It is difficult to not be astounded by the historical amnesia of the current US administration. Most recently exemplified by Vice President J.D. Vance, who, in a now infamous leaked group chat, laments Europe’s military freeloading and expresses his hatred for having to ’bail out’ the continent’s decadent offspring once more. One might get the impression that he is referring to some age-old arrangement, as if Americans have been compelled for generations to wield Europe’s sword while the Europeans sipped Pernod and debated Camus. The truly remarkable aspect is that this narrative is not merely a falsehood but almost the exact opposite of the truth.
For the greater part of the post-war period, it was not the Europeans who pleaded to shelter under the American security umbrella; it was the Americans who insisted on holding the handle. U.S. foreign policy after 1945, from Truman to Clinton via Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan, was characterised by an explicit reluctance towards Europe regaining military independence. When Charles de Gaulle in 1966 decided to withdraw France from NATO’s military structures and asked the U.S. to take its nuclear weapons home, he was regarded in Washington as an ungrateful enfant terrible, despite doing precisely what Vance and his ilk now pretend to have desired: for Europe to take responsibility for its own defence.
However, the Americans did not want an armed, independent Europe. They desired a dependent, fragmented, and subordinate Europe, a Europe that served as both a market and a base area, but never a rival. Hence the Marshall Plan, hence Bretton Woods, hence NATO, which from the outset was far less a mutual alliance than an American military protectorate. ’We have to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down,’ as NATO’s first Secretary General, Lord Ismay, articulated with brutal clarity. What Vance’s chatroom buddies seem to forget is that the European pacifism they now bemoan is a direct result of an American security policy that, with surgical precision, rendered Europe dependent.
It is therefore nothing short of absurd that Vice President Vance now attempts to rewrite history, portraying the U.S. as a reluctant guardian of Europe when it was Washington that, by every available means, ensured Europe’s dependence in the first place.
The truly cynical aspect is that this revision occurs precisely at the moment when Europe, for the first time in fifty years, has actually begun to take its military responsibility seriously. The increased defence expenditures following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are not a result of American demands but of European self-preservation. Yet Vance and his ideological comrades, in a simultaneous act of denial and self-pity, pretend that Europe is a burden that must be borne, rather than a showcase for an American empire that largely built its power precisely on European subjugation.
One is reminded of Gibbon’s remark in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, that ’history is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.’ In the group chats of our modern patricians, this has never rung truer. The crimes and follies are not only committed—they are promptly forgotten, and then projected upon the very continents they once shaped to their liking.
All this is not to suggest that European leaders have not been complicit in creating this situation. Many have gladly allocated their countries budgets to other sectors while the US kept the continent safe. However, to ignore the historical aspects and only see the emerging situation is to deliberately disregard decades of political evolution.
