Vice President JD Vance recently gave a phone interview to UnHerd, a British news and opinion website, focused on how he and the Trump administration view America’s European allies. The major takeaway is that while Vance still thinks the U.S. and the continent should be considered friends, despite the U.S. levying (and then suspending) large tariffs on European countries, he argued that there are a few caveats to that relationship. In making those points, Vance offered some truly bizarre takes on history.
Unsurprisingly, Vance harangued European governments for not listening to their own far-right parties and sharply limiting immigration. He also declared that it’s “not good for Europe to be the permanent security vassal of the United States.” The latter argument provided what was likely the most eye-catching quote for most readers, as Vance teed up a wildly ahistorical retelling of the lead-up to the Iraq War:
“Something I know a little bit more personally: I think a lot of European nations were right about our invasion of Iraq. And frankly, if the Europeans had been a little more independent, and a little more willing to stand up, then maybe we could have saved the entire world from the strategic disaster that was the American-led invasion of Iraq.”
There are a few things to unpack there. Most obviously, it’s not as though Europe (aside from the British) meekly went along with President George W. Bush’s march towards war France’s and Germany’s governments at the time were especially vocal in their opposition, denouncing U.S. warmongering at the United Nations. More than 1.5 million Europeans took to the streets to protest America’s belligerency in the month before Operation Shock and Awe began in 2003. The Bush administration scoffed at their lack of resolve, while pro-war Americans mockingly replaced french fries with “freedom fries."
This opposition came at the same time NATO members, including France and Germany, were participating in the war in Afghanistan. Even as they honored their obligations to their ally in response to the 9/11 attacks, they were still perfectly willing to disagree about plans to invade Iraq. They did so with no hesitancy or fear of reprisal in the form of reduced spending that one would expect from a vassal state. Short of threatening some form of retaliation of their own, a more independent European security structure wouldn’t have halted the Bush administration’s headlong sprint to war.
And finally, reduced U.S. military spending in Europe wouldn’t have stanched the American government’s desire to remove Saddam Hussein from power. It wasn’t until well after the U.S. invasion that the massive cost in dollars and lives began to take a toll on public opinion. If anything, the war might have dragged on even longer with similar results in that case.
Vance should know this: He joined the Marines shortly after the invasion and served for four years as a public affairs officer, including a six-month deployment to Iraq. It was literally part of his job to be informed about the way the world viewed the U.S. military. Yet despite his firsthand view, he has seemingly forgotten the backlash.
But as strange as that argument was, it wasn’t the most baffling one he made. That “honor” belongs to his characterization of an infamous, overcomplicated scheme carried out in the dying days of European colonialism. “I don’t think that Europe being more independent is bad for the United States — it’s good for the United States,” Vance said, starting off strong before going off the deep end. “Just going back through history, I think — frankly — the British and the French were certainly right in their disagreements with Eisenhower about the Suez Canal.”
For those not familiar with the Suez Crisis: In 1956, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal and its revenue, angering the U.K. and France, who had overseen the canal’s construction and operation. The two European countries connived with Israel, which was already planning to attack Egypt, to use the latter’s upcoming attack as a pretense to step in as peacekeepers and re-seize the canal.
Vance’s mangling of history is all the more aggravating because it’s so unnecessary.
It was classic neocolonialism poorly disguised as altruism that President Dwight Eisenhower rightly refused to condone. The U.S. worked at the U.N. to pressure the invaders until the British and the French relented and a real peacekeeping force could be launched to act as a buffer between Egypt and Israel.
The American response was based on global considerations, as the Soviet Union was invading Hungary at the same time. The British-French-Israeli failure had nothing to do with Europe’s reliance on U.S. security guarantees. According to Vance, though, the U.S. should have let the Europeans bully the Egyptians into submission — which isn’t exactly encouraging given the Trump administration’s rumblings about control over the Panama Canal.
Vance’s mangling of history is all the more aggravating because it’s so unnecessary. There are good-faith cases for encouraging Europe to envision a world where the U.S. isn’t the main guarantor of their security. The security umbrella was originally meant not just to deter the Soviet Union but also to help give the Europeans a chance to stop fighting each other after two World Wars, a goal that has been resoundingly achieved. And there are arguably more pressing concerns for U.S. interests in other parts of the world for which a strategic rebalancing would be mutually beneficial.
Instead, Vance missed a chance to be correct in favor of sounding smarter than everyone else, one of the most annoying habits of bad nerds everywhere. This isn’t the first time that his fast-and-loose approach to history has drawn criticism, and it probably won’t be the last. There’s a never-ending demand from the right for the sort of pseudointellectualism that Vance delivers to help justify the MAGA policies that have sprung from nowhere but Donald Trump’s own muddled thought process.