No issue animates the Vice President more than his hostility towards governments across Europe, including our own
As 2026 gets under way, the closing weeks of the old year have suggested that over the next 12 months, Vice President JD Vance will become increasingly emboldened, promoting himself as the inevitable successor to Donald Trump.
While the current US President is still toying with the idea of trying to circumvent the constitution in order to seek a third term in office, Vance is sending his boss a series of increasingly unsubtle messages that the Make America Great Again revolution will be safe in his hands.
No issue animates Vance more than his hostility towards governments across Europe, including our own. Last February, he stunned European leaders by telling the Munich Security Conference that their continent faced a “threat from within”, and lectured them with the blistering claim that “democracy will not survive if…people’s concerns are deemed invalid or, even worse, not worth being considered”.
New FeatureIn ShortQuick Stories. Same trusted journalism.
The speech served as the Vice President’s coming-out party in Europe, and with hindsight can be viewed as his opening salvo in a campaign that has now found full voice in the US government’s official National Security Strategy.
Vance, a political chameleon for much of his life, is a key influence behind the strategy’s argument that immigration will soon leave Europe facing “civilisational erasure”. But beyond his enthusiastic backing of the Trump administration’s masked agents seizing people off America’s streets, he is also the lead administration voice warning Europe over what he claims is the continent’s “backsliding” on freedom of speech.
Vance and second lady Usha Vance tour the US military’s Pituffik Space Base in Greenland in March shortly after Trump threatened to take the island by force (Photo: Jim Watson/AP)
Last week, the US announced sanctions against five Europeans, including former EU commissioner Thierry Breton, and British nationals Clare Melford of the Global Disinformation Index, and Imran Ahmed, founder of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate. The State Department used astonishing language to describe their alleged offences, with phrases more usually found embedded in the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list.
Breton is described as “a mastermind of the Digital Services Act”, European regulations that Vance and other leading figures in Trump world vigorously oppose because they seek to hold America’s social media businesses accountable for their excesses. Ahmed is called a “key collaborator” with the Biden administration, and Melford is accused of exhorting “censorship and blacklisting…American speech and press”.
The PayPal founder Peter Thiel is one of the prominent voices in the Vice President’s ear (Photo: Nordin Catic/Getty)
All of this is pure, authentic Vance. At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last year, he even posited the possibility of withdrawing US troops based in Germany. Observing that the deployment of 34,500 military personnel is a burden on the public purse, he asked rhetorically whether “you think that the American taxpayer is going to stand for that if you get thrown in jail in Germany for posting a mean tweet?” Europe and America, he said, will not continue to enjoy “shared values if you’re jailing people for saying we should close down our border”.
In demanding that sovereign governments across Europe should not even attempt to regulate big American tech, Vance is channelling the viewpoint of his political ally Elon Musk. While their views on social media regulation coincide politically, Vance also knows that if he seeks the presidency in 2028, he will need the support of Musk’s social media blow-torch, and his limitless financial resources. This week, The Washington Post reported that Vance played a central role as peacemaker last year between Musk and Trump, and had also talked Musk out of launching his own political party that threatened to siphon support away from the Republicans.   Â
Other prominent voices in the Vice President’s ear include PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who donated a staggering $15m (£11m) to Vance’s campaign in 2022 for a Senate seat in Ohio. Thiel, a libertarian who claimed in 2009 that democracy and freedom are incompatible, was one of the first Silicon Valley billionaires to back Trump in 2016.
Musk, Trump and Vance during the presidential race in 2024. The Vice President will need Musk by his side if he runs for president (Photo: Alex Brandon/AP)
Vance is also a vocal supporter of Trump’s threats to wrest Greenland away from Denmark’s control. As early as March 2025, he told Fox News: “Denmark…it’s not doing its job and it’s not being a good ally…If that means that we need to take more territorial interest in Greenland, that is what President Trump is going to do, because he doesn’t care about what the Europeans scream at us.”
While Trump’s mercurial nature means that anything he says can quickly be reversed, in August he appeared to give Vance an early nod for 2028, calling the Vice President his “most likely” successor. Two weeks ago, Secretary of State Marco Rubio indicated that he would not seek the Republican presidential nomination if Vance went ahead with a run. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and other dissident Maga voices are possible runners and riders in the race to follow Trump into the Oval Office.
But Vance is lining up the money, the political philosophy, and the backing of Musk and Thiel for the job. Unlike Trump, he’s disciplined, focused and a key architect of the ideology that is driving America’s lurch to the right. The firmer Vance’s grip on power becomes in 2026, the more worried European governments should become.