European leaders were already panicking at the prospect of a Donald Trump victory, which looked likely even before Saturday’s assassination attempt galvanised support for the ex-president. But Trump’s announcement yesterday that he has chosen the 39-year-old Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate has sent them into a full-blown meltdown. According to Politico, the mood in Brussels, and in most European capitals, is that Vance’s appointment is “a disaster for Ukraine — and by extension for the European Union”. But why would that be the case?
Vance is more isolationist than any prominent member of the Republican Party, and has been the fiercest opponent in Congress of US financial and military support for Ukraine. He has often described the maximalist military-victory-at-all-costs strategy as completely unrealistic, claiming it has always been known in US foreign policy circles that “the idea that Ukraine was going to throw Russia back to the 1991 borders was preposterous.”
Ukraine “has gone from about 40 million people to 28 million people,” he told Tucker Carlson. “Men in their prime were killed, wounded or maimed. They’ll never be functional people ever again and that is what we have accomplished here: it has become a rump state that will become a permanent welfare client of the United States of America and of Nato, but I joke here when I say that Nato’s going to pick up the tab because we all know they won’t.”