America Wins Wars by Walking Out, Leaving Europe the Bill

This was the week America won. Donald Trump ended the war with Iran on terms close to everything he had asked for, watched Russia and Ukraine edge toward the negotiating table he had demanded, and stood at the G7 in Evian and announced, in effect, that the United States was now strong enough to start coming home. It was also the week that exposed how little the winning is worth while the wars are not actually finished and the people being handed responsibility for them cannot yet carry it.

Start with Iran. The war ended on June 14 with a memorandum reopening the Strait of Hormuz, which Trump signed at the G7 three days later; within days the two sides had sketched something far larger. Under the framework now taking shape, Washington would lift every category of sanction on Iran — the UN Security Council resolutions, the nuclear measures, the terrorism, missile and human-rights designations, the entire architecture built up since the 1979 hostage crisis — on an agreed schedule, alongside a plan to channel $300 billion of reconstruction into the country with Gulf partners. It is the most complete diplomatic victory of Trump's second term. It is also the one that most plainly strengthened the adversary. Iran's nuclear program, its ballistic missiles and its proxy network all survived the war intact, and Tehran emerged holding the Strait of Hormuz. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the strait Iran's "economic nuclear weapon"; Iran has now stood up a Persian Gulf Strait Authority, run in effect by the Revolutionary Guard, and signalled it will charge for passage once a 60-day negotiating window closes. The CIA director has told colleagues he doubts Iran ever truly meant to build a bomb, even as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth warned in Brussels that the US would reimpose the blockade and "recommence operations" if Tehran reneges. And Israel, whose war this also was, says the agreement does not bind it and is carrying on in Lebanon. Trump has the signature. Whether anyone has the peace is a separate question.

The deeper story of the week was unfolding three thousand miles away, in a NATO conference room. On June 18 Hegseth told allied defence ministers that the Pentagon would spend the next six months reviewing the American troop presence in Europe, and that the review was a test the alliance could fail — "some countries will fail, and others will pass with flying colors." He demanded 3.5 percent of GDP in defence spending, tied future US contributions to the common budget to hitting that mark, and called it "shameful" that European capitals had denied American forces the bases and overflight they wanted during the Iran war. He gave the new arrangement a name: "NATO 3.0," an alliance in which Europe leads its own conventional defence and America, at most, backstops it. The secretary-general, Mark Rutte, called the review "completely acceptable" and pointed out that European members spent $90 billion more on defence last year than the year before, a fifth more than in 2024. The trouble is the timetable. Allies have been told to present plans by July to fill the gaps the US is opening; intelligence services worry about a Russian move before 2030; and the single thing Europe most depends on Washington for — the nuclear umbrella — is the one it cannot quickly build.

That is what makes Emmanuel Macron's gambit the most consequential European move of the week, and the easiest to misread. The French president has increased France's warhead stockpile for the first time since 1992, stopped disclosing its size, and offered allies an "advanced deterrence" framework — strategic dialogues, the possibility of forward-basing nuclear-capable Rafales on their soil — that eight countries, from Germany and Poland to Britain and Sweden, have signed up to explore. German troops have joined French nuclear exercises for the first time. It looks like the embryo of a European deterrent. But as Chatham House put it, what Macron is offering "falls well short of a nuclear umbrella": the launch decision stays with the French president alone, with no sharing and no delegated authority, and Paris expects partners to supply the early warning, missile defence and conventional deep-strike forces that would make any of it credible. Andrius Kubilius, the EU's defence commissioner, drew the line plainly — Europe can handle its own conventional defence, but replacing the American nuclear guarantee "will take a decade, likely longer." Hegseth is demanding a handover on a six-month clock for a capability that is ten years out. The gap was dramatised, almost comically, on June 16, when a Russian frigate, the Admiral Grigorovich, fired warning shots at a retired British couple's yacht that had drifted toward it in fog off the Isle of Wight — Russian naval guns in the English Channel, in the very week NATO was told to look after itself.

Ukraine showed why the clock matters, because there the war refused to wait for the diplomacy. On the night of June 15 Russia put a missile through the Dormition Cathedral of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, a UNESCO monastery, setting its roof ablaze, cutting power to 140,000 people and killing five rescuers in a separate strike on Kharkiv. Three days later Ukraine answered with the largest drone assault on Moscow of the entire war — waves of aircraft striking the Kapotnya refinery ten miles from the Kremlin, 190 brought down on the approach, four airports shut and smoke hanging over the capital all morning. In between, at Evian, Zelenskyy did something shrewder than either strike: he showed Trump photographs of the burning Lavra, and, by Politico's account, the images visibly moved the president and helped tug Washington back toward Kyiv. The G7 agreed to expand air defence, interceptors and long-range weapons for Ukraine and to tighten sanctions on Russia's oil and its shadow fleet, with Britain and Canada adding their own. The EU, after Hungary's new government dropped its veto in a deal over ethnic-Hungarian minority rights, formally opened accession talks with Kyiv — "a huge step forward," in Ursula von der Leyen's words. And yet the Council on Foreign Relations was right to call the G7's unity "deeply fragile." With the US pulling back its aid, Europe is now the largest single source of money and arms for Ukraine — which means the war's outcome rests ever more heavily on the continent that has just been told it must also rebuild its own defence from the studs.

The bill for all of this is already arriving in domestic politics, and nowhere more starkly than in France. A poll this week put Jordan Bardella, the National Rally's 30-year-old leader, on roughly 35 percent for the 2027 presidential race, more than fifteen points clear of his nearest rival, the former prime minister Edouard Philippe. Bardella spent the week calling the European Union "completely obsolete" and vowing to halve France's contribution to it. The complication — and it is a real one — is that the National Rally may reach 2027 without a candidate at all: Marine Le Pen is barred pending an appeal ruling due July 7, and Bardella himself faces a case that could end in the same disqualification. A party leading every poll, in a nuclear-armed UN Security Council founder now positioning itself as the spine of European defence, may be unable to field anyone for the office that controls the warheads. That is the contradiction the West is living inside: the more the burden shifts onto Europe, the more Europe's own politics tilt toward the people who want least to do with the project.

Watch three things in the weeks ahead. Whether Iran tries to monetise the Strait of Hormuz once its negotiating window expires, and whether Israel's free hand reignites the war Trump has just closed on paper. Whether Europe's defence ministers actually deliver, in July, the plans Hegseth has demanded — or whether "NATO 3.0" turns out to describe a hole rather than a handover. And, on July 7, whether a Paris courtroom decides who, if anyone, the front-runner for the French presidency will be. America has decided it is done carrying the world it built. The question the week leaves open is whether anyone else can pick it up before it falls.