Germany’s Welt newspaper is warning that Donald Trump’s pick for vice president, J.D. Vance, is bad for Europe in a new editorial peice, noting that Vance has been harshly critical of Germany and other European countries, and is considered even more isolationist than Trump himself.
The paper further writes that Vance may very well push for large cuts in foreign aid to Ukraine.
“The newly appointed vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance is known for his digs against Europe. The 39-year-old is not only regarded as a key critic of aid to Ukraine, but also as far more isolationist than Donald Trump himself. This can be seen in his statements about Germany,” Die Welt writes.
Last year, he criticized the country, particularly with regard to its involvement in Ukraine. He called on Berlin to take a stronger role in the conflict. The Bundeswehr was a hopeless case, and he described Germany’s energy policy under the traffic light government as “idiotic.”
“Germany’s conduct in this war is disgraceful, and it’s insulting to our voters that too many Republicans go along with it. All of their promises have materialized into manure,” Vance wrote in a social media post last March. “Why do American taxpayers subsidize idiotic German energy policy and weak defense policy? A mystery.”
At a panel discussion at the Munich Security Conference in February, where, coincidentally, Green Party leader Ricarda Lang was also sitting, he said of Germany:
“You are deindustrializing your own country while at the same time saying that Putin must be defeated at all costs. If Putin must be defeated at all costs, then, dear German friends, stop deindustrializing your own country in the name of a ridiculous green energy policy.” Instead, Europe should finally “take a more aggressive role in terms of its own security.”
Vance also attacked Germany’s defense capabilities in an article in the Financial Times in February of this year:
“Germany spends considerably more on defense each year than France, with nothing to show for it. The French army has six highly capable combined-arms brigades (…) but the Bundeswehr can barely scrape together a single combat-capable brigade,” Vance wrote. Germany is the most important economy in Europe, but at the same time, it is dependent on imported energy and borrowed military strength.
An EU official has already described Vance as a “disaster” for Ukraine, writes Politico magazine.
However, Germany is not Vance’s only target. He recently described Great Britain as an “Islamist country.”
“I was talking to a friend recently, and we were talking about how one of the greatest dangers in the world is, of course, the proliferation of nuclear weapons,” he said last week at the National Conservatism conference in Washington. “And I talked about which is the first really Islamist country that’s going to get a nuclear weapon. And we thought maybe it would be Iran, maybe Pakistan would somehow be one of them. And then we finally decided that it might actually be the U.K. since Labour had just taken over the government.”
Vance criticized the European Union for its decision to withhold funds from Hungary and Poland over concerns about democracy and the rule of law: “You know, the EU withheld billions of dollars in promised aid from Hungary because it had a different opinion on Ukraine. It withheld billions of dollars in promised aid from a previous government in Poland because of the views of the conservative Polish government,” he said in February. “This is not a rules-based order. This is Europe, from Brussels and Berlin, imposing liberal, imperialist views on the rest of the continent.”