BRUSSELS-(WN)President Pence assured nervous
European leaders Monday that the Trump administration is committed to
“cooperation and partnership” with the European Union, in a bid to quiet fears
that the White House wants to break up the 28-nation bloc.
Pence’s reassurance was a striking departure
from some of President Trump’s references to Europe, which have painted the
European Union in dark terms. Trump called Brussels “a hellhole” and praised
Britain’s decision to leave the European Union. But in meetings with top E.U.
officials, Pence offered a far more conventional vision of relations with the
bloc.
“It is my privilege on behalf of President
Trump to express the strong commitment of the United States to continued
cooperation and partnership with the European Union,” Pence said after meeting
European Council President Donald Tusk, who represents the leaders of the 28
E.U. nations in Brussels. “The United States’ commitment to the European Union
is steadfast and enduring.”
He said he looks forward to increased
coordination on dealing with economic matters and fighting terrorism. And he
urged peace efforts in Ukraine, promising to push Russia hard. “We are
separated by an ocean, but we are joined by a common heritage and a common
commitment to freedom, to democracy and to the rule of law,” Pence said.
European fears of Trump’s attitude toward the
European Union spiked when Trump said shortly before his inauguration that he
was indifferent to the fate of the bloc and that he expected that more
countries would split from it in the coming years.
Worries spiked even further after a business
professor, Ted Malloch, said that he was in the running for the ambassadorship
to the European Union. Malloch believes in breaking up the union, and E.U.
officials took the highly unusual step of ordering a review to outline how they
might reject an ambassador, even though there has been no confirmation from the
State Department or the White House that Malloch is a candidate.
And Trump termed NATO “obsolete,” sending
shivers through Eastern Europe, which relies on U.S. security guarantees to
keep it safe from Russia.
Pence and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis were
deployed to Europe last week to try to calm European fears about a shift in
U.S. foreign policy attitudes that have otherwise remained constant since 1945.
Both leaders pushed hard for increased European defense spending in meetings at
the Munich Security Conference, and Mattis delivered a stern message to NATO
defense ministers in Brussels on Wednesday and Thursday.
But in public and in private, European
leaders don’t know how much to trust Mattis and Pence’s message, which came at
the same time that Trump called the news media an “enemy of the people” and
appeared to invent a terrorist attack in Sweden.
Tusk said that he was satisfied with the
meeting.
“Too much has happened over the past month in
your country, and in the E.U. Too many new and sometimes surprising opinions
have been voiced over this time about our relations, and our common security,
for us to pretend that everything is as it used to be,” he said.
“The world would be a decidedly worse place
if Europe were not united,” Tusk said. “It is in the interest of us all to
prevent the disintegration of the West.”
0 Comments