The Trump administration isn’t planning to send any senior defense officials to two key meetings with European allies this week — a decision that’s rankled Ukraine’s biggest proponents on Capitol Hill.
“I think it’s ill-advised,” Rep. Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s diminished participation in matters of Ukraine defense.
The United Kingdom and France are bringing together close to 30 countries in Brussels, Belgium, Thursday for a meeting of the “Coalition of the Willing.” Many of those same countries are meeting Friday for the Ukraine Defense Contact Group.
Hegseth will not attend the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in person, although he may participate virtually, a Pentagon official told NOTUS. U.K. Defense Minister John Healey will lead the group, a responsibility Hegseth relinquished earlier this year.
Rogers and some of his colleagues are worried about the strain on the United States’ relationships with European allies in light of the ongoing war in Ukraine.
“It’s not just bipartisan in our committee, same thing on the Senate side. All of us recognize the strategic importance of what we’re doing over there, and we’re unified,” Rogers said. “We just want the Department [of Defense] and the administration to share our sense of urgency.”
No senior administration official is slated to attend the “Coalition of the Willing.”
The concern, Democratic and some Republican lawmakers say, is that the less present the U.S. is in these discussions and the more often ideas like abandoning the NATO command are floated by the Trump administration, the more it creates uncertainty in relationships with longtime U.S. allies. One Republican senator confirmed that they, and others in the GOP, share this worry, but asked for anonymity given the position of the administration.
While neither Hegseth nor his team are expected to be present in person for the European meetings, Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll is visiting troops and allied partners in Germany, Poland and Belgium – all members of the coalition.
“For decades, the Army has provided exceptional support, resources, and capabilities to the continent,” Driscoll said in a statement to NOTUS about the U.S. relationship with European nations. “We eagerly anticipate the future together, particularly as our allies and partners increase their own domestic military investments too.”
Democrats are more publicly critical.
“That’s really a problem,” Rep. Adam Smith, the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, told NOTUS. “Everybody right now is recalculating, and they’re recalculating based on the idea that they can’t trust the U.S. as an ally.”
Smith said he agreed with Rogers that reducing the U.S. military posture in Europe, especially without consulting Congress, would be a mistake.
The U.K. sees both the coalition and the contact group this week as critical to the long-term success of any peace for Ukraine, with or without U.S. involvement.
“We will continue to ramp up our military planning,” Healey said on Wednesday. “We will not jeopardize the peace by forgetting about the war.”
Lawmakers in both chambers noted a direct line between the administration’s rhetoric and Europe’s recent moves. The “Coalition of the Willing” was started just days after Trump’s February meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy erupted into chaos.
“We’re not in a good situation,” Sen. Mark Kelly said. “This is the worst state of the relationship since World War II, post-World War II.
Now, the leadership of participating countries — especially those directly along the border with Russia — is doubting if they can trust U.S. policy from one day to the next. Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski told Sky News that Trump’s approach to peace is “unusual” and that he would have preferred secret peace negotiations to see if Ukraine and Russia were closer together on a deal. He sees Trump as being “capable of changing his policy rather rapidly” toward anyone.
While Hegseth said Poland is “a model ally on the continent, willing to invest not just in their defense, but in our shared defense and defense of the continent,” Sikorski has questioned the reliability of the United States in sharing defense responsibilities.
“The credibility of the United States, not only in Eastern Europe but globally, is staked on the quality of the solution,” Sikorski said of Trump’s peace negotiations. “He wants to be recognized as a great leader. He wants to do his global power game, competition with China. For that, he needs allies and he needs America to prevail.”
That instability is what lawmakers are most worried about.
“They’ve made it clear they’re not friends of Ukraine. That’s what bothers me,” Rep. Don Bacon told NOTUS. “I think all of us on that top row [of the committee] know that Ukraine is our ally. It’s in our security interest that they don’t get beat.”European countries are doing what Trump and Hegseth asked, spending more on their defense. The German government recently approved 500 billion euros (about $560 billion) in defense spending. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced last month the ReArm Europe plan, an effort to use an additional 800 billion euros for defense spending.
“I think there’s still a desire to maintain the relationship,” Smith said. “There’s just a lot of angst and concern about where it’s going and what it’s going to mean.”
Army Gen. Christopher Cavoli, the commander of U.S. European Command and the NATO commander, was met with bipartisan pushback against much of the administration’s rhetoric around European partners during his hearings on Capitol Hill this week.
“The idiocy of the fact that there was any discussion about the aspects of relinquishing the command or even the rumor of relinquishing the command, is just beyond me,” Rep. Mike Turner, a senior Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, said in the hearing, of the notion that the U.S. would lose command of NATO.
“Hegseth is giving the middle finger to NATO,” Rep. John Garamendi told NOTUS. “That’s what this is.”
The lack of U.S. participation in the coalition or the contact group is only exacerbating the concern.
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John T. Seward is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.