LONDON — Vice President JD Vance went to the Munich Security Conference last week and put the cat among the pigeons. He himself was the feral feline, and his aghast European hosts were the scampering birds, who squawked loudly after Vance gave a speech the likes of which the conference had never heard.
Vance told Europeans to help defend themselves more, external defense being the meat and potatoes of the 63-year-old conference. But what hurt the European leaders was not the usual complaints from Americans that they should start pulling their own weight. They’ve heard that before, have smiled, and have continued to ignore it, building social welfare systems on the back of American taxpayers.
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What really galled them was that Vance then did something no American leader had done before at the conference: he dressed them down for their eroding democratic values. And he did this at a time when an insurgent populist right in Europe is swelling, feeding on the success of Trump and Vance stateside.
Vance told his hosts that Europe’s biggest threat came not from foreign enemies, but from Europe itself, from its abandonment of factors that make a society a democracy and a nation: national identity; patriotism; trusting voters to decide their own future; supporting free speech and religious freedom.
“The threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within. The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values: values shared with the United States of America,” Vance said.
“I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election. He warned that if things don’t go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany too,” Vance told the shocked attendees at the conference, which has been held at the Bavarian capital since 1963. “These cavalier statements are shocking to American ears.”
It is usually Europeans who hector Americans, not the other way around. So why mention these things at a security conference? Because, as Vance said, America’s continued commitment to the defense of Europe is ultimately predicated on shared values.
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“For years, we’ve been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values,” he said. “But when we see European courts canceling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard. … We must do more than talk about democratic values. We must live them.”
The remarks are already being compared to Winston Churchill’s speech in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946, in which he ushered in the Cold War by saying, “From Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.”
No other speech has so captured the growing divide between the Trump administration and its insurgent European backers among populist political leaders, which support free speech in an unfettered social media, and the old political class, made up by the left and the old establishment conservative parties, which — like the Democrats in America — want to label speech it doesn’t like as “hate” or “disinformation,” so they can then censor it and cancel or even jail its purveyors.
Most affronted were Vance’s German hosts, as the country holds elections this weekend, at which the hard right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), long considered too “far right” for polite company, is set to make an unprecedented advance. It is currently polling at over 21%, only behind the establishment center-right Christian Democrats Party (CDU), polling nearly 30%, but well ahead of the collapsing center-left Social Democrats of Chancellor Olaf Scholz, which is polling a measly 16%.
Normally, two conservative parties such as the AfD and the CDU — which, if the polls hold true, would emerge with a clear majority — would form a coalition government. But the Left has created something clever called a “cordon sanitaire” or a “firewall.”
It means that the center Left can form coalition governments with whomever it likes — in Spain, the Socialists are in coalition with communists, separatists, and former terrorists, something Spaniards ruefully call the “Frankenstein coalition — but the center-right must abstain from coalescing with whichever parties the press and the establishment tar as “far right.”
This hypocrisy is illustrative of the democratic deficiencies that Vance identified, and why he went out of his way to meet with AfD leader Alice Weidel. This is also why the Germans responded so quickly.
“If I understood him correctly, he is comparing parts of Europe with authoritarian regimes. This is not acceptable,” said Scholz’s Defense Minister Boris Pistorius. The press on the left and the center-right also bemoaned Vance’s speech. And the German chairman of the conference, Christoph Heusgen, actually broke into tears onstage Sunday as he commented on Vance’s speech.
But not all establishment European conservatives reached for the smelling salts. At the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference I attended this week in London, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch knew better.
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“I thought he was dropping some truth bombs, quite frankly. The Munich Security Conference clearly was not expecting what he had to say. And I found it fascinating that the chair of the conference burst into tears at the end of it and needed a hug,” Badenoch told the American journalist Bari Weiss.
Mick Hume put it best in the European Conservative, a journal based in Vienna: “We are two Wests. The divide is not America versus Europe … It is the people versus the elites, the oligarchs versus the demos, the cancel culture warriors versus those who believe free speech is the lifeblood of our civilization.”