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Donald Trump’s choice of Ohio senator J.D. Vance as his running mate in the presidential election has reignited European fears of American abandonment. Vance is known for his opposition to aid for Ukraine and his almost singular focus on China as the defining security challenge for the United States.
If Trump wins in November, Vance as his vice president would further the reorientation of US foreign and security policy away from the Euro-Atlantic area towards the Indo-Pacific. And given Vance’s likely aspirations for the presidency in a post-Trump era, this will have significant implications beyond another Trump presidency.
By choosing Vance, Trump plans to lock in his brand of American populism. It’s a choice that signals the former president’s now complete control over the Republican party and its future direction. More than anything else, Vance’s appointment as running mate signals the end of the post-1945 internationalist US foreign policy consensus.
European leaders are thus rightly worried about the continuing US commitment to European security. At the Munich security conference in February 2024, Vance reportedly told his European interlocutors that he is “much more interested in some of the problems in east Asia right now than I am in Europe”.
For Vance, the choice is a zero-sum game: arms for Ukraine would be better sent to Taiwan. In April 2024, he wrote a scathing op-ed in the New York Times arguing that rather than providing more military aid to Ukraine, Washington should convince Kyiv to give up on the goal of restoring its full sovereignty within its internationally recognised borders of 1991 and start negotiating with Russia.
This is a position shared by Trump and appreciated by Russian president Vladimir Putin. Unsurprisingly, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, immediately welcomed Trump’s pick of Vance as his running mate.
If America decided to end its support for Ukraine, there is little prospect that the European allies could plug this gap. Without American military technology and the intelligence and communications network that only the US can provide, Ukraine would be unable to resist the relentless Russian onslaught.
Despite European concerns over a likely shift in US support away from Ukraine in the event of a Trump win in November, Germany is planning to halve its military aid for Kyiv next year from the €8 billion (£6.7 billion) provided in 2024.
In a purely material sense, this is offset by an agreement reached among the G7 nations at their summit in Italy in June, 2024, to use US$3 billion (£2.3 billion) annually accruing in interest from frozen Russia assets as leverage to support a US$50 billion loan to Ukraine.
But in a more symbolic sense, the German proposal to cut bilateral aid to Ukraine sends the politically much more damaging message that Kyiv’s key European allies are unlikely to step into any gap left by the US.
Little wonder, then, that even Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, appears to understand the writing on the wall. He has now indicated that the time for negotiations with Russia may be nearing.
Read more: Russia’s reasons for invading Ukraine — however debatable – shouldn’t be ignored in a peace deal
Europe exposed
The Russian aggression against Ukraine clearly poses the most significant and immediate threat to European security. But even if the war ends through a negotiated settlement, this would do little to enhance European security in the longer term.
Putin’s Russia has proven to be an untrustworthy negotiation partner before, as the collapse of the 2014 and 2015 Minsk ceasefire agreements clearly demonstrates. There was a path to peace and stability and Russia chose not to take it. There is no evidence that any new agreement struck with Putin would fare any better.
What’s more, any agreement with Russia to end the war in Ukraine is likely to accelerate the feared US abandonment of Europe. With the war against Ukraine brought to a – probably temporary – close, a Trump-led administration in Washington would feel further emboldened to complete its security pivot towards the Indo-Pacific and focus solely on China.
Ascendant Trump-aligned forces in Europe on both the extreme right and extreme left of the political spectrum would likely also see this as an opportunity to advocate for an appeasement of Russia and a lowering of defence budgets. In a White House with a China-focused view of the world, winning over Russia to the American side is a long-term strategic goal.
Yet, this would be a serious folly, endangering European security in the long term. It would not only put trust into an untrustworthy Russian leadership. It would also neglect China’s importance when it comes to European security.
A complete US pivot to the Indo-Pacific is not in China’s interest. So it would be logical to use Russia as a proxy to stir up trouble in the Euro-Atlantic theatre. Apart from anything else, this would undermine the prospects of any European assistance to the US in the Indo-Pacific.
It also underestimates how much Russia and China are a common security problem that the US and Europe share. Efforts by Moscow and Beijing to form a military, political and economic counterweight to the US and Europe may still be in their infancy, but they are becoming more concerted. This much was evident at the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, of which Russia and China are leading members, in early July 2024.
Read more: Xi and Putin talk up growth of their Eurasian bloc organisation as counterweight to Nato
So the problem for European security is not primarily that Trump and Vance want to focus away from Russia towards China. It’s what this does to the future of the transatlantic security community that has its roots in the 1941 Atlantic charter and was one of the key pillars of international security, prefiguring the foundation of Nato in 1949.
Weakening this transatlantic link will inevitably strengthen an emerging Sino-Russian Eurasian alliance. Thus, a US retreat from its traditional role as the guarantor of European security will pose many challenges for Europe. This includes how much it is prepared to spend on its own defence and how it organises the strategic response to these new realities.
Stefan Wolff is a past recipient of grant funding from the Natural Environment Research Council of the UK, the United States Institute of Peace, the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK, the British Academy, the NATO Science for Peace Programme, the EU Framework Programmes 6 and 7 and Horizon 2020, as well as the EU's Jean Monnet Programme. He is a Trustee and Honorary Treasurer of the Political Studies Association of the UK and a Senior Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Centre in London.
David Hastings Dunn has previously received funding from the ESRC, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Open Democracy Foundation and has previously been both a NATO and a Fulbright Fellow.
