Europe was already panicked about a second Trump presidency and its implications for U.S. foreign policy. With the announcement of J.D. Vance as Donald Trump’s running mate in November’s presidential election that alarm has only escalated.
Trump announced his choice on Truth Social on Monday shortly after the Republican National Convention kicked off in Milwaukee.
“After lengthy deliberation and thought, and considering the tremendous talents of many others, I have decided that the person best suited to assume the position of Vice President of the United States is Senator J.D. Vance of the great state of Ohio,” Trump said in a separate statement. Minutes later, chants of “J.D., J.D.,” broke out in the convention hall.
The 39-year-old senator is one of the most isolationist members of the Republican Party. He is vehemently opposed to using more funds to help Ukraine and has blasted what he sees as Europe’s over-dependence on the United States when it comes to military investment.
In a lengthy interview with POLITICO at the Munich Security Conference in February, Vance, an erstwhile Trump critic turned evangelist, set out his stall on why America should not help Ukraine.
“We simply do not have manufacturing capacity to support a ground war in Eastern Europe indefinitely. And I think it’s incumbent upon leaders to articulate this for their populations,” Vance told POLITICO’s Global Playbook. “How long is this expected to go on? How much is it expected to cost? And importantly, how are we actually supposed to produce the weapons necessary to support the Ukrainians?” he asked.
In the hallowed halls of the Bayerischer Hof hotel in Munich such talk was sacrilege — the annual Munich Security Conference has long been the champion of transatlantic defense and security cooperation, frequented by such U.S. foreign policy luminaries as the late John McCain and President Joe Biden, who strongly believed in the ‘rules-based international order’ that governed transatlantic relationships in the decades after World War II.
But in his first appearance at the high-level international conference in February, Vance skipped a meeting between President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and a bipartisan group of senators on the fringes of the gathering. “I didn’t think I would learn anything new,” he told POLITICO.
Even the death of Putin critic Alexei Navalny, which overshadowed that gathering, didn’t seem to change Vance’s views. He reiterated in his interview with POLITICO his belief that Ukraine would ultimately need to cede territory to Russia, “Putin is not a great human being, but that doesn’t change what the strategic imperatives of the United States or Europe are.”
Since February, Vance’s rhetoric has only toughened as he has doubled down on his Trump-style, America-first foreign policy beliefs. In a speech on the Senate floor in April he blasted Europe for not spending enough on defense.
“For three years, the Europeans have told us that Vladimir Putin is an existential threat to Europe. And for three years, they have failed to respond as if that were actually true,” he said, calling out Germany in particular for failing to spend two percent of its GDP on defense.
He also played a central role in trying to kill off U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson’s Ukraine aid bill earlier this year in the Senate.
One senior EU official told POLITICO Monday night that the appointment of Vance was a “disaster” for Ukraine nothing that, if he becomes vice president, Vance would likely push Europe to take a stronger stance on China.
Vance’s skepticism about the fundamental underpinning of the ‘rules-based international order’ extends beyond foreign policy. The Ohio senator, whose best-selling book Hillbilly Elegy chronicled his own upbringing in America’s rust belt, has long championed the cause of the American worker and the importance of the U.S. manufacturing sector. Expect him to advocate a turning inwards economically and push against China if he is elected as vice president on the Republican ticket in November — another headache for Brussels as the E.U. seeks to repair a battered trade relationship between Brussels and Washington.
Vance, who beat other front-runners for the vice-president nomination such as Senator Marco Rubio and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, is due to officially address the convention on Wednesday evening, with Trump scheduled to accept the Republican Party’s nomination for president on Thursday.
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