Being vice president of the United States is a strange role. John Nance Garner, Franklin Roosevelt’s understudy for his first two terms, dismissed the office as ‘not worth a bucket of warm piss’, but it was the first incumbent, John Adams, who put his finger on its one transcendent quality. ‘I am vice president. In this I am nothing, but I may be everything.’
That nod to ‘everything’ makes Vice President J.D. Vance important. By the next presidential election in November 2028, Donald Trump will be 82, and unless he defies any rational reading of the 22nd amendment, he cannot continue as president. That places Vance in the pound seats to pick up the Maga banner and lead Trump’s movement forward. So what he thinks matters.
Europe should be on notice: we are not much liked
This week Vice President Vance gave his first interview to a European publication, talking to UnHerd’s Sohrab Ahmari. Last month’s grotesque security failure on messaging service Signal gave strong clues as to how Vance sees the far side of the Atlantic: ‘I just hate bailing Europe out again,’ he had told the Secretary of Defence, Pete Hegseth. It was not much more hostile than the speech he had given at the Munich Security Conference in February, when he had lamented ‘the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values’ and asked Europeans ‘what exactly it is that you’re defending yourselves for’.
Two months later, the emphasis and the formatting may have changed. ‘I love Europe. I love European people. I’ve said repeatedly that I think that you can’t separate American culture from European culture,’ he says.
Vance is what Americans call ‘Scotch-Irish’. (President Trump’s paternal grandparents were, on the other hand, Bavarian, while his mother was born on the Isle of Lewis.) But his professed warmth for Europe as a generality stands shoulder-to-shoulder with a mixture of frustration, disdain and garbled history wearing a very thin disguise. Two of his bêtes noires are security and trade, inextricably linked.
That many European nations have underspent on defence and relied on the insurance of American might is largely accepted. When Vance says that ‘most European nations don’t have militaries that can provide for their reasonable defence’, there is truth in it. This does, however, overlook the fact that the collective security commitment of Nato is designed to offset that.
The Vice President is taking a new tack, however, and presenting a higher level of military spending by Europe as the counter-balance to the United States to keep Washington honest. Vance cites French president Charles de Gaulle as a leader who ‘loved the United States of America’ but understood that it was in no one’s interest ‘for Europe to be a permanent security vassal of the United States’.
A tough kind of love: de Gaulle liked Eisenhower and Kennedy, but publicly condemned the war in Vietnam; he hated what his finance minister, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing called ‘le privilège exorbitant’ America derived from the Bretton Woods monetary system of fixed exchange rates; and he withdrew France from Nato’s formal command structures in 1966. But history, as Trump consistently demonstrates, is whatever you say it is.
Vance mixes this notion of self-sufficiency and balance into his defence of current tariff policy (though readers would be wise to check the state of play hourly):
It will lead to a lot of positive trade relationships with Europe… we just want it to be an alliance where Europeans are a little more independent.
He echoes Trump’s theological rather than economic belief that trade deficits are damaging and unfair, somehow exploitative of the United States. ‘That’s been bad for us,’ he argues. ‘It’s been bad for American manufacturers. It’s been bad for workers.’ Given that America is the world’s largest economy, its GDP per capita has risen every year but two since 1980 and unemployment has rarely been lower, this is a psychological sense of grievance which has been nurtured by Maga.
This grievance is foundational. America has been exploited by Nato, it has shouldered an unfair burden of European security and it has somehow suffered by the development of globalisation (while remaining the world’s largest economy since 1900). This is a zero-sum world. If anywhere America finds a challenge, then somewhere, someone must be gaining an advantage.
If J.D. Vance is the medium-term future of the United States, as he may well be, Europe should be on notice: we are not much liked. Some of the reasons are understandable, some are more tendentious, some are simple invention – but they are real to him. The challenge for Britain’s leaders is to assess how much they can change, how much is rhetorical and can be endured, and how much will force – should force and is already forcing – a reassessment of our place in the world and our global alliances. ‘America First’ will sometimes feel like a cold wind.
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