In an interview with the (largely sympathetic) Unherd website, we got the affable, upbeat version of “JD”, successor to the hard-line snark of punitive Vance, who has been busy telling Europe off for months. It is a reminder that this Veep is a protean figure – an outrider for the Maga movement, but capable of a switcheroo into schmoozing when it suits the cause.
Talking to – and more often at – hapless Europeans now appears to be part of his brief. Undoubtedly, there has been a tonal switch. The “JDV” in the Unherd version is fond of Europe but solemnly wishes it would get its act together on defence. It should not be a “vassal” of the US, he said, but at the same time should warm to being told off by Washington.
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“I love European people,” he blandished. “You can’t separate American culture from European culture.” Sceptics might reply that the present administration is having a good go at that.
But one reason for the cosier tone on the international stage is a desire to offset a blizzard of negative headlines which have followed the President’s abrupt row-back on tariffs. Only a couple of weeks ago these tariffs were presented as a definitive game-changer which would force concessions and prompt industrial production back to the US. The massive fall in bond markets and unease at the consequences for the more industrial end of Republican states appear to have worked their magic and corrected a reckless course.
His default setting in public is pugnacious. But even in the leaked messages of Trump’s inner circle discussing the timing of a range of missile attacks on Houthi insurgents in Yemen, Trump’s deputy is one of the voices asking whether it was tactically wise to act now, or better to prepare public opinion for the shift of a declared “peace president” to one ordering air attacks in the Middle East to protect shipping – a policy which looks a lot like his predecessor’s.
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Read MoreSome of this is pragmatic trade policy, but a lot of it is a belief system about America’s role in the world and grievances which go far beyond tariffs.
It is also where we move to a less coherent area of the Vance doctrine – and Russia (and therefore Ukraine’s fate) is at the heart of it.
At the same time, Vance is trying to explain away the US administration’s glaring pivot away from supporting Ukraine, whose pleas for more external help in its self-defence he dismisses as “absurd”, to accepting pretty much any pallid excuse for continued aggression and excuse-making dreamt up by the Kremlin’s mouthpieces: “It does not mean you morally support the Russia cause or the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but you need to understand their strategic red lines”.
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Read MoreAnd it is also a view whose terms will endanger other countries from the Baltic states to the Balkans – and embolden Moscow’s desire to destabilise more of Western Europe, not least by backing many of the far-right forces Vance thinks need more of a hearing in politics. In short, Vance’s recipe for keeping Europe safe is that it should pay up a lot more to defend itself from the advances of the very Russia that he placates or excuses.
There is always in Vance a kind of intelligence and slyness which is a refinement on Trump’s more megalomaniacal truth-inversions. It is also a case-building exercise for ambitions which stretch beyond this White House and position him as a figure with global stature on the new right, with a possible eye on the presidential contest in 2028. So far, his most likely rival on that front is the president’s son (and closest adviser) Donald Trump Jnr.
Anne McElvoy is co-host of the Politics at Sam and Anne’s podcast
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