Boris Johnson: Put Up or Put a Sock in It, Europe

Well said brother!

I love the way the European's booed us at the Olympic opening ceremony. Why? Because we told them to chip in for their own defense and ramp up their anemic economy. Sorry...too much truth telling.

As for Greenland, it's to their and our benefit to have a massive US base there to protect their sorry ass. Suck it.

Boris Johnson: Put Up or Put a Sock in It, Europe

Continental leaders talk big about autonomy and independence from the U.S., but it’s all bluster.

By Boris Johnson, WSJ

Feb. 17, 2026 12:12 pm ET

So come on then, Europe. Show us what you’re made of. From Davos to Munich and across the capitals of the old Continent, the clamor is rising to a crescendo.

We can’t stand Donald Trump, European politicians say. We can’t trust Washington anymore. We can no longer rely on American military leadership, and so—this is the hour of Europe! It’s time for European strategic autonomy!

According to senior officials in the European Commission, Mr. Trump’s surrealist trolling over Greenland has fatally gashed the Atlantic alliance. “A line has been crossed,” says Ursula von der Leyen, “that cannot be uncrossed. . . . Europe must become more independent in every dimension that affects our security.”

Virtually every European leader has noted the tearful ovations that greeted Mark Carney’s speech at Davos—according to which the free world is apparently going to be led by (checks notes) Canada.

So they have been chiming in: Friedrich Merz, Emmanuel Macron, even the U.K.’s beleaguered Keir Starmer. It’s time for some kind of stand-alone European military effort, they say, or at least more collaboration.

My friends, I agree—but on what are you proposing to collaborate? We hear something about a European nuclear umbrella, apparently to be offered by France to Germany. We hear about joint defense procurement, but then we have been hearing this kind of thing for 50 years, and nothing has come of it.

These debates are trivial, and irrelevant, because right now Europe has a golden opportunity to assert its strategic independence. If Europeans want the chance to seize leadership from the U.S. and do things differently, then this is it.

There is a real war on our Continent—as opposed to a nonexistent U.S. “threat to Greenland.” It is a cruel and hideous war in which Vladimir Putin is increasingly torturing the Ukrainian population, bombing their electricity supply, so that women and children are freezing to death in temperatures of 15 below.

Does Europe actually want this war to end? Then what are we doing about it? If we care about the suffering of these Ukrainians, as we say we do, then for God’s sake let’s give them the means to take out the factories that make Russia’s drones. Why are the Germans still sitting on their arsenal of Taurus cruise missiles? Fears of “escalation”?

The history of the war so far is that the only person who fears escalation is Mr. Putin himself. If we wanted to show real strategic European autonomy, we would launch a concerted operation to impound the shadow fleet—the sanctions-busting oil tankers that are helping Mr. Putin to fund his war machine. Will this crop of European leaders have the guts?

We Europeans could show our commitment to a free and sovereign Ukraine by sending a contingent of European troops—“boots on the ground”—to one or more of the parts of Ukraine that are completely safe. Their mission wouldn’t be to fight, or to put European lives at risk, but to make the essential point that the decision to invite foreign soldiers onto Ukrainian soil is a matter for Ukraine, now and forever. It isn’t a matter for Mr. Putin.

That is what we mean by a free Ukraine. Will Europeans have the nerve, now, to show their belief in that simple idea? Don’t hold your breath.

Above all the Europeans should rectify the disgrace of last December when, after months of fine words, they failed to do the right thing, unfreeze Mr. Putin’s assets, and give the cash to the Ukrainians as a down payment on the war reparations that Russia will inevitably owe. The European Union should have unfrozen the $140 billion in the Euroclear bank account. The U.K. should have shown a lead and unfrozen the $15 billion in London. Why didn’t we? Why didn’t we Europeans have the balls to show independence from the U.S., and to go the extra mile for Ukraine? Because we were afraid of being sued? By Mr. Putin? In what court? In what world?

The whole thing is beyond pathetic. European statesmen say they want strategic autonomy. Liberal Europeans clap their perfumed hankies to their noses and proclaim their revulsion at the boorishness of the Trump administration.

It is true that the Americans can be maddening, true that the White House is sadly deluded if they think that Russia wants peace. There is much more that the Trump administration could do to get this war over. We must pray they do it. But what, mes amis, is the European alternative?

Unless these European leaders are prepared to do something brave and perhaps very expensive to make good their rhetoric, the best hope for this economically stagnant, welfare-addicted Continent is to maintain the strategy that has worked for the past 100 years and more. That is to do everything we can to persuade Americans of the truth that their security is bound up with ours, and that in return for that commitment we are willing to spend more on defense, and glad to accept the continued reality of American military hegemony in Europe.

The Ukrainian generals know that reality. It would be impossible for them to keep going without some of the technical support that America still provides. It is idle and foolish to pretend otherwise.

It is also dangerous, exactly what Mr. Putin wants: just as it is dangerous to pretend that there is some European alternative to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The last time I looked, the U.S. supplies 70% of NATO spending and almost all of its nuclear deterrence (depending on what you believe about the French force de frappe), as well as 95% of heavy-lift capacity.

European leaders need to be serious. They either need to show that they mean it—that they are willing to do something big, risky and strategically autonomous to help Ukraine, which they show no sign of doing—or else they need to put a sock in it.