{"id":21699,"date":"2025-04-15T10:09:07","date_gmt":"2025-04-15T10:09:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/21699\/"},"modified":"2025-04-15T10:09:07","modified_gmt":"2025-04-15T10:09:07","slug":"europe-cant-be-a-permanent-security-vassal-of-the-us-politico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/21699\/","title":{"rendered":"Europe can\u2019t be a \u2018permanent security vassal\u2019 of the US \u2013 POLITICO"},"content":{"rendered":"

Vance\u2019s comments land as President Donald Trump\u2019s administration repeatedly hammers European capitals over their overreliance on American military might for their own defense, while hinting repeatedly<\/a> that the U.S. would not come to the aid of NATO allies who don\u2019t invest in their own security. U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also warned American military presence in Europe<\/a> is not \u201cforever.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Trump wants NATO countries to spend 5 percent of their GDP on defense \u2014\u00a0a sharp increase from the alliance\u2019s current 2 percent target, which is set to increase at a summit in The Hague this summer.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think that Europe being more independent is bad for the United States \u2014 it\u2019s good for the United States,\u201d Vance said. \u201cJust going back through history, I think \u2014 frankly \u2014 the British and the French were certainly right in their disagreements with Eisenhower about the Suez Canal.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the 1950s, U.S. leader Dwight Eisenhower forced London and Paris, before de Gaulle became president, to back down from a military intervention to regain control of the Suez Canal from Egypt, which was key to the countries\u2019 economic and colonial interests.\u00a0<\/p>\n

With the exception of Britain, France and Poland, \u201cmost European nations don\u2019t have militaries that can provide for their reasonable defence,\u201d Vance argued. \u201cThe reality is \u2014 it\u2019s blunt to say it, but it\u2019s also true \u2014 that Europe\u2019s entire security infrastructure, for my entire life, has been subsidized by the United States of America.\u201d<\/p>\n

De Gaulle, whose thinking was shaped by Suez, frequently warned that Europeans should be more independent from the U.S., and worked to make the French military more autonomous, including by developing nuclear weapons and a powerful defense industry. He inspired a decades-long push<\/a> for what current French President Emmanuel Macron now calls \u201cstrategic autonomy.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Vance\u2019s comments land as President Donald Trump\u2019s administration repeatedly hammers European capitals over their overreliance on American military…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21700,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5311],"tags":[32,36,38,2348,10470,601,2597,13994,1771,1772,49,978,659,1116],"class_list":{"0":"post-21699","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-donald-trump","9":"tag-france","10":"tag-french-politics","11":"tag-history","12":"tag-iraq","13":"tag-jd-vance","14":"tag-military","15":"tag-military-strategy","16":"tag-u-s-foreign-policy","17":"tag-u-s-politics","18":"tag-united-states","19":"tag-us","20":"tag-usa","21":"tag-weapons"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114341436677808821","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21699"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21699\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}