The vice presidency of the United States is often thought to be one of the most thankless jobs in politics. The only real duty for its occupant is to break ties in the United States Senate, which rarely occurs. The first vice president, John Adams, infamously remarked that the vice presidency is “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.”

Thus, when current vice president JD Vance addressed the Munich Security Conference last week and delivered a stinging rebuke of Western Europe’s adherence to democratic values, it was an unusually charged and provocative speech for the holder of an office that has traditionally been relegated to the sidelines of, well, everything. 

Vance’s speech dropped a diplomatic bomb in front of an audience that was expecting him to explain the Trump administration’s strategic plan for ending the war in Ukraine:

“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. “Now, 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.” 

“Now, these cavalier statements are shocking to American ears,” Vance continued. “For years, we’ve been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values. Everything from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship is billed as a defense of democracy, 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. And I say ‘ourselves’ because I fundamentally believe that we are on the same team. We must do more than talk about democratic values, we must live them.”

Never before had an American statesman in the post-war era so harshly and confrontationally engaged with western European leaders. The response was swift and negative. At the end of the conference, Christoph Heusgen, the event’s chairman, lamented that “after the speech of Vice President Vance… we have to fear that our common value base is not that common anymore.”

Heusgen’s hyperbole aside, the common interests between Western Europe and the United States have indeed changed over the last several decades. But the relationships between the U.S. and Europe have largely remained unchanged.

Since 1945, the U.S.-Europe relationship has largely been defined by opposition to the Soviet Union. This was the crux of the Cold War: the free West vs. the Iron Curtain in the East. It was this military and economic partnership, born in the aftermath of World War II, that created the circumstances for the fall of communism in Europe. 

In 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev signed the dissolution of the Soviet Union, officially ending the Cold War. But while the “cold” conflict that had necessitated an aggressive security posture and close economic ties with Europe was over, little changed in terms of the geopolitical posture. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, rather than recede, expanded to include former communist states, including Poland and Lithuania. 

At the same time, the U.S. did nothing to adapt its military and security posture on the continent, despite the enormous geopolitical shift that the end of the Cold War represented.

With the threat of a geopolitical adversary greatly diminished (until recently), Europe was able to benefit from the United States decision to maintain its Cold War security posture. With the U.S. military’s extensive presence on the continent, NATO spending obligations went largely unfulfilled, and while the U.S. assumed security responsibilities, European nations dramatically expanded their spending on social welfare.

Which brings us back to Vance’s speech and the moves that the Trump administration has taken in its first month in office when it comes to the nation’s posture on the European continent. 

For a long time, Trump has railed against NATO members effectively freeloading off of the U.S., even suggesting that the U.S. could withdraw from the alliance if other member states did not sufficiently increase their defense spending. But in his first term, he received significant pushback from his own advisers and from lawmakers any time he suggested it. In his second term, no such resistance exists.

Tens of thousands of U.S. troops are currently on the European continent, a mobilization that dates back to World War II. The largest concentration of U.S. forces is in Germany, where more than 30,000 troops are stationed. For comparison, that represents one-sixth of the size of the entire German military, which counts slightly more than 180,000 uniformed personnel. 

Poland has the largest military on the European continent, with more than 200,000 troops. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently described Poland as “a model ally on the continent, willing to invest not just in their defense but in our shared defense and defense of the continent.”

Thus, Vance’s Munich speech is a courtesy notice to Europe that, 30 years after the Iron Curtain fell, the security posture of the Cold War is finally coming to a close. In fact, in his Munich address, the vice president explicitly stated that the values that had united Western Europe to the U.S. during the Cold War were no longer in practice, and Europe was, in effect, betraying the promise that had guided the free west to victory over communism.

Here’s what Vance said:

“Within living memory of many of you in this room, the Cold War positioned defenders of democracy against much more tyrannical forces on this continent. And consider the side in that fight that censored dissidents, that closed churches, that canceled elections. Were they the good guys? Certainly not, and thank God they lost the Cold War. They lost because they neither valued nor respected all of the extraordinary blessings of liberty, the freedom to surprise, to make mistakes, to invent, to build. As it turns out, you can’t mandate innovation or creativity, just as you can’t force people what to think, what to feel, or what to believe. And we believe those things are certainly connected. And unfortunately, when I look at Europe today, it’s sometimes not so clear what happened to some of the Cold War’s winners.”

The Trump administration, simply put, is putting into practice what many believed the end of the Cold War was truly supposed to represent: an end to the Cold War security posture and a return to the responsibility of Europe’s security in the hands of the very wealthy European countries that had long benefited from the U.S.’s military presence.

FREE SPEECH UNDER ATTACK AT HOME AND ABROAD

Perhaps right on cue, Hegseth delivered the message that Europe had long dreaded: “Now is the time to invest, because you can’t make an assumption that America’s presence will last forever.”

The message from the Trump administration is abundantly clear: The Cold War has long been over in name, and it is now over in practice too. America’s security posture in Europe will never be the same again.