It may have been meant as little more than a rhetorical wave of the hand, but it was enough to win him the ire of almost the entire British media for 24 hours. In the wake of Zelensky and Trump’s disastrous falling out in the Oval Office on the last day of February, US Vice President J.D. Vance appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show to offer his assessment of the situation.
Warning the Ukrainians not to be led astray by hollow European rhetoric, he advised that “the very best security guarantee is to give Americans an upside in the economic future of Ukraine” and not “twenty thousand troops from some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years”.
Many British commentators assumed this was a reference to Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron’s stillborn offer of peacekeeping troops in the event of a ceasefire, and that by extension, Vance was suggesting that neither the UK nor France had fought a war since 1985. This was declared to be an outrageous slur upon those British troops who had fought and died alongside the Americans in Afghanistan, Iraq and half a dozen other theatres over the last few decades.
Despite Vance’s protestations that he had not been referring to the UK and that he held the contribution by Britain’s armed forces in Iraq in great respect, the fact that Britain and France were the only countries who had made a formal offer of peacekeeping troops in Ukraine led many observers to conclude that he was simply backtracking having realised that he’d overstepped the mark.
Vance’s phrasing was clumsy, sure, and his comments were made in the context of an informal, rambling discussion with a friendly interviewer, in which he clearly wasn’t worried about being challenged. Still, my own hunch was that the specificity of “twenty thousand” peacekeeping troops was spurious, and that observers were reading too much into it by linking it to the Anglo-French plan. Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron had made the proposal for the eventuality of a ceasefire, which would have required Zelensky to engage with Trump’s proposals. In any case the White House had rendered the Anglo-French plan moot by confirming that the US would not consider offering a security guarantee to any physical peacekeeping mission. As this had been a precondition of the proposal, the plan was dead in the water and there wouldn’t have been any need for Vance to attack it, even if it had conflicted with Trump’s plans.
Less specifically, there has been a huge amount of conjecture in European media, and in remarks made by European politicians, about Europe stepping up and defending itself, and filling the gap that would be left by the anticipated abandonment of Ukraine by Trump’s America. This type of discourse had been extremely prominent in the days immediately following the public falling out between Trump and Zelensky. Keir Starmer had convened a meeting at Lancaster House in London to coordinate Europe’s response to the breakdown of American and Ukrainian dialogue, which saw a great deal of this type of commentary by European leaders.
The European commission president Ursula Von Der Leyen had said that Europe must “urgently” rearm and help Ukraine turn into a “steel porcupine” that proves “indigestible for future invaders”, and that Europe must “put Ukraine in a position of strength”. Kaja Kallas, the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs, had said in the immediate aftermath of the Oval Office meeting that the free world “needs a new leader” and that “it’s up to us, Europeans, to take this challenge.” Guy Verhofstadt — a former MEP whom many in Brussels still seem to take seriously for some reason — called for the creation of a European Defence Community, including an EU Army. In fact almost every senior EU figure, from the European Council President Charles Michel, to the heads of government of many of its 27 member states, had made comments to the effect that it was time for Europe to act.
Examined individually, few of these comments seemed to be saying anything Europeans have not been saying ever since it became clear that Trump was likely to regain the presidency, or indeed throughout the war. Verhofstadt, for example, has been calling for an EU Army for many years. But the sudden flurry of statements, accompanied by breathless reporting across EU media, made these comments feel far more substantive than they ever had done previously.
Most Europeans, and certainly most American politicians and diplomats, know to take such statements with a pinch of salt. It is political and social signalling on the part of the people making the statement; the kind of cost-free countersignalling against Trump that has been the common currency of European politics for at least nine years now. The European Union requires a degree of coordination and unity of purpose that it has very seldom mustered in order to make such momentous changes. In recent years, the only circumstances in which the EU has been able to act decisively in any policy area has been when the Chancellor of Germany has acted as a firm hand on the rudder. That office is currently occupied by a caretaker, and his successor is unlikely to take a decisive role on defence or security policy.
It is France that has traditionally been seen as the leader on defence matters, but even on that subject, France does not enjoy the leverage that Germany is periodically able to exert over economic or migration policies. And in any case, Emmanuel Macron seems to be taking a similar circumspect position on Ukraine as Keir Starmer.
But while Europeans may understand that there is a difference between official statements and political reality, there is a danger that this is being misinterpreted in Ukraine. During the earlier phases of the war, Zelensky’s government learned to work with European governments to influence the Biden administration, and there was some indication in the lead up to the February 28th meeting that the Ukrainians were trying to use similar tactics with Trump. This backfired predictably as Trump responded with outrageous statements about the Ukrainian president’s character and political legitimacy. Following the falling out in Washington, Zelensky first appeared defiant before issuing a statement on Wednesday that he was willing to fall into line behind Trump’s plan, before appearing to change tack again.
There is clearly growing frustration among Trump’s inner circle that European promises (or suggestions) of support are planting seeds in Ukrainian minds that there might be an alternative to dealing with Donald Trump. Even if Zelensky himself is experienced enough now not to take European rhetoric at face value, what Trump is offering them sounds extremely unappealing, and any alternative offer, no matter how vague, makes it even harder for Zelensky to go through with the negotiations.
The Trump administration’s claim is that they are the first group of people in any position of authority (at least outside of Moscow) to have a coherent theory of how the war ends. Vance’s summary of the Biden Administration’s position, as it was apparently told to him, was that the US would go on supplying weapons to Ukraine for as long as it could, or for as long as Ukraine could go on fighting. I’m not aware of any alternative articulation of the previous administration’s strategy, and that does appear to be what they were thinking. Clearly, they were either unable or unwilling to offer Ukraine the kind of material assistance that could have meaningfully raised the costs of war to Russia to an unacceptable level, let alone provided the kind of sucker punch that would have knocked the Russians out of the Donbas. And if that wasn’t going to come from Biden, it most certainly wasn’t, and isn’t, going to come from Europe.
The result has been a drawn out, attritional war in which the West hoped that it was Russia that would be ground down and lose the will to fight first. This was justified on the grounds that not doing so doomed the inhabitants of Donbas to perpetual Russian occupation. By contrast, the new administration takes the view that the occupied territories are lost already, pointing at the complete absence of any credible military strategy to regain them. Continuing the fight will do nothing to alter that, and will simply waste a huge number of lives every month. Ukraine’s best bet under the circumstances, so Trump reckons, lies in him making Russia agree to stop bombing and trying to capture the rest of Ukraine (for now, anyway), and to drop any pretensions they have of influence over the Ukrainian state.
It will be a humiliating and painful climb down for the Ukrainians, who will presumably have to acknowledge Russia’s de facto administration over large areas of its former territory. Trump’s argument that it is the least worst of the outcomes facing Ukraine is therefore vulnerable to other outsiders implying they might have a better offer. This is where the administration’s frustration becomes especially acute, and why the Vice President gets drawn into language that belittles European nations and capabilities.
Vance regards the current White House as being a vehicle of unmatched power in recent western history; the sheer material heft of the United States of America combined with a president who finally has both the political mandate and the alacrity to use it if he has to. He sees this power as placing a huge weight of moral and political responsibility on the president’s shoulders; a responsibility which forces Trump to make calculations that are too difficult for lesser politicians who don’t share that immense burden of great office. And he is very much looking at the figureheads of the European Union as he does so.
The leaders of the EU are free to make grand statements of intent which they know will never be audited by history
The European Union has a great knack of taking political figures, such as the former heads of government of relatively small countries, and endowing them with the trappings of global statesmanship; the equivalents of those enjoyed by the leaders of superpowers. They have a sprawling bureaucracy of tens of thousands of the finest minds of a continent of 400 million souls. Tribute is paid by the leaders of 27 of the most advanced countries in the world, taking in the huge industrial powerhouses of Germany and the grandeur of France. From the vantage point of the Berlaymont, it is possible to feel they are the successors of Rome. It would feel almost unworthy of their office therefore, at moments of great global crisis, not to make weighty statements about how things will or will not be; after all, they are speaking for Europe itself.
But of course, there is no Caesar in Brussels. The European Union has three presidents, not one. While Americans may pride themselves on their constitutional system of checks and balances against an over-mighty executive, it is the Europeans who have perfected a system wherein truly nobody has the power to do anything significant. Instead it is a system in which an awful lot of insignificant things are done, which are then passed down to the member states to enforce. Should Guy Verhofstadt’s dream of a European army come true, it would find itself lacking an executive with anything like the political legitimacy to direct it. If that army were to be made potent enough to influence world affairs, history suggests that it would be forced to create such an executive itself. This is why member states are rightly wary of creating it at all.
Europe’s nations find themselves torn on the one hand between replicating in each state all of the basic security functions that would be pooled centrally in a truly unitary structure, or else losing the autonomy of action that comes with having their own armed forces. So far, they have chosen the former, and whatever people may say about the need for Europeans to unite to confront Putin, the most obvious lesson of the war in Ukraine is that a nation needs to be able to defend itself, alone if necessary.
There has been a tendency to project onto Ukraine and its government an aura of preternatural brilliance
With military power remaining at member-state level, the leaders of the EU are free to make grand statements of intent which they know will never be audited by history. We can look back now at the rise of ISIS, and Putin’s initial invasion of Donbas and the annexation of Crimea, and ask whether Barack Obama’s legacy is one of failure. Nobody asks the same of José Manuel Barroso or Baroness Ashton of Upholland. The closest that any European figure gets to that kind of historical scrutiny is Angela Merkel — and, as we can see, the European leaders who come closest to having real geopolitical power, the elected leaders of France, Britain and Poland, are the ones being most cautious about the signals they are sending out to Ukraine.
There has been a tendency to project onto Ukraine and its government an aura of preternatural brilliance. But it remains a very young post-Soviet republic with few traditions of good governance to draw upon, and an elite that is deeply inexperienced in international affairs. To them, Brussels really does look like the heart of a great and powerful empire; a rival to both Moscow and Washington. There is a very real risk that European rhetoric will be taken literally in Kyiv, and will lead Ukrainians into making disastrous miscalculations.
For the time being, Caesar is in Washington. And if Europe’s leaders are unhappy with that, they will have to forge something resembling a nation across the continent, something for which people will fight and which has the authority to wage war. But that will mean binding a single people out of Europe’s nations; a European demos, who will demand that the bureaucracy subject itself to the accountability of elected institutions. If that is an unappealing prospect for Europe’s national leaders who shy away from giving Brussels that kind of popular legitimacy, it is even less appealing for the bureaucracy itself. It is much easier to stick to lofty rhetoric, and leave the hard strategy to Washington.
