Holidaying in the U.K., Vance spent Saturday at the country retreat of U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy, where he met Rustem Umerov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council, and Andriy Yermak, the head of Zelenskyy’s office.
Did that swing Vance? If so, only up to a point. On Sunday, he struck a pretty traditional line on Fox News: “We’re done with the funding of the Ukraine war business,” he said. “Americans, I think, are sick of continuing to send their money, their tax dollars to this particular conflict. But if the Europeans want to step up and actually buy the weapons from American producers, we’re OK with that, but we’re not going to fund it ourselves anymore.”
That doesn’t exactly sound like the U.S. is more interested in providing post-war security guarantees.
The attraction of being peacemakers, however, seems to be building traction in the administration. Vance later noted, at an air base in Britain on Wednesday, that Trump “said very simply that we are going to make it our mission as an administration to bring peace to Europe once again.”
Played by Putin
Jan Techau, head of Germany for Eurasia Group, a think tank, also cautioned that Trump entered the meeting with the Europeans with different objectives from them.
For Trump, the key is that he should not come out of the Alaska summit looking like a “loser.” That implication — that he could be outsmarted by Putin — makes him simmer with anger on his Truth Social account.