Europe is “our ally”, but it cannot be “a permanent vassal” of the United States as regards safety and trade. To say it is the American vice -president JD Vance, in an interview with the British Unherd site, in which he claimed that European armies are not able to “guarantee a reasonable defense” and has relaunched the criticisms against the approach of European governments to defense and economic relations with Washington.
“We simply want an alliance in which the Europeans are a little more independent, and our relationships on safety and trade will reflect it,” explained Vance. “It is not good for Europe, and it is not in the interest of America, that Europe is a permanent vassal of the United States in terms of safety,” he insisted.
Inadequate armies
The position of the vice -president reflects the line already expressed several times by Donald Trump since he returned to the White House, with increasingly explicit requests to the Europeans to increase the expenses for his defense and accusations to the European Union to adopt a “unfair” commercial policy towards the United States.
In the interview with Unherd, Vance has redeemed the dose, claiming that “all the European security infrastructure was, since my birth, subsidized by the United States of America”. In his opinion, apart from France, the United Kingdom and Poland, “most European states do not have an army capable of guaranteeing a reasonable defense”.
The criticisms of Vance
It is not the first controversial exit of the vice -president: already in February, at the summit on Monaco’s security, he had accused European leaders of not doing enough against immigration and of endangering freedom of expression. At the beginning of March he also caused new tensions stating that for Ukraine “concluding an economic agreement with the United States would be a better guarantee of security than 20 thousand soldiers of any country who does not fight a 30 or 40 years war”.
“I don’t think that a more independent Europe is a negative thing for the United States,” said Vance again, adding that “a stronger Europe could have avoided the strategic disaster of the war in Iraq” than 2003.
