JD Vance: My message to Europe - UnHerd
“It’s not good for Europe to be the permanent security vassal of the United States.” So says JD Vance during a phone conversation with UnHerd on Monday, his first major interview with a European outlet since taking office as Vice President. The backdrop is a week of turmoil on financial markets triggered by President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs.
The decision to apply (and then partially rescind) hefty tariffs on European allies — combined with a barrage of harsh statements about Europe from Vance, both public ones and leaked private messages — has left many on the Continent wondering whether America can still be thought of as a friend.
Vance’s answer: yes, provided European leaders are prepared to assume a more independent role on the international stage, and to be more responsive to their own voters, especially when it comes to the question of immigration.
“I love Europe,” Vance tells me in a wide-ranging interview from his office in the West Wing, showcasing a diplomatic side that has not always been front and centre. “I love European people. I’ve said repeatedly that I think that you can’t separate American culture from European culture. We’re very much a product of philosophies, theologies, and of course the migration patterns that came out of Europe that launched the United States of America.”
Europe’s leaders are a different matter. Take Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, who, in a recent interview with the American TV programme 60 Minutes, charged Vance with “somehow justifying” Russia’s invasion of his country.
Vance counters this by referring to his condemnations of Moscow’s actions since 2022. But he adds: “I’ve also tried to apply strategic recognition that if you want to end the conflict, you have to try to understand where both the Russians and the Ukrainians see their strategic objectives. That doesn’t mean you morally support the Russian cause, or that you support the full-scale invasion, but you do have to try to understand what are their strategic red lines, in the same way that you have to try to understand what the Ukrainians are trying to get out of the conflict.”
“I think it’s sort of absurd for Zelensky to tell the [American] government, which is currently keeping his entire government and war effort together, that we are somehow on the side of the Russians.” That kind of rhetoric, Vance says, “is certainly not productive”.
Beyond Ukraine, the American Vice President worries that European leaders are still failing to reckon with 21st-century realities on immigration, integration, and security.
“It’s not good for Europe to be the permanent security vassal of the United States.”
Vance says: “We’re very frustrated — ‘we’ meaning me, the President, certainly the entire Trump administration — that European populations keep on crying out for more sensible economic and migration policies, and the leaders of Europe keep on going through these elections, and keep on offering the European peoples the opposite of what they seem to have voted for.”
Immigration is at the heart of Vance’s palpable frustration with European leaders. He argues that, as in the United States, open-borders policies handed down from on high are poisonous to democratic trust. As Vance notes, “the entire democratic project of the West falls apart when the people keep on asking for less migration, and they keep on being rewarded by their leaders with more migration.”
Europe’s other blind spot, Vance says, is security. “The reality is — it’s blunt to say it, but it’s also true — that Europe’s entire security infrastructure, for my entire life, has been subsidised by the United States of America.” As recently as a quarter-century ago, “you could say that Europe had many vibrant militaries, at least militaries that could defend their own homelands”.
Fast-forward to today, Vance says, and “most European nations don’t have militaries that can provide for their reasonable defence”. True, “the British are an obvious exception, the French are an obvious exception, the Poles are an obvious exception. But in some ways, they’re the exceptions that prove the rule, that European leaders have radically underinvested in security, and that has to change.”
Vance’s message to the Continent, he says, is the same one delivered by Charles de Gaulle at the height of the Cold War, when the French president insisted on a healthy dose of independence from Washington. De Gaulle “loved the United States of America, but [he] recognised what I certainly recognise, that it’s not in Europe’s interest, and it’s not in America’s interest, for Europe to be a permanent security vassal of the United States”.
What the Vice President had not made clear before this interview is that he would prefer to see a strong and independent Europe precisely because it could then act as a better check against the foreign-policy missteps of the Americans.
He says: “I don’t think that Europe being more independent is bad for the United States — it’s good for the United States. Just going back through history, I think — frankly — the British and the French were certainly right in their disagreements with Eisenhower about the Suez Canal.”
Vance also alludes to his own experience as a combat veteran of the Iraq War. “Something I know a little bit more personally: I think a lot of European nations were right about our invasion of Iraq. And frankly, if the Europeans had been a little more independent, and a little more willing to stand up, then maybe we could have saved the entire world from the strategic disaster that was the American-led invasion of Iraq.”
Bottom line: “I don’t want the Europeans to just do whatever the Americans tell them to do. I don’t think it’s in their interest, and I don’t think it’s in our interests, either.”
Talking about the UK specifically, Vance puts great emphasis on the place it occupies in the affections of President Trump — with a trade deal highly likely as a result.
“We’re certainly working very hard with Keir Starmer’s government” on a trade deal, Vance says. “The President really loves the United Kingdom. He loved the Queen. He admires and loves the King. It is a very important relationship. And he’s a businessman and has a number of important business relationships in [Britain]. But I think it’s much deeper than that. There’s a real cultural affinity. And of course, fundamentally America is an Anglo country.” Thus, “I think there’s a good chance that, yes, we’ll come to a great agreement that’s in the best interest of both countries”.
Other European states are likely to reach new trade arrangements too, though the climb might be steeper. Already, “with the United Kingdom, we have a much more reciprocal relationship than we have with, say, Germany… While we love the Germans, they are heavily dependent on exporting to the United States but are pretty tough on a lot of American businesses that would like to export into Germany.”
The administration’s lodestar will be “fairness”, Vance says. “I think it will lead to a lot of positive trade relationships with Europe. And again, we very much see Europe as our ally. We just want it to be an alliance where Europeans are a little more independent, and our security and trade relationships are gonna reflect that.”
As financial markets have whipsawed in recent weeks, it has not been clear what success looks like from the administration’s point of view. I ask Vance how he will judge the tariff policy in the long term. “What we want to see is lower trade deficits, really across the board,” says Vance. “Sometimes, a trade deficit makes sense. Like, America doesn’t produce bananas. So obviously, we’re gonna be importing bananas, not exporting bananas. So with certain product categories and maybe even with some countries, a small trading deficit can be justified.”
The status-quo system as a whole, however, is intolerable from the White House’s point of view. “What the global trading system has led to,” complains Vance, “is large and persistent trade deficits across product categories, with the gross majority of countries really using the United States [home market] to absorb their surplus exports. That’s been bad for us. It’s been bad for American manufacturers. It’s been bad for workers. And God forbid, if America ever fought a future war, it would be bad for America’s troops.”
But before he became a politician, Vance was a venture capitalist. Has he had heart-sinking moments watching his own portfolio sink into the red in recent weeks? He sounds unfazed.
“Any implementation of a new system is fundamentally going to make financial markets jittery,” says Vance. “The President has been very consistent that this is a long-term play… Now, of course, you have to be responsive to what the business community is telling you, what workers are telling you, what bond markets are telling you. These are all variables that we have to be responsive to” in order to “make the policy successful”.
But Vance says the administration can’t govern for the stock market alone. “No plan is, you know, going to be implemented perfectly… We’re very cognisant of the fact that we live in a complicated world where nobody else’s decisions are static. But the fundamental policy is to rebalance global trade, and I think the President has been very clear and persistent on that.”
Even as adjustments and delays to tariffs seem to have soothed markets and allies, for now, the Trump administration is bent on applying its brand of shock therapy 2.0 to the international system. The goal, of course, is nearly the diametrical opposite of the original therapy: while shock therapy 1.0 goaded the world to follow America into adopting neoliberal globalisation and to follow Washington on its military adventures, this one is aimed at reversing both outcomes.
Yet it can be no less discomfiting to live through the change — not just in the policy orientation, but how it’s communicated: not least by a very-online Millennial Vice President who revels in online debate. Does he think he tweets too much? Eyebrows were certainly raised in Europe when he took the time to get into a Twitter dispute with podcaster Rory Stewart.
Vance laughs. “There are many blessings to this job. One unquestioned downside is that I very much live in a bubble. I’m surrounded by Secret Service agents. It’s very hard for a random person to walk up to me — in fact, it’s damned-near impossible. I see social media as a useful, albeit imperfect, way to stay in touch with what’s going on in the country at large… I probably spend way less time on Twitter than I did six months ago, and that’s probably good for me.”
All told, the Trump-Vance administration’s commitment to turning the page on globalisation as we knew it runs deeper than allies and adversaries alike might imagine. As Vance says: “We’re not on anybody’s side, we’re on America’s side.”
PANAFOLKS 2
in reply to Emmanuel Florac • • •