In his own remarks, the vice-president told students that Volodymyr Zelensky had made a “completely scandalous” attack on Orbán by inciting Ukrainian soldiers to give him a piece of their mind. Vance also accused the EU of “foreign influence operations” to affect the Hungarian election.
How strange. Here was the American vice-president conducting his own foreign influence operation in a faraway country of which he knows little. Here was the No. 2 of Nato’s dominant partner supporting a government which colludes with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Nato’s main enemy.
A recent phone leak shows Orbán telling Putin that he (Orbán) is the ingenious mouse assisting Putin the lion. The Hungarian foreign minister has allegedly leaked secrets of EU meetings to his Moscow counterpart.
Yet, to the US administration, Orbán is a hero. Vance never admits that Russia invaded a sovereign country to change the borders of Europe by force. To the Hungarians, he described the war in Ukraine as “haggling over a few hundred square kilometres of territory”.
In the same week in which the vice-president was supporting Putin’s most assiduous mole (or mouse) within the EU and Nato, President Trump declared, in relation to Iran, that “NATO WASN’T THERE WHEN WE NEEDED THEM, AND THEY WON’T BE THERE IF WE NEED THEM AGAIN,” thus implying the alliance is useless and America isn’t in it.
By contrast, Trump seems content that Russia actively helps Iran. He happily lifted sanctions on Russian oil when the conflict began. President Zelensky tweeted on Friday: “Now a ceasefire is beginning in the Middle East and the Gulf. And I am waiting for sanctions on Russian oil to be fully reimposed.” He speaks out because he fears Trump will not reimpose them.
All the above serves to prove that this American administration is an impossible ally. It will never properly consult you in advance. If you disagree with it, you will be publicly denounced. If you do what it wants, you will probably be unpopular at home; you will certainly be embarrassed when, not much later, the President reverses whichever decision you had supported.
You will become more bewildered still when you notice that Trump is pursuing a Right-wing version of Barack Obama’s Left-wing policy of being much nicer to the enemies of the United States than to its friends.
Under Trump, Russia and China are respected; Nato members are trashed. If the Iranian situation becomes trickier for him in the coming weeks, one could imagine him suddenly claiming that the Tehran regime is being reasonable and denouncing his closest ally, Israel, instead.
And yet, you cannot just give up and seek other allies. After all, from January 2029, Donald Trump will have left the White House. America will still be the top nation and better, from a Western point of view, than any likely global rival.
Even at the current nadir, Britain’s military, intelligence and cyber services and nuclear capabilities are closely entwined with America. Roughly 100,000 US service personnel remain in Europe. Our cultural, scientific, business and educational links are incalculably stronger than those with Russia or China. An alliance of freely trading Western democracies, keeping the sea-lanes open, dominated by the English language, Judaeo-Christian traditions and the rule of law, continues to be the most rational political, military, economic, commercial and human option.
So what can we do? How can we try to look through smoke of battle and find a clearer direction? By now, I feel, this column has kept Sir Keir waiting too long. It hereby invites him in.
On Friday, in The Guardian, he wrote, “The war in Iran must now become a line in the sand” – forgetting, presumably, that a line in the sand is the sort of line which is most easily effaced – “because how we emerge from this crisis will define all of us for a generation”.
The answer lies, says the Prime Minister, in “every element of our security”. “While staying out of the conflict, we’ve rebuilt our European alliances” (note the plural, which is code for “trying to rejoin the EU”). “Resilience” is “at the heart of my government’s approach” – in defence, energy, public finances, economic stability and long-term growth – creating “a country where people are not at the mercy of events abroad”.
The emphasis on security is welcome, but what is energy security based on renewables alone? And what does security mean in Britain when we spend roughly six times more on social security than on national security? When national security fails, those proportions can reverse. Ukraine has to spend about 35 per cent of its GDP on defence. Under Sir Keir’s plan, our own defence spending will not hit even 3 per cent until the 2030s.
Our weakness in defence means that our Navy could make little difference to the re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz – evidence that we are indeed at the mercy of events abroad.
Sir Keir also promised last month that we would “go after” Putin’s shadow fleet of sanction-busting tankers in the Channel, but this paper’s reporting on Wednesday proved otherwise. We don’t have the ships and the kit to risk confrontation.