The News
Europe reacted with outrage Tuesday after US Vice President JD Vance dismissed nations’ offers to send peacekeeping troops to a postwar Ukraine.
In an interview with Fox News, Vance said giving the US an economic stake in Ukraine would be a “way better security guarantee than 20,000 troops from some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years.”
The remarks sparked widespread condemnation, particularly in the UK: British troops have long fought alongside US forces, including in Afghanistan and Iraq, with Nigel Farage, the leader of right-wing opposition party Reform UK, saying “JD Vance is wrong. Wrong wrong wrong.”
The vice president responded to the criticism on social media as “absurdly dishonest,” noting that he didn’t mention the UK or France in the interview, “both of whom have fought bravely alongside the US over the last 20 years, and beyond.”
But, Vance added, there are “many countries who are volunteering (privately or publicly) support who have neither the battlefield experience nor the military equipment to do anything meaningful.”
SIGNALS
Vance adds to strained US-Europe tensions
Vice President JD Vance has played a key role in exacerbating US-Europe tensions: Last month he criticized the continent’s leaders at the Munich Security Conference over free speech rules and met with the leader of Germany’s far right, and his Ukraine remarks threaten to further exacerbate tensions. “There’s a real - and growing - outrage over these comments,” Politico’s editor-at-large in Europe said. “Vance’s insult won’t be easily forgotten.” Vance was also central to the disastrous Oval Office meeting between Trump and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, when he attacked the Ukrainian president for seeming ungrateful. Vance is building a foreign policy team that is skeptical of Kyiv, positioning him as “the chief saboteur of the transatlantic alliance,” The Guardian’s global affairs correspondent wrote.
European media turn their attention to Vance
Immediately following Donald Trump’s inauguration, Vice President JD Vance had been perceived as something of a background character in the eyes of European media. But after Friday’s meeting, The Independent’s world affairs editor warned that Vance could be more dangerous for Europe than Trump, because Vance can run for president in 2028: “Vance’s focus has been international affairs but his intended audience is entirely domestic.” German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung recently quoted a military expert who said Vance “seems dangerous to me.” And French outlet Le Monde has criticized Vance’s “unprecedented aggressiveness” toward Zelenskyy: “Bitter exchanges, accusations, threats – never before in the history of the US have differences been so bluntly and publicly exposed between two allies.”