Vance’s comments land as President Donald Trump’s administration repeatedly hammers European capitals over their overreliance on American military might for their own defense, while hinting repeatedly that the U.S. would not come to the aid of NATO allies who don’t invest in their own security. U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also warned American military presence in Europe is not “forever.”
Trump wants NATO countries to spend 5 percent of their GDP on defense — a sharp increase from the alliance’s current 2 percent target, which is set to increase at a summit in The Hague this summer.
“I don’t think that Europe being more independent is bad for the United States — it’s good for the United States,” Vance said. “Just going back through history, I think — frankly — the British and the French were certainly right in their disagreements with Eisenhower about the Suez Canal.”
In the 1950s, U.S. leader Dwight Eisenhower forced London and Paris, before de Gaulle became president, to back down from a military intervention to regain control of the Suez Canal from Egypt, which was key to the countries’ economic and colonial interests.
With the exception of Britain, France and Poland, “most European nations don’t have militaries that can provide for their reasonable defence,” Vance argued. “The reality is — it’s blunt to say it, but it’s also true — that Europe’s entire security infrastructure, for my entire life, has been subsidized by the United States of America.”
De Gaulle, whose thinking was shaped by Suez, frequently warned that Europeans should be more independent from the U.S., and worked to make the French military more autonomous, including by developing nuclear weapons and a powerful defense industry. He inspired a decades-long push for what current French President Emmanuel Macron now calls “strategic autonomy.”