JD Vance knows Europe must grow up and pay for its own defence

The EU’s liberal-idiots have a new villain in their sights merely for speaking the truth: the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate JD Vance. He is accused of being an “isolationist” because he says that Europe must finally stand militarily on its own two feet rather than looking endlessly to the USA. But Vance was not speaking as an isolationist but rather like an irate parent of a dysfunctional seventeen-year-old who will not leave home, will not work, will not study and expects the weekly pocket-money to continue to flow.

NATO’s European arm, formed in 1949, is now a semi-senile, seventy-five-year-old, still whining, whingeing and wailing, while his bony old paw remains querulously outstretched for yet more dollars.

Much of the European media attack any American who suggests that Europe grow up. The Financial Times, once a serious newspaper but more recently a supporter of the worst two-time President of the USA, Barack Obama, and then, hilariously of his former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton as his replacement, is now the mouthpiece for the geriatric parasite that is Europe. It recently fretted that Vance’s nomination “has cemented European fears that a second Trump term would drastically reduce transatlantic security ties, increaser tariffs and sever critical support for Ukraine.”

Has the Financial Times editor looked at a map? There is no Atlantic between Europe and Ukraine. The tragedy that has befallen that country is vastly more Europe’s business than America’s. Only a pathologically abject mindset would conclude that a state that begins four thousand miles from Ukraine has a greater obligation to it than does a political union alongside it.

More witlessly supine still was The Independent, now owned by former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev, which declared: “In his immoral absolutism, JD Vance outflanks even Donald Trump.” It even managed to invent a spurious suggestion that the Trump-Vance presidency might even shut down NATO. Wanting Europe to pay for its own defence, as Vance does, is no more than Churchill wanted of Britain in the late 1930s. The British military analyst Rob Johnson, recently warned that Britain is now unable to fight any kind of war, including any defence of the UK homeland.

But chronic inability to defend its territory is now a definition of the EU, with the sole exception of Poland. Last year it ordered, 648 K-9 Thunder 155mm self-propelled howitzers and 980 K 2 tanks from South Korea, a single transaction that placed it firmly ahead of the UK both as military power and a mature democracy.

Weak American political leadership has allowed NATO to degenerate into a parody of the final stages of the Ottoman Empire. The nomination of Vance as Trump’s running mate came ten years almost to the day that Putin’s proxies shot down Air Malaysian Airlines MH 17 over Ukraine.

Subsequent events confirmed the supineness of NATO. Two hundred and twelve passengers were citizens of NATO countries, thus constituting a lawful casus belli for the alliance. Under serious leadership, NATO would have demanded the instant right of its armed forces to occupy and hold the Donbas area in Ukraine where the airliner crashed. However, this would have required leadership and courage, qualities which US President Obama lacked, as he had already comprehensively revealed. 

In 2013, Obama had warned Syria’s President al-Assad that if he used Sarin nerve gas in the civil war, he would be crossing a red-line with “enormous consequences.” Assad duly used it, murdering over a thousand civilians, and of course, Obama duly blinked. Assad behaved similarly while Trump was in office, and the US President ordered the USAF to drop the largest bomb in history on one of Assad’s underground chemical bunkers, annihilating it and its  occupants. 

Putin performed one more test of European resolve when his agents used the nerve-agent Novichok on the dissident Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, England, in 2018. If the war-monger Putin wanted merely to kill them, his men could have shot them during their many trips to London. Using Novichok in what was to Russian minds the very centre of the British Army was a studied provocation, so turning a would-be assassination into a war-crime without a war. The Salisbury operation was what is known militarily as “a reconnaissance in strength,” the purpose of which was not the deed itself but an assessment of the response. This consisted merely of “sanctions,” a perfectly meaningless concept for Russia, with a ten-thousand-mile land-border along its Asian flank. 

So, thus encouraged, next step, Ukraine, in which Putin catastrophically (for him) under-estimated the opposition, while he correctly assessed Europe. Europe still manufactures three different fourth-generation jet fighters and three different kinds of armoured fighting vehicle. Meanwhile, the UK was so sure that permanent peace had returned to Europe that it even closed its last howitzer barrel-forging plant twenty years ago. 

However, the US had not fallen asleep, and continued to spend four per cent of its GDP on defence, more than twice that of most European countries. Thus, taxpayers in the US Midwest rustbelt are paying to protect to defend Stuttgart, the home of Mercedes Benz, whose vehicle-sales in the US are worth €36bn annually. To be sure, the company has built a fig-leaf “assembly-plant” in the appropriately-named Vance, Alabama, which employs just six thousand people who each year convert 87,000 German-made models to US standards. 

By any measure, this is economic and military parasitism, which Germany is concealing by falsifying its accounts to make it seem it is reaching the two per cent defence threshold, while remaining addicted to self-indulgent virtue-signalling. The German vice chancellor and Green leader Robert Habeck has refused to allow any cutbacks on “culture and social spending,” though these are precisely where economies must be made in any democratic society under armed threat. Germany’s cultural projects this year include twenty-three state-sponsored QueerScope film-festivals celebrating homosexuality, twenty-two of which feature the word “queer” – yes, even in German, the manifold joys of multiculturalism result in such essential and enriching word-sharing. Every German adult receives a kultarpass worth €200 a year, enabling holders to revel in such riveting artistic events across the republic, while lucky Berlin has announced a cultural budget for this year of nearly €1bn, greater than that for all of England. 

This is Weimar-like madness, and not of recent coinage. A decade ago, when EU President Ursula von der Leyen was German Minister for Defence, she ordered that tanks be rebuilt to suit pregnant drivers, while not a single German U-boat could submerge, 40 per cent of Germany’s combat aircraft were unable to fly and German soldiers on Arctic manoeuvres carried blackened broom-handles because of lack of serviceable rifles.

Nonetheless, as Vance correctly perceives, irreversible strategic truths today must be accepted. Ukraine will never regain the lost territories of Donbas and Crimea, and any military attempts to reconquer them will doom its army to a purposeless repeat of the endless attritions of Flanders, 1915-18. Moreover, Europe must come to terms with the hideous truth that the Russian people genuinely support both Putin and the war in Ukraine. This is a conflict that will evolve, not vanish, even as Europe once again fails to meet the great military and existential challenge facing it. But the days of the US rescuing the richest corner of the world are over for ever. Does nobody in Brussels and Berlin understand that?