If the Trump administration wants to sever the American relationship with Europe, it might get what it wants.
In an interview with UnHeard’s Sohrab Ahmari, Vice President JD Vance recast his naked hostility toward Europe as a species of tough love. “It’s not good for Europe to be the permanent security vassal of the United States,” he said. Europe must learn to stand up on its own.
As “America First” foreign policy prescriptions go, this is an odd one. I, a notoriously perfidious RINO squish, would be happy if Europe’s foreign policy preferences are subject to an American veto in perpetuity. After all, the only reason why conservatives spent decades advocating for a Europe that invests more in its own security was so that it could be a more capable steward of our shared strategic objectives — goals the United States would, as NATO’s prima inter pares, define.
Still, the Trump administration is getting what it wants, much to its own chagrin.
As The Economist reports this week, under the administration’s pressure, Europe is taking more ownership of its foreign policy goals by doing what the Trump White House has repeatedly and explicitly said it should do: invest more in Ukraine’s security. Apparently, that, too, runs contrary to the administration’s preferences:
Another sign of the times is that Pentagon figures recently questioned one ally about why it was still supplying weapons to Ukraine — a challenge that was ignored. Diplomats in Washington also report that some Trump aides say privately that they are “fed up” with Europe’s effort to strengthen Ukraine. As always with such a chaotic administration, it is hard to distinguish the true signal from the noise.
It’s tough to avoid the conclusion that the Trump administration — in particular, the “restrainers” in the Pentagon who want to see U.S. global hegemony go the way of the dodo — don’t actually want a strong and independent Europe; not if that meant the provision of more support for Ukraine. They just wanted the Ukraine issue to go away, and the fastest route toward that outcome is Kyiv’s capitulation.
The Trump administration’s anti-European agitators are right to fear the outcomes for which they’re advocating. Today, the European political consensus is inclined toward confrontation with Russia. It may not be tomorrow, especially if American security guarantees look shaky enough to spook European voters. Accommodating the bully in its backyard, even at America’s expense, may soon look to Europeans like the path of least resistance.
Beyond Russia, the continent has never shown much inclination to aggressively check the ambitions of America’s adversaries in Tehran and Beijing in the absence of U.S. inducements. A Europe that is at liberty to freelance an independent foreign policy is not guaranteed to advance U.S. interests. Rather, we should expect that European politicians will respond to the incentives associated with striking a defiant posture vis-à-vis the American politicians who cannot go five minutes without antagonizing their European allies.
That might be fine with JD Vance. As part of his haute campaign of denigrating every Republican politician who came before him, the vice president shared his admiration for the late French President Jacques Chirac and his noble effort to frustrate America’s regime change project in Iraq. Vance might like that as a policy outcome, but what he’s supporting isn’t just anti-Iraq War revisionism. Rather, he’s explicitly advocating a European effort to complicate or even scuttle U.S. foreign policy objectives as defined by the commander in chief of the armed forces. It only takes a little imagination to envision a circumstance in which that impulse, if it becomes the European status quo, could present the United States with obstacles that prevent it from achieving its future foreign policy goals.
If the Trump administration wants to sever the American relationship with Europe, it might get what it wants. But it would be a mistake to attribute any of this to a grand strategy. The concept implies a level of forethought that is not in evidence when it comes to the administration’s relations with America’s European allies.