What Vance Really Thinks About Europe

JD Vance, former US President Donald Trump’s new running mate, has a lot to say about Europe.

As a defender of US isolationism and a staunch critic of aid to Ukraine, the appointment of the 39-year-old Ohio senator has sparked panic among diplomats across the Atlantic.

But what could a Vice President Vance mean for Europe? From “idiotic” Germany to “Islamic” Britain, POLITICO investigates what the senator has said so far about the Old Continent.

About the EU

Vance has sharply criticized Brussels for its decision to withhold funds from Hungary and Poland over concerns about democracy and the rule of law.

“You know, the EU has kept billions of dollars of promised aid away from Hungary because of its views on Ukraine. It has withheld billions of dollars of promised aid from a previous government in Poland because of the views of the conservative Polish government,” he said in an interview in February.

“This is not a rules-based order. This is Europe, from Brussels and Berlin, imposing liberal imperialist visions on the rest of the continent.”

About Hungary

Like Trump, Vance spoke highly of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and proposed following his example in social policy.

“In Hungary, under Orbán, they offer loans to newly married couples that are forgiven at some point later if those couples actually stayed together and had children. Why can’t we do that here? Why can’t we actually promote family formation?” he told a conservative thinktank in 2021.

Vance has also called for the “de-woke-ification” of schools and cited Orbán as an inspiration in an appearance on a right-wing podcast last September.

“What do you do at the Department of Education? Well, you do what Viktor Orbán did in Hungary, which is basically say, ‘You’re no longer allowed to teach critical race theory, you’re no longer allowed to teach critical gender theory… You’re no longer allowed to do these things and make a dollar of federal money or a dollar of state money.’”

About Poland
Vance criticized Donald Tusk after the Polish prime minister criticized Republicans for blocking US aid to Ukraine in February this year.

“Poland’s new leader is jailing political opponents and owes his country’s security to my generosity,” Vance wrote in a social media post. “He might consider showing some appreciation, or at least tempering his own authoritarian impulses.”

He called on the Biden administration to respond to the Tusk government’s state media reforms by purging loyalists installed by the previous conservative government.

“I urge you to encourage Poland’s new government to reconsider any actions that could harm it or the freedoms that Polish and American citizens cherish,” he said in January.

Polish security concerns about Russian aggression were overblown, Vance said in an interview with CNN last December.

“The idea that [Putin] can march to Poland or to Berlin is absurd,” he said.

About Germany
Berlin’s military is a lost cause and its energy policy is “idiotic,” according to Vance.

“Germany’s conduct in this war is shameful, and it is an insult to our voters that so many Republicans are going along with it. All their promises have turned into dung,” he raged on social media in March last year.

“Why do American taxpayers subsidize Germany’s idiotic energy policy and weak defense policy? A mystery.”

Vance attacked Germany’s defense capabilities once again in an essay for the Financial Times in February.

“Germany spends considerably more than France on defense each year, with little to show for it. The French army includes six highly capable combined arms brigades… but the Bundeswehr can barely muster a single combat-ready brigade,” he said.

“Germany is Europe’s most important economy, but it relies on imported energy and borrowed military strength.”

Vance also commented on the growing popularity of the far right in Germany in a February interview, claiming that the “AfD is doing well” because of “a growing resistance to mass migration.”

In the United Kingdom

British Foreign Secretary David Lammy counts Vance among his friends, but that hasn’t stopped the US senator from criticizing the UK as an “Islamic country.”

“I have to hit out at the UK, just one more thing. I was talking to a friend recently and we were talking about, you know, one of the great dangers in the world, of course, is nuclear proliferation,” he told a Conservative conference last week.

“And I was talking about, you know, what would be the first truly Islamic country that would have a nuclear weapon, and we thought, maybe it’s Iran, you know, maybe Pakistan already counts, and then we kind of finally decided that maybe it’s the United Kingdom, since the Labour Party had just taken over.”

About Italy

Not even far-right Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni could escape Vance’s wrath.

“Meloni’s victory in Italy was a rejection of the immigration policies in Brussels. And yet it has been a complete catastrophe when it comes to actually reducing migration to Italy,” Vance said in an interview in February.

Via News Agencies