Many critical issues were left uncertain — including the fate of Ukraine — at the end of Europe’s first encounter with an angry and impatient Trump administration. But one thing was clear: An epochal breach appears to be opening in the Western alliance.

After three years of war that forged a new unity within NATO, the Trump administration has made clear it is planning to focus its attention elsewhere: in Asia, Latin America, the Arctic and anywhere President Trump believes the United States can obtain critical mineral rights.

European officials who emerged from a meeting with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said they now expect that tens of thousands of American troops will be pulled out of Europe — the only question is how many, and how fast.

And they fear that in one-on-one negotiations with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Mr. Trump is on his way to agreeing to terms that could ultimately put Moscow in a position to own a fifth of Ukraine and to prepare to take the rest in a few years’ time. Mr. Putin’s ultimate goal, they believe, is to break up the NATO alliance.

Those fears spilled out on the stage of the Munich Security Conference on Saturday morning, when President Volodymyr Zelensky declared that “Ukraine will never accept deals made behind our backs.” He then called optimistically for the creation of an “army of Europe,” one that includes his now battle-hardened Ukrainian forces. He was advocating, in essence, a military alternative to NATO, a force that would make its own decisions without the influence — or the military control — of the United States.

Mr. Zelensky predicted that Mr. Putin would soon seek to manipulate Mr. Trump, speculating that the Russian leader would invite the new American president to the celebration of the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany. “Putin will try to get the U.S. president standing on Red Square on May 9 this year,” he told a jammed hall of European diplomats and defense and intelligence officials, “not as a respected leader but as a prop in his own performance.”

Behind closed doors, Mr. Zelensky had a different kind of confrontation with the Trump administration officials this past week: After meetings with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, he rejected an extraordinary proposal that the United States be granted a 50 percent interest in all of Ukraine’s mineral resources, including graphite, lithium and uranium, as compensation for past and future support of the war, according to two European officials.

Mr. Zelensky himself referred to the tense negotiation in Munich, after he met Mr. Vance, complaining that the administration’s proposal included no security guarantees for the country should Russia attempt another invasion. “We can consider how to distribute profits when security guarantees are clear,” he said.

The security guarantee is key because Ukrainians believe the United States and Britain failed to live up to obligations to protect the country under an agreement signed at the end of the Cold War, when Ukraine gave up the Russian nuclear weapons on its territory. But European diplomats complained that the negotiation reeked of colonialism, an era of exploitation when Western countries held up smaller nations for commodities, in return for protection.

Listening to the open debate at the Munich Security Conference over the past three days, and the more blunt conversations over dinners and in hallways, was to witness a relationship in crisis and confusion.

It was only last July that the NATO allies gathered in Washington for the 75th anniversary of the world’s largest and most successful military alliance. While officials knew that the re-election of Donald J. Trump would strain the system, they have been stunned by both the ferocity and the velocity of the effort.

“Compare the speeches that General Mattis and Mike Pence gave here in their first appearances in 2017,” said Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, referring to Mr. Trump’s first defense secretary and vice president. “They were full of reassurance and discussion of what allies can do together. Then listen to Pete Hegseth and JD Vance this week,” she said. “It feels that it’s their goal to create division.”

In fact, when Keith Kellogg, Mr. Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine, spoke in Munich on Saturday, he made clear that Europe would not be at the negotiating table. He envisioned a negotiation between Russia and Ukraine in which the United States plays “mediator.”

It is the uncertainty of how that negotiation will play out — and whether Europeans can count on the United States to come to their defense should Russia try to pick off a smaller NATO nation next — that is driving European anxiety. But it is also clear that the Trump administration has no clear plan for Ukraine, at least not yet.

“For those in search of Trump’s strategy on Ukraine: Relax,” said Douglas Lute, who served both Democratic and Republican presidents in senior national security positions. “There is no strategy.”

Still, President Emmanuel Macron of France has asked “the main European countries” to come to Paris on Monday to discuss the war in Ukraine and European security, Jean-Noël Barrot, the foreign minister, said on Sunday in an interview on France Inter radio.

The Élysée Palace said on Sunday in a statement that the meeting would be informal and involve the heads of government from Germany, Britain, Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands and Denmark. The presidents of the European Council and the European Commission, as well as the NATO chief, would also attend.

“Their work will continue in different formats, with the objective of bringing together partners interested in peace and security in Europe,” the statement said.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain is expected to go, saying on Saturday that this was a “once-in-a-generation moment for our national security” and that it was clear that Europe must take a greater role in NATO.

The Western alliance has gone through many crises before, including in the 1950s, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected with a promise to lower the price of waging the Cold War and pulled back on American troops in Europe, replacing them with nuclear weapons to keep the Soviet Union at bay. Some predict a similar move by Mr. Trump in coming months — sharply reducing manpower, but keeping an arsenal of nuclear weapons on the continent.

To many in Munich, the past few weeks have already alienated Europeans and destroyed much of the unity created over the past three years in providing arms, aid and intelligence to Ukraine.

It is hard to know how lasting the breach will be, but for some like Norbert Röttgen, a member of Germany’s Parliament for the Christian Democratic Union, the party expected to run the next government after elections next week, it is time for Europeans to recognize the world has changed.

“This is a new reality, a break with traditional European American policy that security in Europe is a genuine U.S. national interest,” he said. “But this administration does not consider it a primary U.S. interest, and this is a fundamental shift.”

He pointed in particular to Mr. Vance’s speech on Friday. There was no talk of common bonds, or a plan for Ukraine, or the goals of a peace negotiation. Instead, Mr. Vance delivered a blistering attack on European democracy for restricting the power of the far right. Mr. Vance then met with the leader of the far-right German political party that Elon Musk has backed and which is running second in the opinion polls.

“The spirit of the Vance speech was hostility,” Mr. Röttgen said.

The speed of the embrace of Mr. Putin also shocked those in Munich. In the Biden years, the strategy was to isolate the Russian leader. Mr. Trump broke with that approach when he engaged in a 90-minute phone call with Mr. Putin, without prior consultation with his allies.

Mr. Vance added to the suspicions. The parties he embraced during his visit here are the same far-right parties that Mr. Putin embraces, and that buy into his narrative of an aggressive NATO infringing on a broader Russian sphere of influence. Among those who embraced that view was Tulsi Gabbard, the new director of national intelligence.

Europeans are now afraid that they may find themselves as pawns in a negotiation conducted without their active participation, even if their own borders are in question and they are expected to take up the largest burden of defending them. That is reminiscent of a Europe and a world of a previous age, of regional empires and the rule of the strong with little concern for the rest.

Kaja Kallas, the E.U. foreign policy chief and former prime minister of Estonia, said in an interview that she remained worried about “appeasement” of Mr. Putin by Mr. Trump over Ukraine, which she defined as “giving the aggressor what he wants” even before negotiations begin. “That’s why we shouldn’t give Putin what he wants because that will only invite more aggression,” she said.

Trump officials had sent mixed signals, she said. “When we meet these people inside the rooms, we are discussing that we are great allies,” Ms. Kallas said. But then, “we see also the public statements, which are a bit confusing.”

Given the war in Europe, she said, the stakes are high. “It’s not only the question of the sovereignty of Ukraine, or the freedom of Europe,” she said. “It’s actually a question of trans-Atlantic but also global security.”

As for American troops, which were increased in Europe after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, she said that there were no detailed discussions about removing them, but that there was a clear trend that worried her. The United States is “turning inward,” she said.

Boris Pistorius, the defense minister of Germany, said troop withdrawals were discussed with Mr. Hegseth in Brussels. “We would have to compensate for what the Americans are doing less of in Europe,” Mr. Pistorius said. “But that can’t happen overnight.”

Mr. Pistorius said he had proposed a “road map” to Mr. Hegseth that included “a change in burden sharing, in such a way that it is orchestrated” and “no dangerous capability gaps arise over time.”

Other NATO defense and foreign ministers have said that personnel was less of a problem than the kind of arms and equipment only the United States has in Europe in large numbers, from attack helicopters to satellite intelligence. To replace all of that, even if ordered tomorrow, would take close to a decade, one minister said.

As for Ukraine, Ms. Kallas said, there was not yet a real plan from Washington, and no plan could be imposed by Washington because for any plan to function, “you need the Europeans and you need the Ukrainians.”

And if the Ukrainians do not accept a deal and decide to continue to resist, “then Europe will support them.”

António Costa, the president of the European Council, said in an interview that it was important “to keep calm” and “prepare for all scenarios, but not to react to each declaration, each tweet, each speech.”

More important, Mr. Costa said, was Europe’s lasting support for Ukraine. “There can be no lasting peace without Ukraine and without the European Union,” he said.

Europe must pay attention to the realities, not the rhetoric, he said. “We are prepared on tariffs, on security, on defense, on Ukraine,” he said.

Catherine Porter and Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting from Paris.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in Jerusalem on Sunday, where they discussed President Trump’s insistent proposals for the United States to seize the devastated Gaza Strip and force out its Palestinian residents, among other matters.

The trip is Mr. Rubio’s first to the region as secretary of state, and comes as uncertainty is rising over whether Israel and Hamas can or are willing to turn a tenuous cease-fire in Gaza into a permanent end to their war.

But Mr. Trump’s controversial vision for transforming Gaza into an American-owned “Riviera of the Middle East” has overshadowed those high-stakes negotiations, and Mr. Rubio is sure to be pressed for more clarity about the proposal during his visits in the coming days to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Mr. Trump has “been very bold about what the future for Gaza should be, not the same tired ideas of the past,” Mr. Rubio said in prepared remarks delivered alongside Mr. Netanyahu on Sunday after the two met privately. “It may have shocked and surprised many, but what cannot continue is the same cycle where we repeat over and over again and wind up in the exact same place.”

Mr. Rubio also talked about the need to watch for any security threats arising from the new government in Syria, and the imperative to disarm Hezbollah in Lebanon. And he asserted that Iran is the “common theme in all of these challenges,” using more aggressive language to describe that nation than Mr. Trump typically does in calling it “the single greatest source of instability in the region.”

“Behind every terrorist group, behind every act of violence, behind every destabilizing activity, behind everything that threatens peace and stability for the millions of people who call this region home, is Iran,” Mr. Rubio said.

Mr. Netanyahu said he had thanked Mr. Rubio for “America’s unequivocal backing for Israel’s policy in Gaza in moving forward.” However, Mr. Netanyahu’s government has yet to present a long-term strategy for Gaza to the Israeli or American public.

“I want to assure everyone who’s now listening to us, President Trump and I are working in full cooperation and coordination between us,” said Mr. Netanyahu, who met with the president in the White House on Feb. 4.

Mr. Trump surprised the world with his Gaza plan during a news conference that day with Mr. Netanyahu, who has since called it “a revolutionary, creative approach” that should be studied.

Mr. Netanyahu said on Sunday that he and Mr. Rubio had discussed Mr. Trump’s “bold vision for Gaza, for Gaza’s future — how we can work together to ensure that that future becomes a reality.”

Mr. Netanyahu said later Sunday that “it did not come as a surprise” when Mr. Trump presented his vision for Gaza to the world on Feb. 4 in Washington. “We knew about it, and we spoke about it beforehand,” the Israeli prime minister told his cabinet in videotaped remarks distributed by his office.

Some Israeli officials consider the idea impractical, and experts say it would be a severe violation of international law.

After Arab officials in the region immediately denounced the proposal, Mr. Rubio had suggested that Mr. Trump was merely trying to “get a reaction” and “stir” other nations into providing more assistance for postwar Gaza.

Since then, however, Mr. Trump has doubled down, telling reporters in the Oval Office on two other occasions and in a Fox News interview that he intends to move forward with the plan. On Friday, Mahmoud Abbas, who governs the West Bank as the president of the Palestinian Authority, said the Palestinian people “must remain” on their land.

The forced expulsion of Palestinians would be ethnic cleansing and a war crime, international law scholars say. More than 47,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli military retaliation in Gaza for a Hamas-led assault in October 2023 that killed 1,200 people. Most of the dead on both sides have been civilians.

Mr. Trump has said Jordan and Egypt should allow the Palestinian residents of Gaza to move to their countries. The idea has long been promoted by the Israeli right but flatly rejected by Arab and Palestinian leaders as well as past U.S. presidents of both parties. King Abdullah II of Jordan publicly rejected Mr. Trump’s proposal after a Wednesday meeting at the White House that Mr. Rubio also attended.

Mr. Rubio said in a radio interview on Thursday that any Arab proposal for a postwar Gaza should address the mammoth task of reconstructing the territory and deploying a multinational security force to fight remnants of Hamas.

But that would be possible only once the war in Gaza comes to an end — which is dependent on extending a cease-fire agreement that revolves around hostage and prisoner exchanges. The first phase of the current cease-fire agreement is set to end in March.

Neither Mr. Rubio nor Mr. Netanyahu made any reference in their public remarks on Sunday to the status of negotiations for the next phase of the deal. Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, said in an interview with Fox News on Sunday that talks on phase two of the cease-fire deal would take place this week.

Later Sunday, Mr. Netanyahu’s office said that the Israeli leader had spoken with Mr. Witkoff and informed him that he would convene Israel’s security cabinet on Monday to discuss the second phase of the agreement.

Indirect negotiations for a permanent cessation of hostilities and the release of all remaining living hostages from Hamas captivity were supposed to have begun two weeks ago and were meant to be finalized by the end of the coming week. Mr. Netanyahu’s spokesman has denied that any such talks are underway.

Israel and Hamas have both asserted that the other party has violated the terms of the cease-fire. On Sunday, Hamas accused Israel of violating and showing a lack of commitment to the cease-fire deal by preventing the entry of trailers into Gaza to house displaced Palestinians and delaying talks for the next phase of the agreement.

Israeli officials acknowledged holding up the entry of housing trailer into Gaza, saying over the weekend that the issue would be discussed in the coming days, without elaborating on reasons for the delay.

Mr. Trump, meanwhile, appears to have given Mr. Netanyahu some leeway for changing the terms of the deal or for resuming fighting in Gaza, should he choose to do so, saying in a social media post on Saturday that the United States would back any decision made by the Israeli government.

Both Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Rubio spoke on Sunday of the need to eliminate Hamas’s military and governing capabilities. Israel’s Ministry of Defense announced that a shipment of 2000-pound bombs, which had been held up by the Biden administration, had arrived in Israel overnight. U.S. military officials have said that such bombs are unsuitable for urban combat, though the Israeli military has dropped them in Gaza.

Mr. Rubio’s arrival in Israel on Saturday night came hours after Hamas released three Israeli hostages, including a dual American citizen, in exchange for 369 Palestinian prisoners. On Sunday, Mr. Rubio released a written statement saying that Hamas “still holds 73 hostages including New Jersey native Edan Alexander and the remains of four Americans murdered in Gaza. They must ALL come home NOW.”

The Israeli and American governments had been pressuring Hamas for days to release the hostages in hopes of sustaining the cease-fire first reached in mid-January with the prodding of Biden and Trump aides. Mr. Trump warned last Monday that Israel could cancel the agreement and that “all hell is going to break out” if Hamas did not release all hostages by Saturday.

Mr. Rubio is on his second trip as secretary of state. He landed in Israel after a stop at the Munich Security Conference, and was expected to fly to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Mr. Rubio had planned to stop in Qatar earlier, but that was not on the announced schedule.

In Saudi Arabia, Mr. Rubio and two other top Trump aides plan to meet with Russian officials to discuss ending Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Michael Crowley contributed reporting from Washington, and Patrick Kingsley contributed reporting from Jerusalem.

While American officials prepared on Sunday for the start of talks with Russia over ending the war in Ukraine, European leaders were rushing to formulate a response to President Trump’s push for a settlement that appeared to leave them and Kyiv with no clear role in the process.

The Russian ambassador to Saudi Arabia, where the talks are set to take place this week, met Sunday with the kingdom’s foreign minister. Two senior Trump administration officials — the national security adviser, Mike Waltz, and the Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff — will fly to Saudi Arabia to join Secretary of State Marco Rubio for the negotiations, Mr. Witkoff said Sunday in an interview with Fox News.

The final preparations follow a flurry of diplomatic discussions over the past several days that included a conversation between Mr. Rubio and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov.

On Sunday, Mr. Rubio said in an interview from Jerusalem with CBS News that if an opportunity presented itself “for a broader conversation that would involve Ukraine, that would involve the end of the war, that would involve our allies all over the world, particularly in Europe, we’re going to explore it if that opportunity presents itself.”

The meeting with Russia, while preliminary, would signal the start of Mr. Trump’s accelerated timetable for a deal and his seeming determination to conduct negotiations with Russia alone, at least for now.

Ukraine will not take part, Andriy Yermak, the head of the President Volodymyr Zelensky’s presidential office, confirmed Sunday in a post on the Telegram social networking site. He said that Ukraine would prefer to reach a common plan for negotiations with the Trump administration before meeting with a Russian delegation.

“There have been no meetings, nor are any planned,” Mr. Yermak wrote. “The president made it clear that any agreement reached without Ukraine’s involvement will not be accepted. Security guarantees must include the United States. We will never make decisions that go against Ukraine’s interests.”

In an initiative initially encouraged by Ukraine, the Trump administration is in talks to secure a portion of the profits from Ukraine’s natural resources in exchange for security aid. But when the administration proposal arrived, Mr. Zelensky declined the terms, under which the United States would receive half of the profits.

Mr. Zelensky said he declined, in part, because it offered no assurances of U.S. support in the war in exchange. It has not been clear whether the U.S. demand is tied to future aid or seen as compensation for assistance already provided.

Mr. Zelensky’s rejection of the proposal prompted a rebuke from Mr. Waltz, the national security adviser. Mr. Zelensky, he said in an interview on Fox New Sunday, would be “very wise” to accept the deal, adding, “The American people deserve to be recouped, deserve to have some kind of payback for the billions they have invested in this war.”

The leaders of France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands and Denmark, and the top officials of the European Union and NATO, will convene an emergency meeting in Paris on Monday to discuss the war in Ukraine and European security, French officials said Sunday. The aim is to coordinate a response to the Trump administration’s opening of talks with Russia without European participation.

That follows a meeting Sunday of foreign ministers from the European Union, which as a bloc has provided more military support for Ukraine than has the United States.

In the Fox News interview, Mr. Waltz denied that the Europeans were being excluded from the negotiations. “They may not like some of the sequencing that is going on in some of these negotiations,” he said. “I have to push back on any notion that they aren’t being consulted. They absolutely are.”

Mr. Waltz added that the U.S. negotiators “will bring everyone together when appropriate,” while specifying that the Europeans will be expected to “provide long-term military guarantees.”

Mr. Zelensky said he would be in Saudi Arabia this week but did not specify when. He has made clear he does not want to enter negotiations before determining what security guarantees Western nations are willing to offer to ensure any cease-fire is not violated. As of Saturday, he said he had no such assurances from the United States.

In an interview with NBC on Sunday he reiterated that he would “never” accept a peace negotiation settled between Russia and the United States without Ukraine.

Asked if he feels he has a seat at the table right now, Mr. Zelensky did not answer directly. He said he counted on one. He said he told Mr. Trump that Putin “is a liar” who “doesn’t want any peace.”

In Moscow, a spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry did not respond to a request for comment. But Russian state television on Sunday released an interview with Dmitri S. Peskov, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, who reasserted Russia’s newfound optimism about negotiating with the United States after years of diplomatic isolation by the Biden administration.

“We’re now going to be talking about peace, not about war,” Mr. Peskov said. “Based on President Trump’s statements, we’re solving problems through dialogue.”

Russia and Ukraine have not met for direct talks in nearly three years. Direct Russian and Ukrainian talks, mediated first by Belarus and then Turkey, began at the outset of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 but unraveled six weeks later. They became untenable after Russia suffered battlefield defeats and after human rights abuses by the Russian Army came to light in the town of Bucha, where about 400 bodies were found on city streets, in mass graves and in backyards.

Russia subsequently lost about half of the territory gained in the invasion, but for a year it has been advancing in a bloody, slow-motion offensive in the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine that has moved the front line about 30 miles. Ukraine has a pocket of Russian territory it captured six months ago in the Kursk region to use as leverage going into the talks.

For now, though, Ukrainians — who have endured hundreds of thousands of casualties in the fighting and missile attacks, electrical blackouts and displacement for civilians to fight Russia to a near stalemate — were left with the unwelcome prospect of negotiations on their future without their voice.

“I find this completely incomprehensible, and of course, it outrages me,” Vladyslava Bilova, 19, a student in Kyiv, said of Ukraine’s exclusion from the opening of talks. “It’s strange to decide the fate of a country when it is not even participating in the process.”

Viktor Reuta, 49, a soldier, said Ukrainians would not accept a settlement forced on them. “They can try to impose whatever they want,” he said. “We are already at war, and we have realized that we can speak for ourselves.”

The exclusion of Ukraine from the start of talks is “very unsettling and even terrifying,” said Vita Voinovska, 40, a pharmacist. She added, “It feels like three people are standing together, and two are talking to each other while the third — the one actually facing the problem — is standing there as if they don’t exist.”

Edward Wong contributed reporting from Washington, Oleksandra Mykolyshyn from Kyiv and Anton Troianovski from Berlin.

On Thursday morning, an Afghan refugee deliberately plowed a car into a crowd in Munich, motivated by what the police called an “Islamist orientation.” A 2-year-old girl and her mother were killed, and nearly 40 others were injured.

A day later — in a country where migration has been a major election issue — that attack was no longer the biggest news story in town.

German news media, and much of the country’s political leadership, immersed themselves to a larger degree in a blizzard of foreign-policy pronouncements from the Trump administration as Western leaders gathered at the Munich Security Conference.

The annual gathering, which ended on Sunday, left many Germans who attended fuming that the Trump team was trying to influence the vote in coming parliamentary elections by publicly lecturing German politicians about blocking a far-right party from government.

German leaders left Munich profoundly worried about the country’s relationship with the United States as the Trump administration appeared to be icing Europe out of substantive discussions on a peace plan for Ukraine, at least for now.

The onslaught of news from the conference vaulted Mr. Trump and his policies squarely into the center of Germany’s final week of campaigning, diverting some of the attention from issues like the string of deadly attacks carried out by immigrants and refugees across the country over the last year.

The main article on the front page of Munich’s largest newspaper, Süddeutsche Zeitung, on Saturday featured a picture of Vice President JD Vance delivering a speech criticizing Europeans that stunned attendees at the conference. “Undiplomatic Announcement,” read the headline.

In the speech, Mr. Vance urged German leaders to allow the hard-right Alternative for Germany to enter the federal government, without mentioning any of the reasons mainstream parties have shunned governing with it, including that some of its members have been convicted of using Nazi slogans.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung front page also included a picture from the attack site, but the accompanying article ran inside the paper. Other German news outlets were filled with stories on the fallout from Mr. Vance’s appearance and other Trump administration moves in Munich.

The coverage signaled a clear shift: Until this weekend, the American president was a preoccupation of many Germans. But he hadn’t really been an issue in the race for chancellor.

He is now.

It is unclear what party, if any, might benefit from the new focus on Mr. Trump. His administration’s actions gave platforms to several leading parties. Those include Alternative for Germany, known as the AfD, which received what German media called a “campaign gift” from Mr. Vance in his Friday speech.

But they also include the incumbent Social Democrats and Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who sit a distant third or fourth in the polls but suddenly had an opportunity to project diplomacy on a global and local stage. The same was true for the poll-leading Christian Democrats and their chancellor candidate, Friedrich Merz.

Both Mr. Merz and Mr. Scholz spent their time at the Munich conference publicly telling Mr. Trump and his team to stay out of German politics.

“There is an elephant in the room here, and the elephant is the trans-Atlantic relationship,” Mr. Merz said on Saturday in response to a Munich panel moderator’s question about plans for peace in Ukraine.

Germans respect America’s elections, he said, “and we expect the U.S. to do the same here.”

The reaction was so strong because of Germany’s “deep historical experiences with fascism,” said Steven E. Sokol, president of the American Council on Germany, who attended the conference. “Vance was a shock to the system,” he said.

But Mr. Sokol cautioned that “it remains to be seen if the speech has an impact on the results of the upcoming election.”

The German campaign has been relatively short, particularly by American standards. The early elections were called after the last governing coalition splintered in November. After a slow holiday start, the contest really roared to life only in January.

Until this weekend, candidates focused largely on migration and on Germany’s stagnant economy. The leading contenders for chancellor, including Mr. Merz and Mr. Scholz, have mostly sparred over government spending and borrowing, energy policy and how best to overhaul migration laws to manage the millions of asylum seekers who have entered Germany over the past decade.

The first big shake-up in the race came last month, when an Afghan immigrant who was scheduled to be deported — and who the police said suffered from mental illness — used a knife to kill a toddler in a Bavarian park and a bystander who tried to intervene. The killings came not long after a Saudi immigrant who was working as a doctor in Germany killed six people at a Christas market in Magdeburg by ramming his car into a crowd, and after other knife attacks last year.

Mr. Merz, breaking a decades-old taboo, quickly pushed a set of migration bills to a vote in Parliament, knowing they could pass only with votes from the AfD. Protests ensued across Germany against giving the AfD such an opening, but Mr. Merz emerged unscathed in polls.

Even before the shift in attention to Mr. Trump, the political race had stayed remarkably static. There is, however, potential for a dramatic swing in the final days. A third of Germans have told pollsters they could change their minds before Election Day — either switching parties or choosing not to vote at all.

The AfD sits in second place in polls with just over 20 percent support, well behind the Christian Democrats. It gained a few points of support in December, a trend that started before the Christmas market attack, but has largely flatlined in the new year. Recent polls showed it roughly back to the vote share it had a year ago, notwithstanding the high-profile endorsement it recently got from Elon Musk, Mr. Trump’s billionaire adviser.

It will take a few days for polls to take the first measure of effects from the latest attack in Munich and the outcry at the Munich conference.

Still, it was clear that the Trump news at the conference had spilled immediately into German politics. Top German political figures rewrote their speeches or panel remarks to include pointed rebuttal to Mr. Vance and Mr. Trump. The AfD’s candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel, was alone in celebrating Mr. Vance’s remarks and the Trump administration.

Before diving into his plans for expanded government borrowing and military spending, Mr. Scholz rebuked Mr. Vance for telling Europeans “there is no room for firewalls” in their politics, a reference to mainstream parties shunning the AfD. “We will not accept outsiders intervening in our democracy,” the chancellor said.

He added, “That is not appropriate, especially not among friends and allies.”

The candidate currently leading the race, Mr. Merz, used his panel appearance on Saturday to defend German restrictions on hate speech in pushing back against Mr. Vance, who said it was time for Europeans to stop policing speech. He also went out of his way to ding Mr. Trump’s trade policies, including threats of new tariffs on Europe.

Mr. Merz tried to cast himself as a potential future counterweight to Mr. Trump in Europe, a message that seemed to be aimed as much at German voters as it was to the diplomats at the conference.

“I fully agree with all those who are demanding more leadership from Germany,” Mr. Merz said. “And I am willing to do that.”

Steven Erlanger contributed reporting.

A Syrian asylum seeker who the Austrian authorities said killed a teenager and wounded five other people in a knife attack in Villach, Austria, was inspired by the Islamic State militant group, officials said on Sunday.

The man, who was detained after the attack on Saturday, had become radicalized online, said Austria’s interior minister, Gerhard Karner. The police said they believed that the victims were chosen at random.

The suspect is 23 years old, came to Austria from Syria in 2020 and was later given asylum, according to the interior ministry.

The attack comes days after an Afghan citizen, who came to Germany as a child refugee, drove a car into a crowd of people at a union march in Munich, 150 miles from Villach, killing two people and wounding nearly 40.

In July, the singer Taylor Swift was forced to cancel three concerts in Vienna, Austria’s capital, after the authorities learned of a plan to attack the venue by two teenagers who had become radicalized Islamists online. Neither was a refugee.

Austria’s far-right Freedom Party has profited from fears of foreigners, especially young male asylum seekers. Campaigning on a slogan of “Fortress Austria,” the party came in first in elections last year, with 29 percent of the vote. Last week it gave up its quest to form a governing coalition in Austria’s current Parliament, but its popularity continues to rise, according to polls.

The attack in Villach, a quaint city in the south near the Italian and Slovenian borders, happened around 4 p.m. on Saturday on the city’s old town square, where a man started stabbing random people with a folding knife, the police in Villach said.

In the seven minutes between when the police got the first call and the time he was apprehended, the man killed a 14-year-old and wounded five other people, they said.

The attack was eventually stopped by a 42-year-old Syrian citizen who saw the violence unfolding, according to the authorities.

“A witness saw the event and decided to intervene — he rammed the perpetrator with his car and thus probably prevented worse things from happening,” said Michaela Kohlweiss, the state police director who is in charge of the investigation.

Two officers were able to restrain and then arrest the suspect immediately afterward.

On Thursday, the police briefly believed that there was a second assailant involved and brought in extra forces, the Austrian equivalent of S.W.A.T. teams and two helicopters. But the authorities now believe the suspect acted alone.

The police said on Sunday the suspect did not have a police record and had not been monitored by domestic intelligence.

When officers searched his apartment, however, they found clear evidence of “Islamist thought” and Islamic State flags hanging on the walls, they said, but no weapons or explosives.

The police said that they were still investigating the suspect’s background and motivation, and that it appeared he had become radicalized online in a very short period.

Peter Kaiser, Carinthia’s center-left governor, called for the “harshest consequences” for the attacker, saying on social media that the perpetrator “must be put on trial, imprisoned, and deported.” Herbert Kickl, the firebrand leader of the Freedom Party, called the attack a “system failure of the first order.”

The city’s mayor, Günther Albel, wrote on social media: “To all those who sow hatred and violence, I say: You will not win.”

Millions of Syrians sought refuge in Europe, including in Austria, after a popular uprising against the nation’s autocratic longtime leader, Bashar al-Assad, that began in 2011 and turned into a civil war. The large number of arrivals has strained social safety nets in Europe and stirred concern about assimilation, which has at times taken an openly xenophobic form and provided an opening for right-wing, nationalist political movements.

The collapse of the Assad regime in December prompted several European countries to pause legal proceedings on asylum status for Syrians. Austria has said it plans to deport Syrians whose claims for asylum fail.

Violence is relatively uncommon in Austria, which was ranked as the fifth-safest country in the world as of 2023, according to the Global Peace Index.

Rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo on Sunday entered the vital trading hub of Bukavu in the east of the country, according to the fighters and videos circulated by local residents. If confirmed, Bukavu would be the latest city to fall in a sweeping offensive that has revealed the weakness of the crumbling Congolese Army.

The M23 rebels — who are supported and directed by Rwanda, Congo’s much smaller neighbor — appeared to meet no resistance, residents said, as they marched into Bukavu, a provincial capital that is a major center for gold trading and smuggling.

“We’re there, we’re there in Bukavu,” said Willy Ngoma, a M23 spokesman reached by telephone.

On Sunday, the rebels addressed a crowd of people in Bukavu’s main square after they entered the city in long, silent columns, according to three witnesses and videos shared on social media and verified by The Times. The witnesses requested anonymity for fear of retribution from the armed group.

Days earlier, Congolese soldiers had fled the city in similar columns, according to a dozen other residents, leaving Bukavu under no clear leadership and in the hands of looters who broke into warehouses and shops. The Congolese government has not spoken publicly about the situation in the city on Sunday, and the capture of Bukavu has not been independently confirmed.

The apparent fall of Bukavu would stand in sharp contrast to the protracted battle for the key city of Goma last month, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed, according to the United Nations.

With the capture of Bukavu, a city of more than a million people that sits on the edge of a crystalline lake, the M23 rebels would now control the two largest trading hubs in Congo’s mineral-rich east.

Experts say Bukavu’s capture threatens to draw more neighboring countries into the conflict. The city sits 20 miles from the border with Burundi, whose troops have been fighting alongside the Congolese Army.

“It will increase the risk of regional war, especially with Burundi,” Fred Bauma, the executive director of Ebuteli, a research group specializing on Congo, said about Bukavu’s fall.

Now, M23 is also more directly connected to its powerful backer, Rwanda. Bukavu and Goma, on the southern and northern edges of the sprawling Lake Kivu, both sit on the border with Rwanda, whose exports of minerals smuggled out of Congo have spiked in recent years, according to U.N. experts.

President Paul Kagame of Rwanda has acknowledged that Rwandan soldiers are present in eastern Congo but has denied backing M23.

The leaders of M23 have now vowed to march on Kinshasa, Congo’s capital and one of Africa’s largest cities. The Congolese government has refused to sit down with M23 leaders or Rwanda, and its military response on the ground has been limited.

M23 is the most powerful of the dozens of armed groups that have destabilized eastern Congo over nearly three decades. Since capturing Goma, the rebels have vowed to restore order and security — attempting to present the group as an administrative power qualified enough to govern large parts of one of Africa’s richest mining regions.

“It is important that we can work hand in hand for our country’s development,” Bernard Byamungu, a high-ranking M23 official, told Bukavu’s residents on Sunday, according to a video verified by The Times. “No development without work, but let’s not forget that peace remains fundamental for a stable nation.”

Mr. Byamungu then ordered residents to go back home so M23 could finish securing the city.

The group’s calls for peace have been at odds with M23’s bloody tactics on the ground. M23 has repeatedly violated cease-fires, including some that it had unilaterally declared. Mr. Byamungu, according to the United Nations, planned and directed the killings of civilians and the extrajudicial executions of soldiers.

Unlike Goma, the apparent capture of Bukavu was hardly a surprise: Schools there closed earlier this month and countless people fled in recent weeks in anticipation of the M23 offensive.

The M23 rebels entered Bukavu on Sunday days after they said they had captured a nearby airport that the Congolese Army had used as a key rear base to try to contain the group’s advance in the province of South Kivu.

The latest M23 offensive, which began in early January, has further destabilized eastern Congo, a mineral-rich region scarred by nearly three decades of conflict over access to land and gold, tin and cobalt, among other minerals.

More than 500,000 people were displaced last month, according to the United Nations. The number of rapes against children carried out by armed groups, already rampant in the region, has soared in recent weeks, according to UNICEF.

Ruth Maclean contributed reporting from Dakar.

No international body is searching for hundreds of Yazidi women and girls still held captive by the Islamist terrorists. Instead, their fates depend on a ragtag army of activists, relatives and armchair detectives.

Feb. 16, 2025

The investigator’s eyes dart between the two photographs. In one, a young girl, maybe 10, is wearing a colorful shirt, her hair loose. In the other, a woman, her face weathered to an indeterminate age and framed by a black hijab, stares into the camera.

The first picture is among hundreds of images of young girls sent in by families desperate to find loved ones who were kidnapped years ago, when militants from the Islamic State first roared to power in Iraq and Syria. The pictures of older women come in from a variety of sources.

The woman examining the photographs has become skilled at finding the telling detail that might help confirm an identity — and lead to someone’s freedom. But she is not a professional investigator. Her name is Pari Ibrahim, and by day she is the executive director of a nonprofit in suburban Maryland.

At night, by the glow of a laptop screen, she scours the photos, hoping to locate women taken captive as long as a decade ago.

“Sometimes, late at night, I’m working to see if this girl is someone who can be identified,” said Ms. Ibrahim as she compared the two photographs, searching the faces for any hint — the bow of the lips, perhaps, or a telltale mole — that she might be looking at the same person.

“Ten years brings a lot of change into someone’s face and appearance,” she said. “It’s not easy.”

The missing people are all members of a religious minority, the Yazidi, who were a particular focus of the brutal campaign of terror that ISIS, also known as the Islamic State, launched in 2014. In the years that followed, according to a United Nations commission, the militants murdered, enslaved, raped and tortured at will. Some 3,100 Yazidis were killed and 6,800 kidnapped in August 2014 alone, one study estimates.

The Rescuers

Now, more than half a decade since the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate in Syria and Iraq fell, nearly 2,600 Yazidis remain unaccounted for, according to Ms. Ibrahim’s nonprofit, the Free Yezidi Foundation; in 2022, the United Nations Refugee Agency put the number around 3,000. The foundation, which uses an alternative spelling for the ethnoreligious group, provides support services to members of the Yazidi diaspora.

Many are presumed dead, but Ms. Ibrahim is hopeful that as many as 1,000 are still in captivity, held by their kidnappers or transferred to fighters’ extended families throughout the Middle East.

Although the United Nations has called treatment of the Yazidis genocide, the U.N. agency mandated to collect evidence of ISIS atrocities ceased operating last year. There is no official entity dedicated to finding the women — and their children.

That task has been taken up by a sprawling network of activists, survivors, family members, informants and amateur detectives like Ms. Ibrahim, a Yazidi whose family left Iraq in the early 1990s. The New York Times interviewed people based in Maryland, Germany, Australia, Iraq and Syria.

They described a modern-day Underground Railroad, on which journeys often begin with snippets of information and photographs shared via messaging apps. Sometimes that information is conveyed to families of the missing, some of whom hire informants and human smugglers to reunite them with their loved ones. Other times it is shared with the local authorities.

One member of the unofficial network, Abduallah Abbas Khalaf, helped free his niece from the Islamic State in 2014 using connections he made working as a beekeeper and honey vendor in Aleppo, Syria. Mr. Khalaf, who is Yazidi and is based in Iraq, says he went on to help free other captives through a variety of methods, including impersonating militants online.

“We used to log into ISIS telegram channels, and we used to pretend that we were ISIS members,” he said. To appear more convincing, he said, he would sometimes inquire about weapons and equipment.

“They would welcome us,” Mr. Khalaf said, “and after a period of time, they would post pictures of girls or boys for selling.” As he pretended to be negotiating the price, he said, he would really be trying to coax out the whereabouts of the captives.

Mr. Khalaf shared screenshots from what appeared to be ISIS messaging channels on which women and children were being trafficked. The images showed forum users haggling over sex slaves. The Times was not able to independently verify the source of the images because many of the channels have since been made private or deleted.

At the height of the Islamic State’s reign in the portions of Syria and Iraq that it conquered, the enslavement and sale of women were conducted openly. Later, that became more discreet, experts said. Women and girls have been bought and sold online, and then transferred across national borders quietly, making the work of those who would rescue them all the more difficult.

“While the public Yazidi slave markets of the Islamic State caliphate period no longer exist,” said Devorah Margolin, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, “some women remain enslaved by Islamic State affiliates and continued to be sold by supporters of the group even after the fall of its caliphate.”

According to investigators, experts and news reports, captives have been found in homes connected to ISIS members as far away as Turkey and the Gaza Strip. Other Yazidis have ended up alongside their captors in overcrowded and dangerous desert camps.

About 3,600 Yazidis have managed to get back to their families, according to Nadia’s Initiative, another nonprofit group that works with the Yazidi.

One of them, Sherine Hakrash, said she had been held captive in Syria with her two daughters until she was sold to a Saudi man. Speaking haltingly and at times in tears by telephone from her new home in Australia, Ms. Hakrash said it was too painful to talk about what the girls looked like when she last saw them, in 2018.

“I don’t know anything about them,” she said. “If they are alive. If they need me. How their situation is.”

The upheavals in the Middle East over the past year and a half have further complicated efforts to locate and rescue missing people. In Iraq, for example, the government recently directed a team of international experts investigating ISIS crimes to wind down their work.

In Syria, the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad has led both to hope and fear among Yazidis. They want to take the opportunity to search for the missing but worry that instability may pave the way for an ISIS resurgence.

The Detention Camp

As their caliphate fell in 2019, ISIS fighters fled across the region, some taking their captives with them. In many cases women were forced to marry their kidnappers, integrating them into expansive clans that could then traffic them around the world.

In December in Germany, federal prosecutors accused two people they said were Iraqi members of ISIS of sexually abusing two young Yazidi girls they kept as slaves. The girls had been held captive by the couple when they were 5 and 12. In Gaza, a woman kidnapped by ISIS at age 11 and, American officials say, later sold and forced to marry a Hamas fighter, was rescued in October after her captor died.

Captivity for some Yazidis grew still worse after their captors were themselves detained.

Some ended up in Al Hol, a sprawling nightmare of a detention camp in the desert of eastern Syria. Captive Yazidi women there are forced to live alongside ISIS members and their families. The camp, in which thousands of people are held, is dangerous — murders are common and there have been reports of beheadings.

For the network of rescuers, Al Hol presents a special challenge. Captives there are reluctant to identify themselves as Yazidis for fear that the ISIS members in their midst, some of whom have organized themselves into a religious police force, will target them. Others may have been taken captive when they were too young to know their heritage.

“The way they were enslaved outside Al Hol camp, they are enslaved inside — the torture, everything,” said the camp’s director, Jihan Hanan, who has worked with Yazidi investigators to help extricate captives in the camp.

One member of the informal rescue network, Barjas Khidhir Sabri, is a Yazidi from Sinjar Province in Iraq who currently lives in an Iraqi camp for internally displaced people. It is about 100 miles from Al Hol.

From his tent, using little more than his wits and a smartphone, Mr. Sabri has developed his own web of informants, who include men he says are ISIS members living at Al Hol.

“I don’t trust them and they don’t trust me,” Mr. Sabri said of the ISIS members. “I have to work with them. I have no regrets because any possible way we can save women and girls, it is worthwhile.”

Ms. Ibrahim said the Free Yezidi Foundation did not deal with ISIS members under any circumstances. But for many families, desperation overshadows the disgust of dealing with — and even paying — those who belong to the terrorist group, Mr. Sabri said.

When a woman in the camp is identified as a possible Yazidi captive, Ms. Hanan works with security guards to arrange a discreet interview.

Ms. Hanan said she had seen seven Yazidi girls and women liberated from Al Hol in at least the past two years.

But it is not always simple.

Some Yazidi women who have given birth to their captors’ babies fear their children may not be accepted by the Yazidi community. Some who have been raped fear returning home only to be shunned. Still others who were captured as young children know nothing but their captors’ families and may not even realize that they are Yazidi.

“We have to make sure the woman is able to make a choice in a safe space,” said Ms. Ibrahim, the nonprofit director.

Marwa Nawaf Abas, embraced the opportunity for freedom.

“I was held captive as a sex slave for three months of torture and sold on to several ISIS terrorists,” Ms. Abas, who was 21 when she was rescued, said in an interview.

After escaping from her captors in Raqqa, Syria, in 2014, Ms. Abas was offered temporary protection by a local family. She contacted her uncle, and her family paid smugglers to take her from the ISIS-controlled area to a Kurdish-controlled one.

Ms. Abas moved to Germany, and works at a hair transplant center.

“I am very happy now in Germany,” she said.

Falih Hassan contributed reporting from Baghdad.

Western allies of the United States gathered in Munich this past week, anxious, adrift and despairing in the face of President Trump’s brute display of muscle-flexing on the global stage. But it was people not at the table at the Munich Security Conference who have become most marginalized in Mr. Trump’s world.

Palestinians and Afghans, Greenlanders and Panamanians — these are the true pawns in the president’s geopolitical chess game. Their priorities, preferences and aspirations seem almost beside the point in Mr. Trump’s ambition to redraw the map of the world along “America First” lines.

Even Ukrainians now appear at risk of a peace settlement being negotiated over their heads, as Mr. Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia embark on talks to end a war that has left tens of thousands of Ukrainians dead, much of the country in ruins, and nearly a fifth of its territory in Russian hands.

“Strong-arming has been part of American foreign policy throughout our history,” said Charles A. Kupchan, a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University. “But there was usually an effort to legitimize American power through some form of dialogue. That’s absent from Trump’s foreign policy.”

In his propensity to make deals that take little heed of those most directly affected by them, Mr. Trump’s foreign policy echoes that of a bygone era, when imperial powers waged a great game for influence, with scarcely a pretense that their conquests were rooted in the desires of local populations.

Mr. Trump’s expansionist instincts have been likened to those of William McKinley, the 25th American president, whose victory in the Spanish-American War of 1898 brought the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico under the control of an up-and-coming United States. He annexed Hawaii, as well.

But Mr. Trump is also in the tradition of Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, the British and French diplomats who conducted the secret negotiations that carved up the Levantine remnants of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. The Sykes-Picot Agreement drew the borders of the modern Middle East, with little regard for the ethnic and religious communities that their lines crossed.

Historians trace the resentments that erupted into conflict in the Middle East to the arbitrary nature of Europe’s partitioning of the region. Some question whether Mr. Trump’s cavalier approach to the interests of the Palestinians or Panamanians could stoke new tensions and ignite future conflicts.

“As Oct. 7 showed, you ignore locals at your peril,” said Richard N. Haass, a former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, referring to the deadly attack on Israel by Hamas fighters from Gaza. That triggered the war that Mr. Trump proposes to end by dispersing Gaza’s 2.1 million Palestinians to Jordan and Egypt, and then taking over the enclave to redevelop it as an Arab Riviera.

“Ultimately, what happens in Ukraine or Gaza or Panama will be heavily influenced by the people who live in those places,” Mr. Haass continued. “The ability of the U.S., Russia or China to control these things is not automatic.”

Mr. Haass said it was too soon to conclude that Mr. Trump intended to cut the Ukrainians out of a negotiation with Russia. The president himself insisted Ukraine would be part of the process, as would other countries. He called President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine after speaking to Mr. Putin.

But Mr. Trump’s announcement of “immediate” peace negotiations with Russia — blindsiding Mr. Zelensky as well as European leaders — bore the hallmarks of a blitzkrieg approach to geopolitics in the early days of his second term. His proposal to empty Gaza appeared to catch off guard even Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who was visiting him in Washington.

Analysts said Mr. Trump’s lightning speed was designed to knock potential critics of his deals off-balance and short-circuit the kind of lobbying or scrutiny that could delay or dilute them. Some said Mr. Trump learned from his first term, when his secretary of state at the time, Mike Pompeo, oversaw a more traditional negotiation with the leaders of the Taliban to end the war in Afghanistan.

While the Trump administration left Afghanistan’s pro-Western government and America’s NATO allies out of the process, the prolonged, public nature of the talks brought demonstrators, including women’s groups, into the streets of Doha, the capital of Qatar, where the two sides were meeting.

Critics say the 2020 deal opened the door to the Taliban’s calamitous takeover of Afghanistan 17 months later, though allies of Mr. Trump blame that on what they say was President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s botched withdrawal of American troops.

“Trump learned that the establishment and the media can put enormous pressure on a deal,” said Vali R. Nasr, a professor of international affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “His approach now is to present the world with a fait accompli, with no room to influence things.”

“Deals that are this opaque and that are done this quickly are more vulnerable to grave errors because they are not subject to scrutiny,” said Mr. Nasr, who worked on Afghan policy during the Obama administration.

Mr. Trump is not the only president to try to make deals privately. President Barack Obama famously negotiated a rapprochement with Cuba — later reversed by Mr. Trump — under a veil of secrecy. Mr. Obama authorized American diplomats to open a secret back channel to Iranian officials, which cleared the way for a nuclear agreement that Mr. Trump also later abrogated.

Mr. Trump often appears more comfortable dealing with adversaries than allies. That could open the door, Mr. Haass said, to a new round of diplomacy with Iran. Mr. Haass, who has long argued that the United States needed to redefine its objectives on Ukraine, said there was also potential for Mr. Trump to make progress with Mr. Putin in winding down the war.

The trouble is likely to come in Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure allies. Neither King Abdullah II of Jordan nor President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt has yielded to his proposal that they take Palestinian refugees from Gaza. Panama has rejected his demand that the United States seize the Panama Canal.

Denmark has rebuffed Mr. Trump’s proposal to acquire Greenland, its semiautonomous territory. So has Greenland itself, though the prime minister, Múte Egede, said it would be open to working with the United States on defense and natural resources. In this, Mr. Egede might have a clearer insight into Mr. Trump’s motives than many leaders.

The president’s foreign policy, analysts said, is so rooted in commercial calculations that local people barely enter the equation. Greenland lies along valuable Arctic shipping lanes and, like Ukraine, has rich mineral deposits. Panama has its canal. Gaza has a scenic Mediterranean coastline.

“What’s different about Trump is that it’s 100 percent materialist,” said Professor Kupchan, who worked on European affairs in the Obama administration. “There’s not an iota of ideology in any of this.”

When McKinley started the Spanish-American War, Professor Kupchan said, he did so ostensibly to liberate the Cubans from Spanish colonial rule. Even the conquest of the Philippines, he said, was done under the cloak of a “civilizing mission.”

“This is devoid of any civilizing mission,” he said. “This kind of bald transactional approach, unadorned by any ideology, is new.”

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia shocked the audience at the annual security conference in Munich in 2007 by demanding the rollback of domineering American influence and a new balance of power in Europe more suitable to Moscow.

He didn’t get what he wanted — then.

Nearly two decades later, during the very same conference, top officials from President Trump’s cabinet made one thing clear: Mr. Putin has found an American administration that might help him realize his dream.

Comments by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Vice President JD Vance raised fears among attendees that under the new administration the United States might align with Russia and either assail Europe or abandon it altogether.

Such a shift, analysts say, would give Mr. Putin a previously unthinkable victory far more momentous for him than any objectives in Ukraine.

“Since the dawn of the Cold War in the late 1940s, the Kremlin has dreamed of pushing America out of its role as the cornerstone of European security,” said Andrew S. Weiss, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Putin surely is savvy enough to pounce on any openings provided by the new administration.”

The presence of American troops has been the underpinning of 80 years of peace in Western Europe since the end of World War II. But in a speech in Warsaw on Friday, before his arrival at the conference, Mr. Hegseth warned European leaders they shouldn’t assume that the United States will be there forever.

Later in the day, at the Munich conference, Mr. Vance delivered an even scarier message for many European attendees: The enemy he sees isn’t Russia or China, but Europe itself.

Mr. Vance set about attacking European nations for using what he called undemocratic methods to restrain far-right parties that in some cases have been backed by Russia. He argued that the continent needed to recognize the desires of its voters, stop attempting to moderate disinformation in undemocratic ways and instead allow such parties to thrive as the will of the people.

“If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you,” Mr. Vance said. “Nor, for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump.”

Mr. Vance hit out in particular at Romania, where the country’s constitutional court in December canceled a presidential election that an ultranationalist backed by an apparent Russian influence campaign looked poised to win. The election has been rescheduled for May.

“If your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with,” he said.

The Kremlin for years has sought to weaken Europe by boosting parties that Mr. Vance argued must be allowed to flourish. The same day as his remarks at the conference, Mr. Vance met with the leader of Germany’s extreme right movement, which is contesting national elections this month, boosting a party Russia has sought to legitimize.

Moscow has also sought to drive a wedge between the United States and Europe, realizing that a destruction of the longstanding Euro-Atlantic alliance from within would lead to a world where Moscow can wield far more power.

Nathalie Tocci, director of the Institute for International Affairs in Rome, watched Mr. Vance’s speech and interpreted the message as a direct threat by the United States to the European Union, which far-right Europeans and the Kremlin both seek to dismantle. She called it a plot twist by the United States.

“The plot is we are out there to destroy you,” Ms. Tocci said.

“The point is not even Ukraine,” she added. “The point is the deliberate weakening, if not destruction, of Europe, of which Ukraine is a part.”

Ms. Tocci described Mr. Vance’s remarks as an attack on European democracy that perversely twisted the language of democracy itself, the way Russia often does when seeking to sow division within Europe.

A dramatic reorganization of power in Europe seemed like a pipe dream for Mr. Putin back when he articulated his vision in 2007 at the Munich conference. Robert M. Gates, the American defense secretary at the time, sat in the audience and later dismissed the remarks as a throwback to the Cold War.

The Russian leader, however, has stuck unbendingly to his vision, making it a central point of his argument in the months leading to the war: that the West must be willing to discuss not just Ukrainian sovereignty but the whole security apparatus of Europe, which he claimed omitted Moscow and put it at existential risk.

Mr. Putin has cast his invasion of Ukraine as a broader battle against the West and the woke values he portrays as anathema, some of the same arguments Mr. Trump and Europe’s extreme-right leaders have made to wrest power in their own countries.

Mr. Putin believed that ultimately the United States and Europe would bend to him, Alexander Baunov, a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, wrote in a recent analysis.

The United States is changing, Mr. Baunov wrote, and the current Washington “is getting closer to Moscow not for the sake of Europe, but for its own sake — and even a little to spite Europe.”

The challenge to Europe comes as Germany and France, the European Union’s two biggest countries, both are suffering from crises of leadership, in part because of surging political movements brandishing the same rhetoric as Mr. Trump. In 2015, Germany and France took the lead in negotiating an end to Mr. Putin’s first invasion of Ukraine.

The United Kingdom, which left the European Union owing to a campaign Mr. Trump publicly backed, has seen its influence on the continent significantly weakened.

How far Mr. Trump’s deal-making with Mr. Putin will go is unclear, and the nascent rapprochement between Washington and Moscow could easily evaporate during negotiations over Ukraine, which are set to begin with a meeting between American and Russian representatives in Saudi Arabia this week.

But foreign leaders have managed to woo Mr. Trump into positions favorable to them before, and so far Russia is reaping benefits from the new administration.

The Kremlin has racked up a series of victories since Mr. Trump returned to the White House.

Less than a month into his second term, Mr. Trump has eviscerated U.S.A.I.D., the U.S. foreign aid agency long reviled by Moscow. He has pushed through cabinet officials who regularly traffic in Kremlin talking points, including the new head of U.S. intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. He has exacerbated the discord in relations with Europe, threatening Washington’s closest allies with a trade war. He has empowered and elevated Elon Musk, who spreads falsehoods beneficial to Moscow on X and publicly advocated in favor of Germany’s far-right movement.

Mr. Trump will now influence, possibly without European leaders present, how the biggest conflict on the continent since World War II gets resolved, with implications that could go beyond Ukraine itself to affect the broader security balance in Europe.

Those leaders, who see insurgent right-wing populist movements as a threat to the European Union and freedom on the continent, are worried, particularly given the apparent alignment of Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin against them.

“This is the moment in which we are at our most vulnerable,” Ms. Tocci said.

“If ultimately what you are trying to do is destroy this project,” she added, referring to the E.U., “this is the moment to do it.”