JD Vance’s UnHerd address to Europe arrives not as the idle musings of a junior senator, but as a soft-edged doctrine from the Vice President of the United States. We are meant to receive it as common-sense realism. In fact, it’s the early language of an imperial restoration, dressed down, made familiar, draped in the rhetoric of fraternity. Like all such messages, it comes with conditions.
Vance is no longer merely Trump’s protégé. He is the ideological ballast of this second presidency, its mouthpiece in sensible shoes. While Trump bellows and Stephen Miller drafts orders in blood and ink, it is Vance who interprets. He gives Trumpism a veneer of Midwestern pragmatism, though he trades more in Appalachian grievance, translating its revanchist instincts into a policy language that flatters the insecure and punishes the weak.
His message to Europe is simple, patronising, and unmistakably violent. Europe has grown soft, he says. NATO has made us lazy. Our publics are unprotected, our leaders out of touch. Migration, he insists, is being foisted on people who don’t want it. The remedy? Bigger militaries, harder borders, and policies that make technocrats wince and racists cheer. It’s the same old reactionary brew, but poured this time into a cup stamped Anglosphere Alliance.
The British, he assures us, are different. Vance offers up a bit of flattery, just enough to keep the usual suspects in our political class from asking awkward questions. Britain, he says, has kept its military tradition alive. One suspects he hasn’t seen the state of our armed forces. The British Army is now so depleted that it couldn’t fill Old Trafford on match day. But facts aren’t the point. Vance is extending a hand, not in friendship, but in expectation. This is what loyalty earns you: a mention in the speech and a place in the queue.
When he turns to Ukraine, the tone shifts. Gone is the glib Anglo-American nostalgia. What remains is pure transactionalism. Yes, he says, Putin is bad, but the Ukrainians need to be realistic. Zelenskyy should watch his tone. After all, the Americans have paid, and they expect returns. Vance doesn’t say this, but it hangs in the air like cordite: gratitude is not free.
And then there’s the real lesson, buried in the middle of his remarks: Vance does not believe in multilateralism, or cooperation, or any notion of politics larger than the nation-state and the free market. He sees the European Union not as a flawed project to be improved, but as a decadent edifice to be mocked. The very idea of collective action makes him queasy. Power, in his vision, should be hard, sovereign, and always in service of the domestic ruling class.
What’s alarming is how well this message will travel. Britain, after all, has spent the last decade making itself a test case for exactly the kind of retreat Vance promotes. We left the EU in a fit of sovereign fever. We broke our own supply chains and called it independence. We applauded Priti Patel, then Suella Braverman, while the Channel filled with corpses. And now, in Starmer, we have a Labour Prime Minister who promises border enforcement as a virtue, who speaks of NATO as though it were a sacrament.
Vance’s power doesn’t lie in his rhetoric. It lies in how thoroughly he understands the anxieties of a crumbling hegemony. He is the ideologue of a declining empire that still wants to act like a sheriff. That he comes wrapped in the tones of reason, speaking calmly about tariffs, heritage, and public opinion, makes him all the more effective. He is the translator of cruelty into coherence.
There is a temptation, especially among liberals, to treat figures like Vance and Trump as outliers, curiosities of a broken system. But that is to misunderstand the moment. Vance is not the exception. He is the rule, polished and rebooted. His message to Europe is a warning disguised as a handshake. Accept our terms, or face our withdrawal. Be useful, or be irrelevant. Keep up, or be left behind.
This is not an invitation. It is a script. And if we aren’t careful, we’ll find ourselves acting in it, again, without realising this time fascists wrote the lines.
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