EUROPEAN Union leaders are panicked by the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska.

Yet their “warnings” to Washington only emphasise how sidelined they are in a new era of great power rivalry.

Few regions of the world are so marked by economic decline as Europe: by World Bank figures the EU’s economy, 110 per cent the size of the US’s in 2008, was just 67 per cent by 2023. The EU’s dismal economic trajectory, entrenched by a single currency beyond democratic reach and fortified by a zombie neoliberalism that penalises public investment and strategic planning, is the underlying reason for diminished US respect.

Nor have Europe’s gutless leaders given President Trump any reason to heed them: lying down under unequal trade treaties, racing to comply with his demands for huge hikes in military spending. Why bother negotiating with such submissive vassals?

European leaders couch their objections in the language of law and justice. Borders cannot be changed by force; Russia cannot be rewarded for starting a war.

Reasonable points in themselves. They would carry more weight if the same countries had not participated in wars of aggression against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, in many (though not all) of their cases Iraq, and Libya; had not changed borders to create the Nato client state of Kosovo, or effectively done so through fragmenting Libya, Iraq and Syria into failed states.

This would be “whataboutery” if used to excuse Russia’s invasion. But the collapse of international law is the result of decades of “might is right” aggression from those who considered themselves above it: their indignation when powers beyond their privileged circle act as they do rings hollow.

The choice of Alaska for the summit symbolises the new, Trumpian era of transactional big-power deals.

Trump meets Putin on his own territory: no third party will be allowed a say. The Arctic is a region of intensifying US-Russia rivalry. And Alaska, purchased from Russia by the US in the 19th century, exemplifies that land can be bought and sold, territories and peoples bargained over, something Trump has proposed of Greenland and Canada and — far more bloodily — of Palestine.

Liberal conspiracy theorists who accuse Trump of being in Putin’s pocket are wrong. The US aggressively opposes Russian interests, slapping punitive sanctions on India merely for buying Russian oil. Trump has just hosted a deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan trumpeted as an assertion of US primacy in the Caucasus over long-standing regional powers Russia and Iran.

But he is open to bargains and indifferent to supposed US allies. A grand strategy is sometimes proposed, a “reverse Kissinger” project in which the US woos Russia to detach it from China. A long shot: Kissinger exploited a pre-existing rift between the two, which would now need to be created.

Neither the powers meeting in Alaska nor those lamenting their exclusion in Brussels are in any way progressive. Two things are clear.

One, the conceit that Western powers can dictate to the world, under the guise of policing an international rules-based order that does not apply to themselves, is outdated. But the unrealistic demands of European leaders for peace terms that amount to a Russian defeat, when there is no plausible route to that militarily, show they still do not recognise this. In an era of competing great powers, this is a recipe for world war: realism and compromise are necessary.

Two, self-determination and national sovereignty are illusory in the context of imperialism: the long tug of war over Ukraine, in which Western outrages like the Maidan coup must take their place alongside the Russian invasion, illustrate that.

Opposition to imperialism means fighting for the end of a system based on exploitation and war — and in Britain, among the most aggressive imperialist states, steeped in the blood of Palestinians and still seeking to prolong the fighting in Ukraine, the main enemy is at home.