Donald Trump, for reasons of his own, has decided to join in alliance with Vladimir Putin. He has indicated that the U.S. may leave NATO, which has kept the peace in Europe since the end of World War II. There is a chance that NATO might expel the U.S. due to Trump’s partnership with Putin.

Since 1945, this is the most consequential development in U.S. relations with Europe.

Trump has a deferential relationship with Putin. He made certain to install a Putin-friendly person as director of all national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.

Meanwhile, on the home front, Trump has busied himself installing stooges at every important agency: Kash Patel at the FBI; Pete Hegseth at the Defense Department; Pam Bondi at the Justice Department; John Ratcliffe at the CIA. None of these people will complain or resign if Trump declares that the U.S. is leaving NATO and forging a partnership with Russia.

The New York Times reported today:

President Emmanuel Macron of France called a second emergency meeting of European allies on Wednesday seeking to recalibrate relations with the United States as President Trump upends international politics by rapidly changing American alliances.

Mr. Macron had already assembled a dozen European leaders in Paris on Monday after Mr. Trump and his new team angered and confused America’s traditional allies by suggesting that the United States would rapidly retreat from its security role in Europe and planned to proceed with peace talks with Russia — without Europe or Ukraine at the table.

Mr. Trump’s remarks late on Tuesday, when he sided fully with Russia’s narrative blaming Ukraine for the war, have now fortified the impression that the United States is prepared to abandon its role as a European ally and switch sides to embrace President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

It was a complete reversal of historic alliances that left many in Europe stunned and fearful.

“What’s happening is very bad. It’s a reversal of the state of the world since 1945,” Jean- Yves Le Drian, a former French foreign minister, said on French radio Wednesday morning.

“It’s our security he’s putting at risk,” he said, referring to President Trump. “We must wake up.”

Fear that Mr. Trump is ready to abandon Ukraine and has accepted Russian talking points has been particularly acute in Eastern and Central Europe, where memories are long and bitter of the West’s efforts to appease Hitler in Munich in 1938 and its assent to Stalin’s demands at the Yalta Conference in 1945 for a Europe cleaved in two.

“Even Poland’s betrayal in Yalta lasted longer than Ukraine’s betrayal in Riyadh,” Jaroslaw Walesa, a Polish lawmaker and the son of Poland’s anti-Communist Solidarity trade union leader, Lech Walesa, said Wednesday on social media, referring to the American-Russian talks in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday.

Rasa Jukneviciene, a former Lithuania defense minister who is now a member of the European Parliament, said it was “hard to understand” the sudden shifts in policy by the United States, the once reliable pillar of Europe’s security for decades. She said she was “wondering what historians will write about the events of this time, say, in five decades.”

“It is already clear that the Euro-Atlantic connection will not be the same as it used to be,” she said. “The stage when European security after World War II was basically guaranteed only by the U.S.A. is over….”

Meanwhile Secretary of State Marco Rubio was developing a new relationship with Russia at a bilateral meeting in Saudi Arabia, to which neither Ukraine nor NATO nations were invited.

Mr. Rubio said they hammered out a three-part plan, which would start by re-establishing bilateral relations between Washington and Moscow and end by exploring new partnerships — geopolitical and business — between Russia and the United States, while addressing the parameters of an end of the war with Ukraine in between.

Mr. Rubio said he would consult with Ukraine, the American “partners in Europe and others,” but in the end, “ultimately, the Russian side will be indispensable to this effort.”

Afterward, speaking to reporters at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, President Trump blamed Ukraine for starting the war, despite the fact that Russia had invaded.

“You could have made a deal,” he said, denigrating President Zelensky’s popularity and indicating he didn’t deserve a seat at the negotiating table.

“Well, they’ve had a seat for three years. And a long time before that,” Mr. Trump said. “This could have been settled very easily. Just a half-baked negotiator could have settled this years ago without, I think, without the loss of much land, very little land. Without the loss of any lives. And without the loss of cities that are just laying on their sides.”

Mr. Trump’s comments blaming Ukraine for the war stirred outrage in the Czech Republic, whose centrist government has been a stalwart supporter of Ukraine. “I’m afraid we’ve never been this close to Orwell’s ‘war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength’ before,” Interior Minister Vit Rakusan said on social media.

Mr. Le Drian called it a monstrous reversal of world alliances, as well as an “inversion of the truth.”

“The victim becomes the attacker,” he said, adding that the United States seemed to be retreating to a 19th-century view of itself, and telling an aggressive, expansionist Russia to do what it wants in Europe. “It’s the law of the strongest,” he said, adding “tomorrow, it could be Moldavia and after tomorrow, it could be Estonia because Putin won’t stop.”