European journalist and author of Postcapitalism, Paul Mason, has expressed deep concern over the outcome of the rare meeting between European leaders, United States President Donald Trump, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House, held to discuss the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
In a series of posts on his verified X handle, Mason criticized what he described as the “surreal” nature of the meeting, arguing that while European leaders managed to prevent Trump from being “sucked into Putin’s mental framework,” the gathering revealed troubling signals about U.S. reliability as an ally.
“What happened in D.C.? We, outside the classified zone, won’t know for a while,” Mason wrote, before lamenting that decades of Western expertise in diplomacy, intelligence, and security “ended up overshadowed by the spectacle of the White House of Kennedy and Roosevelt reduced to a trashy gift shop.”
The journalist warned that Europe must draw a stark strategic lesson: the United States can no longer be seen as a dependable or predictable partner. He argued that the collapse of the Budapest Memorandum, once meant to guarantee Ukraine’s sovereignty, had been accelerated not only by Russian President Vladimir Putin but also by Trump’s stance.
“Once you nix one border by force, all borders come into play,” Mason cautioned, stressing that European nations must now assume they are potential targets of what he called “Putin/Trump revisionism.”
He urged European powers — particularly the UK, France, Germany, and the EU — to prepare for a future without U.S. backing by forming a “Coalition of the Willing” and dramatically increasing defense spending, even beyond 5% of GDP.
Drawing parallels with the 1930s, Mason concluded that Europe is sliding back into a pre-World War II environment where states can be dismembered overnight without a strong multilateral order. “The politicians look alarmed because they see the intelligence,” he noted.
Credit: @paulmasonnews via X.
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