Vice President JD Vance said during the Munich Leaders Meeting that the United States desires a shift in its partnership with European nations.
“I do still very much think that the United States and Europe are on the same team,” he said. “Sometimes I’ve been criticized as a hyperrealist. I think of foreign policy purely in terms of transactional values. What does America get out of it?”
“European civilization and American civilization — European culture and American culture — are very much linked,” he explained, describing that driving a “firm wedge” between the United States and Europe is “ridiculous.”
“It doesn’t mean that Europeans won’t criticize the United States or the United States won’t criticize Europe,” he said. “But I do think fundamentally, we have to be—and we are—on the same civilizational team.”
“Obviously, there’s a big question about what that means in the 21st Century,” Vance continued. “Obviously, the President and I believe that it means a little bit more European burden sharing on the defense side. I think it means, frankly, that all of us on both sides of the Atlantic have gotten a little bit too comfortable with the security posture of the last twenty years, and that, frankly, that security posture is not adequate to meet the challenges of the next twenty years.”
“So there are a lot of ways in which this alliance will evolve and change,” he said, going on to assert that while the European alliance is “very important,” the United States and Europe need to “talk about the big questions.”
