What J.D. Vance really thinks about Europe

“Germany is the most important economy in Europe, but it relies on imported energy and borrowed military strength.”

Vance also commented on the far-right’s surging popularity in Germany in an interview in February, claiming the “AfD is doing well” because of “a rising resistance to mass migration.”

On the U.K.

British Foreign Secretary David Lammy counts Vance among his friends, but that didn’t stop the American senator from lashing the U.K. as an “Islamist country.”

“I have to beat up on the U.K., just one additional thing. I was talking with a friend recently and we were talking about, you know, one of the big dangers in the world, of course, is nuclear proliferation,” he said at a conservative conference last week.

“And I was talking about, you know, what is the first truly Islamist country that will get a nuclear weapon, and we were like, maybe it’s Iran, you know, maybe Pakistan already kind of counts, and then we sort of finally decided maybe it’s actually the U.K., since Labour just took over.”

On Italy

Even far-right Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni couldn’t escape Vance’s wrath.

“Meloni’s victory in Italy was very much a rejection of the immigration policies in Brussels. And yet, she’s been a complete catastrophe when it comes to actually reducing migration to Italy,” Vance said in an interview in February.

Csongor Körömi contributed reporting.