Europe and Trump Win Peace Talks They Cannot Enforce

This was supposed to be the week the fighting started to wind down. In London, Britain, France and Germany lined up behind a five-point plan to end the war in Ukraine. Iran said it would stop firing at Israel. And in Washington, the bill for the Gulf war finally landed on ordinary Americans, in the shape of the highest inflation in three years. Three signs, on the surface, that the world's two biggest wars were edging toward the door.

Look closer and the week told a different story. In both wars, the side that looks like it is winning the argument turns out to be the side that cannot actually deliver the result. Europe has taken charge of a Ukraine peace it has no way to enforce. Donald Trump wants out of the Iran war but cannot simply order it, because the man who can keep it going sits not in Tehran but in Jerusalem. Running through all of it was a quiet but widening gap between who is now responsible for these wars and who is actually able to end them — a gap made unmistakable, the same week, by the death of Europe's flagship fighter-jet project.

Start with Ukraine. On June 7, Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz sat down with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in London and put their names to five conditions for peace: an immediate ceasefire, the current front line as the starting point for talks, real security guarantees backed by a European force, Russian assets kept frozen until Moscow pays for the damage, and nothing decided over Kyiv's head. Zelenskyy went further than he ever has, signalling — through Starmer, and through a back channel involving the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich — that he would accept freezing the war along the present line as the quickest way to stop the shooting. That it was the Europeans, not the White House, holding the pen says everything about who owns this war now. So does the sight of the US House voting through more than $1bn in Ukraine aid against Trump's express wishes: when a country's own Congress has to defy its president to keep a policy alive, the president has already walked away from it.

The trouble is that Europe has taken on a promise it cannot yet back. Its armies are smaller than Russia's, its arms factories slower, its decisions tangled across two dozen capitals. The European Council on Foreign Relations, no Eurosceptic outfit, has spent months warning that Europe is "willing" but still not "able" — and that a security guarantee without an American backstop simply isn't credible to Moscow. Putin clearly agrees. He rejected the London plan within a day and restated his original war aims, because a leader who thinks the guarantee behind a ceasefire is a bluff has no reason to stop fighting a war he still believes he can win.

There is one thing that could change his mind, and it was the week's quietest drama. Ukraine's long-range drones have stopped merely harassing Russia and started setting its fuel system alight. By June 11 petrol shortages had spread to 25 Russian regions; in the worst-hit areas four in five stations had no standard fuel to sell. Analysts at the Atlantic Council are now asking, in as many words, whether Putin's war machine is finally running out of fuel, with strikes having knocked out something like a quarter of Russia's refining capacity. Seen against that, Zelenskyy's sudden flexibility is not weakness but timing: he is trying to cash in his strongest hand while it is still strong. Whether Putin folds will depend far less on the communiqué signed in London than on how long the queues outside his petrol stations get by the autumn. For now the likeliest path is a grinding summer — Russia saying no, Ukraine burning its refineries, and a European peace plan with no one on the other side of the table.

The Iran war looks even closer to ending, and is even further from it. The economic reckoning is no longer abstract: energy drove most of May's inflation, petrol hit a $4.15 national average — up 39% since the war flared — and the Strait of Hormuz, which carries about a fifth of the world's oil, stays shut. The strangest twist is that the disruption has turned the United States into the world's largest oil exporter even as American drivers pay through the nose, a windfall for Texas that wins Trump no votes. His "I love the inflation," hastily taken back, was the sound of a president who knows the bill has arrived. He now says a deal is "two or three days" away and that Hormuz will reopen the moment it is signed.

He has said this kind of thing before. At the start he promised the war would be over in four to six weeks; it has now passed a hundred days. The obstacle is not really Iran, which is content to keep the strait closed precisely because that chokehold is its only leverage. The obstacle is Netanyahu. He has an Israeli election due by the end of October, a war he is in no hurry to end, and a goal — finishing off Hezbollah — that Trump simply does not share. So when Vice-President JD Vance said flatly that where American and Israeli interests part ways, "the United States is going to pursue the best interests of our nation," it was not a gaffe. It was Washington warning Netanyahu, out loud, that it is ready to settle this war without him. The most likely result is neither the clean deal Trump keeps promising nor an open rupture with Israel, but a messy, stop-start truce that leaves Hormuz half-closed and petrol prices high deep into the summer. And the figure who captured the new alignment was Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who spent the week comparing Netanyahu to Hitler while offering to help write the peace text and clear the strait's mines: it is Turkey, not Israel, that Washington can now actually use.

Which brings us to the event almost no one led with, and the one that may matter most. On June 6, on the sidelines of an EU summit in Montenegro, Merz told Macron that Germany and France were abandoning the manned-fighter heart of their €110bn Future Combat Air System — the would-be European super-fighter that was the proudest symbol of the continent's ambition to defend itself without the Americans. Only the project's "combat cloud" software survives. The reason it collapsed is the reason the whole week hangs together: France's Dassault and the Airbus consortium could not agree on who would build what, because Europe's big states keep demanding defence sovereignty while refusing to share it. As one analyst at the IISS put it, the failure "sends poor signalling to both Washington and Moscow" — the two audiences Europe could least afford to look weak in front of this week.

It did not look weak alone. In London, Defence Secretary John Healey resigned, accusing Starmer of being "unable" and the Treasury "unwilling" to pay for Britain's defence — the sixth minister to walk out in a month, and at a moment when all five of the Royal Navy's attack submarines were sitting in dock, none at sea. Off Cyprus, Turkish fighter jets harassed a plane carrying the French, Dutch and Greek defence ministers to an EU meeting. A continent that cannot build a fighter jet together, pay for its second-largest military, or fly its defence ministers to a meeting unmolested is not, this week, a continent that can stand behind Ukraine's security. That is why the quiet cancellation of a fighter programme tells you more than the loud summit that preceded it.

The next few weeks will show which way each of these gaps breaks. In Ukraine, the thing to watch is not the diplomacy but the petrol: if the shortages keep spreading and Russia's refineries keep burning, Putin's confidence that time is on his side will start to look like his central mistake, and the door he slammed this week could reopen by the autumn. In Iran, the test is simple — does any deal actually get the oil tankers moving through Hormuz again, or does Netanyahu land one more big strike before his election and blow the whole thing apart? And in Europe, watch whether France and Germany now drift into building rival fighter jets and whether London keeps flinching at its own defence budget. Because if they do, the promise made in that London room will be one Europe's own factories have just told the world it cannot keep — and Putin will have been right to wait.