US President Donald Trump has announced that he intends to talk “peace in Ukraine” with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin at a possible meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The two leaders’ encounter may yield some results – or prove an utter flop, as did their summit in Helsinki in 2018.

But what matters is that Trump’s bombshell of an announcement supercharged a conversation in Europe about what to do with an increasingly untrustworthy ally. The fact that an American president could contemplate, let alone affect, a grand geopolitical bargain in Europe over the heads of the Europeans has sent shivers down the spines of many, as has the prospect of being left alone to handle a hostile and aggressive Russia.

Discussions on how to respond to this predicament seem to have split into two lines of thinking.

One posits that the only realistic option is to hug the United States ever tighter in the hope that strategic withdrawal never takes place. That implies ignoring Trump’s rhetorical antics and, if need be, pandering to his Siberia-sized ego and meeting some of the demands he makes.

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To please the US president, some have suggested slashing tariffs on US-made cars or purchasing larger volumes of liquefied natural gas from across the Atlantic. Everyone agrees that European states should spend more on defence, especially on US-made weapons. There is eagerness to do so, especially on the European Union’s eastern flank; Poland, the Czech Republic and Romania have already joined the queue to acquire the F-35, a state-of-the-art fighter jet from US defence manufacturer Lockheed Martin.

Ukraine is a proud member of this group, too. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy started courting Trump well before he won the US election in November. It seems his pitch to grant the US access to Ukraine’s critical minerals has appealed to the “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) contingent and the US president himself.

Sure enough, Zelenskyy was not given a heads-up about the US president’s call with Putin. The sense of betrayal is real. At the Munich Security Conference earlier this week, the Ukrainian president called for European unity in a clear rebuke of the divisive speech delivered by Trump’s vice president, JD Vance.

However, Zelenskyy will continue to lobby the notoriously mercurial Trump as well as old-school Republicans in the US administration, such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, in order to shape the US position. In Munich, the Ukrainian president met with a group of Republican senators, including Lindsey Graham, who called for extending US support for the Ukrainian army.

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The Kremlin and MAGA crowd seem to believe that Ukrainians have little to no agency. But three years of war shows otherwise. For a ceasefire to work, Ukraine would need to buy in and be present at the table – a point Zelenskyy made quite clear in Munich.

That said, it is rather unlikely that Trump would accommodate Kyiv. Scaling down support is a policy direction he embraces and his electorate is going along with it.

That is why there is a second line of thinking in Europe that calls for ending European dependence on the US. A longstanding proponent of this position is French President Emmanuel Macron. In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Macron renewed calls for strategic autonomy in critical domains, such as defence and technology. The AI summit in Paris earlier this month, along with the EU’s resolve to put up stiff resistance in a future tariff war with the US, indicate there is momentum in this direction.

Macron has also been the first European leader to float the idea of sending European troops to Ukraine. Though he does not believe EU members and the United Kingdom would be capable of despatching up to 200,000, a number mentioned by Zelenskyy, the option, as far as France is concerned, is very much on the table.

Macron sees Trump’s initiative as an opportunity for Europeans to “muscle up” and become a security guarantor. Ukraine can thus become Europe’s path to global relevance.

To be sure, this vision has plenty of potential weaknesses. Macron is vulnerable domestically and who will succeed him at the Elysee Palace is a pending question. Germany, likely to be governed by the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) after the February 23 elections, is not nearly as hawkish. The populist challenge to Superpower Europe can also throw sand in the wheels.

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European militaries have no capacity and are overreliant on the US. Budgets are strained, too, raising the classic guns-vs-butter dilemma. Germany’s debt brake, which the CDU is apparently reluctant to revisit, does not make matters any better. Also adding to the mix are longer-term concerns that have to do with productivity growth, innovation, and technological development which were highlighted in a September report by former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi. All that should sober expectations that Europe could play in the same league as the US and China.

While the EU would struggle to emerge as a superpower on the world stage, its dependence on the US is unsustainable. Trump’s “America First” policy will inevitably continue to nudge Europeans more and more in Macron’s preferred direction. The takeaway from the US outreach to Putin is that the old rules and conventions governing transatlantic relations do not hold.

Even for the diehard believers in a bond with the US, hedging – a humbler version of strategic autonomy, essentially – has become the only viable option in the long run.

Rather than full divorce and dissolution of NATO, hedging implies pushing back against and conditioning US behaviour as much as possible. Or simply pursuing an independent policy without regard to what Washington might think on issues such as China, trade or regulations of the tech industry.

We are likely to see more and more of that going forward, even beyond Trump’s term.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.