Yet European policy still too often treats the environment as another technical chapter to be closed rather than as the infrastructure of political survival. That is dangerously backward. What happens when farmers cannot reliably irrigate their fields? When hydropower becomes unpredictable? When forests burn repeatedly? When drinking-water systems become inadequate? When villages lose agricultural income and young people leave? When people begin moving because the land can no longer support them?

That is not some distant climate scenario. It is the beginning of political instability. The EU cannot seriously discuss enlargement while treating green infrastructure as a decorative attachment to accession. If Brussels wants a stable Western Balkans, it must invest in reservoirs, modern irrigation, wastewater treatment, cross-border river management, drought-resistant agriculture, renewable energy, forest restoration, and resilient cities. It must finance adaptation with the same political urgency it applies to roads, railways, and border systems.

Otherwise, Europe will build excellent transport corridors through increasingly uninhabitable landscapes.

There is also an uncomfortable hypocrisy here. Brussels demands that Balkan governments strengthen institutions, fight corruption, and improve governance. Fine. But environmental collapse itself exposes the weakness of governance. When water becomes scarce, every broken institution becomes more dangerous. Illegal extraction, political patronage, uncontrolled construction, agricultural overuse, and environmental corruption can turn a drought into a social crisis.

Climate policy, therefore, is not separate from enlargement policy. It is enlargement policy. The EU should stop imagining the Western Balkans as a collection of candidates waiting patiently outside Europe's bureaucratic door. These countries are already part of Europe's ecological system. Their rivers, forests, mountains, farms, and coastlines are European assets and European vulnerabilities.

If the European project means anything beyond moving paperwork from one desk to another, it must understand that security begins with water, food, functioning ecosystems, and communities capable of surviving the next summer.

Brussels can count accession chapters until the paperwork catches fire. The Balkans cannot afford to wait. The lake is disappearing. The question is whether Europe will notice before the people start disappearing with it.

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The Aegean mirage

For decades, centuries and definitely going back to WWI, the West has been selling the same comfortable fantasy about the Eastern Mediterranean, Greece and Turkey are difficult neighbours, NATO keeps them talking, diplomats keep the temperature down and therefore everything is under control. It is a beautiful fantasy. It is also becoming dangerously detached from reality.

Whenever Ankara raises the temperature, Athens is advised to remain calm. Whenever Turkish ambitions collide with Greek sovereignty, Greece is encouraged to show restraint. Whenever the Aegean becomes another theatre of strategic pressure, European diplomacy discovers its favourite word: dialogue.

 

Dialogue is wonderful. Unfortunately, it does not define maritime boundaries, defend sovereignty or limit strategic ambition. While everyone has been congratulating themselves on the Mediterranean’s supposedly calm waters, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been building something considerably more ambitious, a strategic network extending far beyond traditional Western alliances, deep into the Gulf and South Asia.

The emerging defence relationship involving Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan is not simply another diplomatic handshake. It is part of a broader Turkish effort to multiply its strategic options, cultivate regional partnerships and reduce dependence on any single geopolitical bloc.

This does not mean Turkey has abandoned NATO; that interpretation would be simplistic. The far more intriguing development is precisely the opposite: Ankara appears increasingly comfortable moving through several strategic worlds simultaneously.

NATO when NATO is useful. Regional partnerships when they are useful. Transactional diplomacy when that is useful. Strategic autonomy when nothing else will do.

And why shouldn't Turkey act this way? The West has spent years teaching its allies that permanent guarantees are rarely as permanent as they sound. Ankara has simply learned the lesson on its own terms.

Greece, however, is travelling in another direction. Athens has invested heavily in Europe, international law, multilateral institutions, and the rules-based international order. Its assumption of the rotating presidency of the UN Security Council temporarily places Greece at the centre of global diplomacy, reinforcing the image of a nation seeking security through institutions rather than geopolitical improvisation.

And here lies the uncomfortable contradiction; Greece is asked, occasionally pressured, to believe in international rules while Turkey demonstrates just how much room there is for a powerful regional state to operate outside them.

The Aegean, therefore, cannot be reduced to another quarrel over islands, territorial waters, continental shelves, or energy resources. Those disputes are real but beneath them lies a much larger confrontation between two fundamentally different visions for the Eastern Mediterranean.

Athens wants a region governed by European principles and international law. Ankara wants the freedom to define its strategic environment through power, bilateral arrangements, military capability, and regional influence.

These visions can coexist for a time, but they cannot be assumed to be compatible forever. This is where the Western approach becomes increasingly absurd: Turkey is "too important" to confront. Turkey controls geography. Turkey matters to NATO. Turkey matters for migration. Turkey matters in the Black Sea. Turkey matters to the Middle East.

Fine. Turkey matters.

But Greece matters too. Europe cannot endlessly demand that Greece be the adult in the room while treating Turkish strategic experimentation as merely sophisticated diplomacy. Athens should show restraint. Athens should avoid provocation. Athens should compromise. Athens should understand Ankara's security concerns. But where is the equivalent expectation of Ankara?

A security system cannot survive when restraint is demanded from one side while strategic flexibility is celebrated on the other.

Greece has every right to insist that international law actually means something. Defending sovereignty does not become nationalism simply because somebody across the water dislikes the argument.

This distinction is vital, as NATO’s southern flank is beginning to look less like a single strategic structure and more like two different geopolitical philosophies temporarily occupying the same map.

There may still be one alliance, and there may still be one NATO headquarters. Yet underneath the institutional rhetoric, Athens and Ankara are preparing for vastly different futures. Greece is tying its security to Europe, international law, and multilateral diplomacy. Turkey is constructing a wider, more transactional regional network where alliances overlap, interests shift, and strategic autonomy is treated as an objective in itself.

The West can continue pretending that these trajectories are perfectly compatible; Greece should not. The Aegean is not an empty blue space between two NATO flags. It is Europe's south-eastern frontier, a strategic corridor connecting the continent with the Black Sea and the Middle East, where sovereignty, energy, migration, and military power collide.

The dangerous European habit of treating Greek sovereignty as an inconvenient detail whenever Turkey becomes strategically useful must end.

The Aegean does not need another sentimental speech about friendship between neighbours. It needs Europe to understand that peace is not maintained by endlessly asking one side to swallow every strategic challenge in the name of stability. Peace requires boundaries. Peace requires rules. Peace requires consequences when those rules are broken.

Above all, peace requires recognising that Greece is not NATO's inconvenient southern relative waiting for permission to defend its interests. Greece is Europe. The Aegean is Europe.

The real Mediterranean illusion is not that Greece and Turkey disagree, everybody knows they do. The illusion is that disagreement automatically guarantees stability. It does not. The waters may still look calm from Brussels, but beneath them, the tectonic plates are shifting. Sooner or later, Europe will have to decide whether it wants to keep admiring the surface or finally look underneath.

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