Europe is “our ally”, but it cannot be a “permanent vassal” of the United States for its safety and trade, American vice president JD Vance said Tuesday in an interview with the Unherd information site.
“We consider that Europe as our ally. We simply want an alliance where Europeans will be a bit more independent, and our relations in terms of security and commerce will be reflected,” said JD Vance, who has already taken it to European leaders several times.
“It is not good for Europe, and it is not of interest to America, that Europe is a permanent vassal of the United States in terms of security,” he insisted.
“A more independent Europe”
From his return to the White House, Donald Trump adds to the Europeans to spend more to guarantee their own defense and have strongly criticized the European Union, which remarkably accuses of pursuing an inequitable commercial policy towards the United States.
His vice president multiplied criticism against European leaders, considering in his speech in Munich last February that they did not fight enough against immigration, and that freedom of expression was threatened in Europe.
“The reality is that, it is brutal to say it, but it is true, all the European security infrastructure has been, from my birth, subsidized by the United States of America,” said JD Vance, in this interview with the British information site.
With the exception of France, the United Kingdom and Poland, according to him, “most European states do not have an army capable of guaranteeing a reasonable defense.”
At the beginning of March, it surprised Europeans by stating that for Ukraine, concluding an economic agreement with the United States would be “a better security guarantee than 20,000 soldiers from any country that has not fought the war for 30 or 40 years.”
“I do not believe that a more independent Europe is something bad for the United States,” he insisted, believing that in the past, a stronger Europe could have avoided “the strategic disaster” of the war launched in Iraq in 2003 by a coalition led by the United States.
Referring to the negotiations between London and Washington to conclude a bilateral economic agreement, the vice president considered that they had “good possibilities” to achieve an “excellent agreement that was the best for the two countries.”
Source: BFM TV
