New blow for Brussels as Trump picks isolationist Vance for VP – POLITICO

The 39-year-old senator is one of the most isolationist members of the Republican Party. He is vehemently opposed to using more funds to help Ukraine and has blasted what he sees as Europe’s over-dependence on the United States when it comes to military investment.

In a lengthy interview with POLITICO at the Munich Security Conference in February, Vance, an erstwhile Trump critic turned evangelist, set out his stall on why America should not help Ukraine.

“We simply do not have manufacturing capacity to support a ground war in Eastern Europe indefinitely. And I think it’s incumbent upon leaders to articulate this for their populations,” Vance told POLITICO’s Global Playbook. “How long is this expected to go on? How much is it expected to cost? And importantly, how are we actually supposed to produce the weapons necessary to support the Ukrainians?” he asked.

In the hallowed halls of the Bayerischer Hof hotel in Munich such talk was sacrilege — the annual Munich Security Conference has long been the champion of transatlantic defense and security cooperation, frequented by such U.S. foreign policy luminaries as the late John McCain and President Joe Biden, who strongly believed in the ‘rules-based international order’ that governed transatlantic relationships in the decades after World War II.

But in his first appearance at the high-level international conference in February, Vance skipped a meeting between President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and a bipartisan group of senators on the fringes of the gathering.  “I didn’t think I would learn anything new,” he told POLITICO.

Even the death of Putin critic Alexei Navalny, which overshadowed that gathering, didn’t seem to change Vance’s views. He reiterated in his interview with POLITICO his belief that Ukraine would ultimately need to cede territory to Russia, “Putin is not a great human being, but that doesn’t change what the strategic imperatives of the United States or Europe are.”