JD Vance is RIGHT to call European Politicians Freeloaders!
This was the leaked Signal group chat that has triggered the mainstream media in Europe, in particular. Never mind Orange Man Bad, JD Vance very bad!
The background here is that JD Vance, as Vice President, was part of a Signal chat named "Houthi PC small group," which included senior Trump administration officials like Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and others.
The chat was intended to coordinate and debate a military operation against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, who had been disrupting shipping lanes in the Red Sea. The operation was ultimately executed over the weekend prior to March 24, 2025, as ordered by President Trump.
Both Vance and Hegseth called out the European freeloaders and rightly so. After all as JD pointed in the leaked chat, the Houthis attacks on shipping in the region is mostly a European concern as a mere 3 percent of US trade runs through the Suez. 40 percent of European trade does! Why can’t the Europeans step up more?
I fully support the frustration of JD Vance and Pete Hegseth. Since the end of WW2, a devastated European continent relied on the US for military protection. This is very understandable but where it all went wrong was that these Europeans constructed massive Welfare States and chose to underspend on their military. Uncle Sam did the heavy lifting. With the fall of the UUSR, these Europeans should have started to invest in their own defence but they didn’t. And it seems that the V-P is acutely aware of this.
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Agreed. He's right.
Here in Portsmouth I was recently talking to a recently-retired Naval Officer. He worked keeping the Straits of Hormuz clear for trade. If Houthis are seen to have dropped anything into the Straits of Hormuz from the back of a fast boat, everything stops. It could be an oil drum, or it could be a smart mine that will bide its time and blow up the next ship passing over, or the fifth from next, or the five hundred and fifth. Checking it requires a helicopter trailing a cable into the water and making slow passes up and down. And it needs protecting while doing that. That's insanely expensive. But if nobody does that, the Houthis are well aware that the slightest glitch in the supply chain to UK supermarkets could trigger panic-buying due to rumours spreading, and they sit back and watch us cut our own throats.
He also said that they simply cannot get the staff to run such operations. The Navy has been hit so hard that it's not appealing enough to attract the brightest and the best. There's less chance to go to sea, little shore leave when you are there, and fewer opportunities to do interesting work. When he started (he was fifty at most) it was actually fun and glamorous. And, of course, the kit keeps breaking down.
In the UK we only had the good life, such as it was, because we were a maritime trading nation capable of defending the trade routes. How much is the rest of Europe doing, I wonder?
I disagree. The US has been the freeloader. They’re the ones whose companies have been making shit tons of money off of all the contracts for the wars if they’ve created here on the continent.
And they’ve a freeloader in several ways: they’re taking American taxpayer money, funding into the military industrial complex, which then sells their goods to the people in Europe, and then the owners of these companies are the ones who make the profit
Even if the US leaves NATO, tax payer, money is still going to fund a lot of these projects, and those were marketing and selling the products are still going to make money that will not go back into the taxpayer pocket
Furthermore, it was the US that militarize NATO and brought it to the behemoth that it is now. And it’s very sad because now Europe is banging the war drums, saying the one of pour $800 billion of our pension money into creating a military… When none of us wanted this. We didn’t need NATO whenever needed to defend against Russia. The whole Russia thing was bloated up by the United States to get Europe to start buying gas from the US.