← Videos · Foreign Policy & Defense

Vice President JD Vance Visits with U.S. Troops Stationed in the United Kingdom, Aug. 13, 2025

August 13, 2025 · The White House · 0:07:50

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Vice President JD Vance spoke to United States airmen and their families at RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire, United Kingdom, on August 13, 2025, during a working visit to Britain. He had started the week, he said, at Chevening with the British foreign secretary working on “one of our most important shared security goals in Europe, which is the end of the war between Russia and Ukraine,” and had taken a call with about 30 European leaders in the preceding days.

The message to the troops was that diplomacy runs on their deterrence: “it is impossible to bring peace anywhere unless the bad guys are also worried that we’ve got a hell of a fine air force and a hell of a fine military to back up the peace to begin with.” He said the President had told him that morning that “we are going to make it our mission as an administration to bring peace to Europe once again,” two days before the President’s trip to Anchorage, Alaska, to meet on the war. He credited the airmen’s presence for administration diplomacy elsewhere, saying, as he stated it, that the President had ended a 30-year war between Rwanda and the Congo and brought peace between Serbia and Kosovo. “Nothing that I do, nothing that we do as an administration is possible without the hard work, the courage and the skill that you guys bring to the job,” he told them.

Why it matters

Fairford is the public, troops-facing statement of the administration’s peace-through-strength sequence in the week of the Anchorage summit: the Vice President in Europe lining up allies, the President about to sit down with Russia, and the forward-deployed force named, on camera, as the leverage behind both.

Scoreboard watch

Scoreboard watch: the mission Vance stated at Fairford on August 13, 2025 — ending the Russia-Ukraine war as an administration objective, pursued at Anchorage two days later — and the ended-conflict claims he listed. Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.

Sources: The White House, “Vice President JD Vance Visits with U.S. Troops Stationed in the United Kingdom” (official upload, embedded above; Gloucestershire, United Kingdom). Remarks as delivered at the event.