Senator Vance on NATO failing to carry its fair share of the European defense burden:
“Even if we assumed, and it’s wrong, but even if we assumed that NATO was carrying its fair share of the burden over the last 18 months, NATO has failed to carry its fair share of the burden for literally decades, ladies and gentlemen. Look just at how much money the United States has spent on defense since 1992, and compare that to our NATO allies.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have been subsidizing European security to the tune of trillions of dollars. And it might feel nice when we go to Munich and the Europeans thank us, and it might be great to get a pat on the back from a European head of state, but the American people demand that NATO carry its fair share of the burden.
“Germany is the largest economy in Europe. They have promised for decades, and especially over the last years that they would meet the NATO threshold of 2% of GDP spent on defense. They are still not there. Italy, a massive economy still underspends on defense. In fact, most of the economies of Europe outside of the UK and France and some economies in Eastern Europe,
“Most of the economies of Europe massively underspend on defense, and that has invited aggression not just from Vladimir Putin, but from other places as well.”
Senator Vance on the crisis of America and Europe:
“At the same time that world leaders play armchair general with the Ukraine conflict, their own societies are decaying. Not a single country, not a single country, even the United States, within the NATO alliance has birthrates at replacement level. We don’t have enough families and children to continue as a nation, and yet we’re talking about problems 6,000 miles away.
“We are being invaded by up to 10 million illegal migrants over the course of Joe Biden’s term in office. And we have apparently no president with willpower to stop that problem. We have a fentanyl crisis that has led to the deaths of over 100,000 people per year in the last few years of our youngest and brightest people.
“Mental health crises are skyrocketing. Youth suicides are skyrocketing. And every single place, not just the United States, but every single one of the countries in the NATO alliance see similar or in some cases even more troubling dynamics on most of those metrics from migration to economic malaise. What are we doing, ladies and gentlemen? China and Russia, if we want them to fear us, we need to rebuild our own countries.
“We need to rebuild a strong Europe and a strong America. We need to rebuild a civilization that can support conflicts instead of just run away from them, because right now we don’t have that. We do not have a country and we do not have a NATO alliance that is strong enough to do the things that need to be done.
“So our message to the Europeans needs to be simple: fix your own country, share your own burden, spend more on defense, fix your own problems, and that will deal with the problem in Russia far more than a $61 billion check to Ukraine will. In fact, we are subsidizing them. We are enabling their refusal to spend enough resources on defense.”
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