Already, a lot of America’s closest allies were fearing the idea of having Donald Trump win the presidency again. Their worries may grow now that the former president has selected JD Vance to be his running mate.
By selecting Vance, Trump has made it quite evident that, should he win, his America-first foreign policy would once again be in effect.Vance, a junior senator for Ohio, is a staunch critic of sending support to Ukraine as it tries to defend itself against Russia. Like Trump, he has repeatedly criticized NATO and its European members for not spending enough on defense. And he has made a number of comments that have raised eyebrows across the pond – including when he said the United Kingdom would become the “first truly Islamist country that will get a nuclear weapon” under the new Labour government.
His nomination puts an end to the hopes by some of America’s allies that Trump might soften his foreign policy stance if reelected. But with the selection of his running mate, Trump dashed these hopes. “JD Vance does not appear to be interested in being a good ally to Europe,” Berzina said.At the Munich Security Conference in February, Vance suggested Ukraine should negotiate with Russia because the US and other allies do not have the capacity to support it. Ukraine and NATO have dismissed that scenario, because it would most likely mean Kyiv would have to give up some of its pre-war territory.
“I think what’s reasonable to accomplish is some negotiated peace. I think Russia has incentive to come to the table right now. I think Ukraine, Europe and the United States have incentives to come to the table,” he said at the conference, adding that the fact that Putin “is a bad guy does not mean we can’t engage in basic diplomacy.”In Munich, Vance notably skipped a key meeting between a bipartisan delegation of US senators and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, saying he didn’t think he’d learn anything new there. He did attend a meeting with Zelensky in Washington in December but left early. Vance has argued that the US should turn its focus away from Russia and toward East Asia. Earlier this week, he said the war in Ukraine must be brought to a “rapid close” so that America could focus on “the real issue, which is China.”
That’s the “biggest threat to our country and we’re completely distracted from it,” Vance said in an interview with Fox News Monday.In an op-ed published in the New York Times in April, Vance also argued that US efforts to supply Ukraine with air defense systems could be detrimental to Taiwan’s defense in the event of a Chinese invasion of the self-ruled island claimed by Beijing.“These weapons are not only needed by Ukraine. If China were to set its sights on Taiwan, the Patriot missile system would be critical to its defense,” he wrote.
The idea that East Asia, and China specifically, poses as big, if not a bigger, threat to the US than Russia is not unique to Vance. Trevor McCrisken, an US foreign policy expert and associate professor at the University of Warwick, said there is bipartisan agreement between Democrats and Republicans that China is the biggest threat internationally to US interests. “The last time we had a Trump presidency, I think Europeans looked at this as potentially a four-year blip, and then breathed a sigh of relief when Biden was elected and thought that we’d return to normal … and I think that there was some wishful thinking in that, and people have now begun to recognize that,” he said.
The effect of this shift, Greene said, is apparent even now – despite the White House being in Democratic hands. US President Joe Biden had an extremely hard time getting the latest Ukraine aid package through Congress, forcing Ukraine’s European allies to start thinking about a plan B. The initial delay in Congress approving the package resulted in a Czech-led initiative to find and fund alternative sources of ammunition for Kyiv, among other efforts to look for assistance elsewhere. “The unreliability of American leadership in Europe has been a fact that Europeans have now had some time to get used to. Even if Biden is reelected, America will be difficult to rely on,” Greene said.
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