The recent customs chaos has made many countries ponder their relations with the USA. But even if the American Vice President has expressed some frustration towards European leaders, he expresses love for the continent in an interview with the British website Unherd.
I love Europe (...) I love European people, says JD Vance there.
But he claims at the same time that Europe must become more self-sufficient, that he does not want Europeans to "just do what Americans tell them to do".
"Giving people the opposite"
According to Vance, the USA is Europe's friend, provided that Europe can take a more self-sufficient role and that countries can be responsive to their own voters – especially when it comes to immigration.
We are very frustrated – "we" means I, the President, and absolutely the entire Trump administration – that European populations continue to cry out for a more reasonable economic policy and migration policy, and Europe's leaders go through these elections and continue to offer the European people the opposite of what they seem to have voted for, he says.
He describes it as if Europe's entire security infrastructure has been subsidized by the USA for a long time.
Most European countries do not have militaries that can provide reasonable defense, he says.
Points to the Iraq War
Only weeks after JD Vance became Vice President at the beginning of the year, he made headlines when he held a scathing speech about Europe at the security conference in Munich. Now he says it is good for the USA if Europe becomes more independent. This would, according to him, make it possible for Europe's countries to "stand up" against the USA's foreign policy decisions. In the interview, Vance brings up the invasion of Iraq as an example:
If Europeans had been a little more self-sufficient and a little more willing to stand up, then maybe we could have saved the whole world from the strategic catastrophe that the USA-led invasion of Iraq was.
