J.D. Vance, an honorary Frenchman, sends Europe into panic mode

When American senators are asked to name a political idol, they usually reach for a figure carved on Mount Rushmore. J.D. Vance, the newly minted Republican nominee for the vice-presidency, unexpectedly plumped for a Frenchman. Asked by Politico, a news site, earlier this year whom he looked to for inspiration, Mr Vance paused for a moment then cited Charles de Gaulle. Zut alors! Might this transatlantic admiration be good news for Europe, badly in need of allies in the Trumpian camp it fears will be back in power in Washington come January? Not so much. What Mr Vance admires in the French post-war president was the “invigorated self-confidence” he exuded on behalf of his country, diplomatic talk for telling allies to go stuff themselves when he felt like it (as the general did with NATO when it displeased him, say). Europeans fretting about America’s continued support for Ukraine are unlikely to be reassured.

A glum mood has pervaded Europe as the realisation of a return of Donald Trump to the White House has become not just possible but likely. The former president’s choice of an establishment Republican figure as running-mate might have soothed nerves set jangling by past promises that the war in Ukraine would be settled “in 24 hours”, whatever that means. Mr Vance is not that. His MAGA rhetoric on Europe exudes the brash confrontationalism perfected by Mr Trump. If the man on the top of the ticket has a visceral feeling America is being ripped off by Europeans scrimping on defence, his vice-presidential pick adds a layer of indifference to what is happening in a faraway land of which he knows little. “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” he once told an interviewer. Earlier this year he spearheaded the opposition to a $60bn military-aid plan to Ukraine, then skipped a meeting with its president, Volodymyr Zelensky. A peace settlement Mr Vance has mooted includes Ukraine losing much territory and accepting “neutrality”, two Kremlin demands.

Things are both worse and better than they look. Pessimists among Europeans, a dominant faction these days, will look beyond Mr Vance’s bluster on Ukraine and find much else to dislike. His bashing of the foreign-policy elite includes Republican grandees whom ambassadors from Europe have spent years schmoozing. Like his putative boss, Mr Vance is an instinctive isolationist, keen to raise tariffs on imports from Europe and elsewhere. He plainly dislikes the rules-based international order Europeans built alongside America. He has questioned whether humans cause climate change. Like many “national conservatives” stateside, he admires Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister who infuriates most of his European Union counterparts. Those in the political mainstream have found their efforts to butter up the Ohioan backfire. David Lammy, Britain’s new foreign secretary, included a shot of “my friend” Mr Vance in a promotional video of a recent trip to America. The senator returned the favour by saying Britain under Labour was now a nuclear-armed Islamist state.

Optimists should take comfort in the fact that Mr Vance is Europe-curious in ways that his boss never was (beyond his choice of wives). At the risk of volunteering for the guillotine, Charlemagne would venture that Mr Vance is something of an honorary Frenchman. He came to fame as a navel-gazing memoirist and public intellectual, essentially a French profession. He is sceptical of big business, thinking it too often steamrolls the little man he professes to defend. Mr Vance is against tax cuts for the rich and has argued for European-style collective bargaining. The man once even joined striking workers on a picket line, pour l’amour de Dieu. Speaking of which, Mr Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019 based on his appreciation of René Girard, a French philosopher. Like much of the Parisian elite today, the MAGA millennial is a denouncer of woke ideology, obsessively worried about declining birth rates and until not so long ago thought Mr Trump a danger to democracy. In different circumstances, he could have been imported to break the current political imbroglio in France.

A year in pro-Vance

The glumness in Europe is overdone, at least as regards the prospect of a Vance vice-presidency. For what has really changed? Mr Trump, like de Gaulle, is hardly one to have his mind swayed by flunkies. His new understudy is nothing if not ideologically flexible: if he changed his mind on Mr Trump, might he switch tunes on Ukraine, too? Bluster aside, Mr Vance sometimes sounds reasonable. He thinks America should remain in NATO, the very institution de Gaulle partially pulled France out of; and that Russia seizing all of Ukraine would not be in the interest of America.

Best to think of Mr Vance as repeating, in a different register, what both Mr Trump and his foes have been saying for over a decade. His bashing of free trade is a continuation not just of the Trump administration’s, but the Biden one’s too. That Europe needs to carry more of the burden to defend itself, given that America wants to “pivot” to other priorities, was first mooted by Barack Obama. There is an opportunity for Europe: if a Trumpian America wants to isolate China, its diplomatic and security efforts will be far more effective with Europe alongside it, for example.

In Brussels and beyond, the mere prospect of a Trump-Vance combo in the White House ought to add urgency to the debate about Europe’s future. How can it fund the defence spending it needs to make up for two decades of over-indulging in the post-cold war “peace dividend”, and thus not be so dependent on America? A summit of EU leaders on October 17th—in the final throes of the presidential campaign in America, as it happens—is due to consider its 27 members jointly borrowing hundreds of billions to upgrade their military capabilities. Germany is sceptical. France is in favour. It is what J.D. Vance would want, after all. ■

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