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| Vice President JD Vance waves during a bilateral meeting with the president of the European Commission in Paris on Tuesday. (Ian Langsdon/AFP/Getty Images) |
| Vice President JD Vance is in Europe this week for major summits in Paris and Munich. At a forum on artificial intelligence in the French capital, Vance lectured his European counterparts about their “risk aversion” and slammed the European Union’s efforts to regulate the burgeoning AI industry and keep tech companies in check. The former Ohio senator was a key conduit for Big Tech financiers and their interests into the Trump campaign. In Paris, he spoke of the United States as an AI juggernaut that had little time for the “hand-wringing” over tech safety and corporate abuse in Brussels and scoffed at the “trepidation” of European politicians. He left Tuesday without listening to the main speeches of French President Emmanuel Macron and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
The next stop for Vance is the Munich Security Conference, an annual event in the Bavarian city that brings together many of the world’s leading diplomats and defense officials. As a U.S. lawmaker on the rise, Vance appeared a year ago in Munich, where he cast doubt on an indefinite U.S. commitment to Ukraine’s defense against Russian invasion and more broadly called on Europe to do more to bolster its own security. He’s expected to repeat those calls later this week, and will meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as the Trump administration starts laying out its vision for bringing an end to the war. Much to the disquiet of some officials in Europe, Vance and President Donald Trump have found common cause with figures once on Europe’s fringe, including nationalists on the far right with conspicuous connections to the Kremlin. Last year at Munich, Vice President Kamala Harris warned against threats to the pillars of the transatlantic alliance, gesturing to an abandonment of traditional partners and an embrace of autocrats that would be “dangerous, destabilizing and indeed shortsighted.” Harris’s fears may soon be realized. E.U. officials are already reeling from Trump’s latest announcement of tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. Von der Leyen vowed retaliation on Tuesday on U.S. goods. “Tariffs are taxes — bad for business, worse for consumers,” she said. “Unjustified tariffs on the E.U. will not go unanswered — they will trigger firm and proportionate countermeasures.” The Biden administration had framed its investment in Ukraine’s defense as a matter of values and principles, linking Ukraine’s independence and sovereignty to the cause of liberal democracies everywhere. Trump and his allies are not interested in such lofty ideals, and Ukraine appears eager to appeal to the president’s transactionalist instincts, proffering access to some half-a-trillion dollars worth of the country’s critical elements and minerals as an incentive to persuade Trump to maintain U.S. support. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz described the rumored arrangement as “very egotistic, very self-centered,” arguing last week that Ukraine was better served using its resources to finance its postwar reconstruction — not bargain for security assistance now. Trump, though, is unlikely to worry about such complaints, not least because Scholz is a lame duck leader whose ruling party faces a potentially humbling defeat in elections later this month. In his meetings Tuesday, as officials grappled with the prospect of a new trade war, Vance said the Trump administration wanted to rebalance its relationship with Europe. “The Trump administration has been very clear: We care a lot about Europe, we see a lot of economic relations to build upon with Europe,” Vance said. “And we also want to make sure that we’re actually engaged in a security partnership that’s good for both Europe and the United States.” | ||||||
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| Left to right: Geert Wilders, leader of the far-right Dutch Freedom Party; Marine Le Pen, leader of far-right French party National Rally; Santiago Abascal, leader of Spanish far-right party Vox; Viktor Orban, Hungary's prime minister; and Matteo Salvini, Italian deputy prime minister, at a rally in Madrid on Saturday. (Pablo Blazquez Dominguez/Getty Images) |
| However these new imperatives play out, there’s a cohort on the continent that’s thrilled by Trump’s advance. Last weekend, leading figures of Europe’s far right convened at a gathering hosted by Spain’s ultranationalist party Vox in Madrid. Many of the speeches poured scorn on Brussels and welcomed the Trumpist “revolution” unfurling in Washington, where the new administration has set about exercising its radical agenda to overhaul government, bend federal agencies to its will, slash funding to others and police political ideology. Many of the White House’s efforts were applauded at the Madrid event, convened under the slogan “Make Europe Great Again.” “New technologies are beginning to collaborate with the battle for freedom,” Vox leader Santiago Abascal said, referring to the growing alliance between billionaire tech CEOs such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and the Trump administration. Abascal laughed off the threat of Trump’s tariffs, saying the real danger lay in Europe’s “Green Deal and the confiscatory taxes of Brussels and socialist governments across Europe.” A host of other leaders similarly touted the backlash to environmental legislation, and praised Trump and other far-right European leaders for pushing back against “wokeism,” “gender ideology” and immigration. Herbert Kickl, the Austrian far-right leader who may soon be the country’s new chancellor, declared that “people everywhere are rising against the impositions of the E.U. centralists and left-wing ideologies.” French far-right leader Marine Le Pen pointed to the victories of like-minded politicians from Argentina to the United States to various countries in Western Europe as a sign of an illiberal “renaissance” that was “awakening” the West. Geert Wilders, the virulently Islamophobic leader of the Dutch far right, hailed Spain’s 15th century “Reconquista,” when its Catholic monarchy drove out the last Muslim kingdoms in Iberia. Abascal, Italian far-right politician Matteo Salvini and Le Pen all summoned similar anti-Islam rhetoric. “The Trump tornado has changed the world in two weeks,” said Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, arguably the most senior of the leaders at the Madrid gathering, and a figure much lionized by U.S. Republicans, including Vance. “Yesterday, we were the heretics; today, we’re mainstream. People thought we represented the past; today, everyone sees that we are the future.” Much of what was aired in Madrid echoes in Moscow, where ideologues allied to the regime of President Vladimir Putin share in the Trumpist and European far-right’s contempt for the West’s liberal, cosmopolitan establishment. The rampaging first few weeks of Trump’s second term has offered a glimpse of a new political epoch. “We started the war against liberalism in our country and in Ukraine,” wrote Russian far-right thinker Aleksandr Dugin in a blog post this week. “But the decisive blow against it was delivered by the Americans themselves.” |