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European confidence in an American “security guarantee” has hit a historic low, a survey suggests, with only one in 10 people across 15 countries seeing the US as an ally and majorities in all doubting it would come to their aid if they were attacked. The survey, published on Wednesday by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) thinktank before critical G7 and Nato summits in France and Turkey over the coming weeks, revealed “deep European distrust in the US”, the authors said. It also showed that, while many Europeans felt relations with Washington would improve once Donald Trump leaves...

France and Germany have agreed to abandon plans to jointly develop a next-generation fighter aircraft, effectively ending the central element of the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) program, according to Reuters.The decision was reportedly reached during discussions between German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and French President Emmanuel Macron on the sidelines of a summit in Montenegro last week.Reuters cited German officials as saying the two leaders concluded there was no realistic path to resolving longstanding disagreements between the industrial partners involved in the project.Launched in 2017 by France and Germany, and later joined by Spain, FCAS was intended to become Europe's...

The State of Israel has proposed that the United States plant permanent military bases on its territory. Jerusalem wants Washington to relocate existing installations from elsewhere in the Middle East... Establishing those bases, especially in southern Israel along the Gaza border, could potentially deliver the ironclad deterrence that has already raised the cost of mass attacks... Critics call it entanglement. The facts say otherwise. October 7 proved that distance breeds weakness. Iran’s war exposed scattered Gulf bases as sitting ducks. Southern Israel offers proximity, partnership, and punch. The United States already has a military footprint in Israel, and CENTCOM personnel...

Britain and France have scuppered a proposal for Nato allies to spend 0.25 per cent of GDP on military aid for Ukraine. Mark Rutte, the alliance’s secretary-general, this week conceded his plan wouldn’t be taken forward because it didn’t have sufficient support. “I don’t think this one will be proposed,” he told reporters, without naming the opponents. But now The Telegraph can reveal that the UK, France, Spain, Italy and Canada blocked the idea when it was floated in discussions for how to boost support for Kyiv.

President Trump on Thursday said the U.S. will send an additional 5,000 troops to Poland, stirring confusion following weeks of changing statements from Trump and his administration about reducing the American military footprint in Europe.

The United States will be sending an additional 5,000 troops ​to Poland, U.S. President Donald Trump said on ‌Thursday. Trump, in a Truth Social post, cited his relationship with Poland’s conservative nationalist president, Karol Nawrocki, as the reason behind his decision ​to send additional troops. The announcement comes two days ​after U.S. Vice President JD Vance told reporters a ⁠U.S. troop deployment to Poland had been delayed.

Two senior Polish defense ministry officials are on their way to Washington to get more information on why the U.S. suddenly canceled the deployment of 4,000 soldiers on a planned rotation to the country. Paweł Zalewski and Cezary Tomczyk — both deputy defense ministers — will try to get details on what Zalewski called "the incident." "No one in Poland knew that the rotation of the American brigade would be suspended," Zalewski told TOK FM radio on Monday morning. Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth blindsided Warsaw by halting the long-planned deployment of soldiers with the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st...

The Trump administration is planning to tell NATO allies this week that it will shrink the pool of military capabilities that the US would have available to assist the alliance’s European nations in a major crisis, three sources familiar with the matter said. Under a framework known as the NATO Force Model, the alliance’s member countries identify a pool of available forces that could be activated during a conflict or any other major crisis, such as a military attack on a NATO member. While the precise composition of those wartime forces is a closely guarded secret, the Pentagon has decided...

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Friday that Russia was seeking to draw Belarus deeper into its war in Ukraine and was weighing plans to attack Ukraine's north or a NATO country from Belarusian territory. "We continue to document Russia's attempts to draw Belarus deeper into the war against Ukraine," Zelenskiy said on the Telegram messaging app after meeting military and intelligence officials. He said Ukraine knew of additional contacts between Russia and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko to persuade him to join "new Russian aggressive operations". "Russia is considering plans for operations to the south and north of Belarusian territory –...

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared himself "a strong supporter of NATO" after talks with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on Friday, as political friction between the two allies brews. The atmosphere during the visit was notably warmer than in recent weeks. Rubio spoke partly in Spanish during the meetings, joking that the language was "very similar" to Italian. He also said he had been trying to learn Italian himself, but that his subscription to language app Babbel had expired.

President Donald Trump said Friday night that the United States military could decide to relocate the troops that are currently stationed in Germany and move them to Poland. The president touted his friendship with the country's leader, President Karol Nawrocki, who assumed office last year. The Pentagon previously indicated that the U.S. would move 5,000 troops from Germany in the next six to 12 months. “Well, Poland would like that," Trump told reporters at the White House. "We have a great relationship with Poland. I have a great relationship with the president. I endorsed him, and he won. He came...

Europe has betrayed President Trump. For years, EU leaders and key national governments have undermined the White House's agenda quietly, working to remove pro-Washington figures from power. We recently witnessed this in Romania, where Cătălin Georgescu -- a clear frontrunner who favored closer ties with the U.S. -- was effectively sidelined in the presidential race. In Hungary, there was a concerted effort to defeat Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party in April. Now, anti-Trump Europe has stepped out of the shadows and is openly distancing itself from the administration, leaving it to face its challenges in Iran alone. This isn't...

Joschka Fischer, a titan of Germany's post-reunification foreign policy, says he finds Trump "deeply distasteful," discusses the need for a European bomb and says he never trusted Putin. DER SPIEGEL: Mr. Fischer, if you were still Germany’s foreign minister, how would you be dealing with the current U.S. administration and President Donald Trump? Fischer: I'm glad I don't have to, because I find this person deeply unpleasant. The German government has not done a bad job with him so far, and neither has NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. They're often criticized for approaching Trump on a broad trail of slime....

American and European foreign policy "elites" (globalists) are perpetually outraged and shocked at President Donald Trump’s attitude towards NATO. By suggesting that NATO doesn't have to go on forever, our nation's 47th commander in chief is shaking the status quo foreign policy establishment to its core. Any analysis of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (founded on April 4, 1949) should rightfully commence from the perspective of "What have you done for me lately?" So NATO, "What have you done for the United States, now and in years and decades past?" For the most part, we've witnessed nations less friendly to...

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said on Monday she would not support any decision by President Donald Trump to withdraw U.S. troops from Italy. "It is a decision that doesn't depend on me and one that I personally would not agree with," Meloni told reporters in Yerevan, Armenia, on the sidelines of a European Political Community summit. Asked whether Washington would consider pulling its troops out of ​Italy and Spain, Trump last week answered "probably". Meloni added she would likely meet with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is due to travel to Rome later this week for talks,...

The German chancellor Friedrich Merz has desperately backflipped on his criticism of US President Donald Trump after he threatened to remove thousands of US troops from Germany. German chancellor desperately backtracks on Trump criticism after savage threat to remove troops | 4:55 | 6.18M subscribers | 368,472 views | May 4, 2026

Germany’s Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, attacked Trump over the war in Iran. Trump responded by withdrawing 5,000 troops from Germany. The attack was a foolish thing for Merz to have done, but perhaps given the state of Islamic control over German society, he felt he had no other choice. It all started last Monday, when Merz announced that the U.S. was losing in Iran and essentially demanded that the U.S. beat a speedy retreat: “ The problem with conflicts like this is always you don’t just have to get in – you have to get out again. We saw that very...

The establishment consensus is hardening. President Trump’s war with Iran is the culminating disaster of the most damaging and misguided American foreign policy in history. Iranian leaders are humiliating the U.S., German Chancellor Friedrich Merz warned. “Superpower suicide” is how Wendy Sherman, a top Iran negotiator under President Obama and Joe Biden’s deputy secretary of state, described Mr. Trump’s Iran policy to ABC News. As Ms. Sherman sees it, the Iran war has alienated allies, assisted Russia financially, and weakened America’s position vis-à-vis China. For Fareed Zakaria, the question is no longer whether the administration’s policies will backfire but whether...

Europe will not submit to a more “brutal world”, and can instead be the base from which a new international order can be rebuilt, Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister, has said. Carney was speaking as the first non-European leader to attend a meeting of the European Political Community, which opened on Monday amid high tensions in the strait of Hormuz and renewed doubts about the US commitment to Nato. “We don’t think that we’re destined to submit to a more transactional, insular and brutal world, and gatherings such as these point to a better way forward,” he said. In...

Nato is “disintegrating”, Poland’s prime minister has said after the United States announced it was withdrawing 5,000 troops from Germany. Donald Tusk made the dire assessment of the Western alliance on Saturday amid an escalating war of words between Donald Trump and Germany over Berlin’s criticism of the war on Iran. In a post on X on Saturday, Mr Tusk wrote: “The greatest threat to the transatlantic community are not its external enemies, but the ongoing disintegration of our alliance. We must all do what it takes to reverse this disastrous trend.” On Friday evening, the US department of defence...