Since I am not a full-time political commentator (I still have to work with my hands during the daytime), I wasn’t able to react to J.D. Vance’s recent remarks in Munich as quickly as I would have liked. Still, what the new vice president said there on February 14 is worth paying attention to. And for someone who usually fills his website with predictions of a gloomy future, it is quite nice to be able to write something upbeat and optimistic for a change.
The Munich Security Conference has been held annually since 1963 and is a place for senior government officials from a variety of (mostly European) countries to discuss their military and foreign policies. Probably the most significant year for the conference was 2007, when Vladimir Putin came and spoke about how Russia was being disrespected, how it would never accept a subordinate role in the unipolar world order that the United States was trying to lead, and how eastward NATO expansion was a serious mistake.
The ability to listen to someone, and think hard about what the world looks like from his point of view — even if that person’s moral vision is very different from yours — is one of the marks of a mature mind. But it’s not something that the America-led bloc came anywhere close to doing. Instead, we got 15 more years of acting as though the world has room for just one hegemon (or one and a half if you count China, toward which these countries are much more accommodating). At the same time, no European countries made a serious attempt to build up their militaries to the point of parity with Russia’s — or even to the point of being able to act independently of the United States.
Vladimir Putin then saw that situation — he saw a bunch of weak European countries, overflowing with a sense of moral superiority but with weak militaries incapable of autonomous action, while the one NATO country that was definitely strong enough to act was far away and had little direct interest in the fate of eastern Europe. And Putin called NATO’s bluff, and invaded Ukraine, and now, even though the war has gone on for three years, Ukraine is still fighting alone and (being outnumbered four to one) has little chance of winning.
I was writing about all of this well before J.D. Vance became vice president and a got a chance to address the Munich conference himself (you can read his full speech here). Vance is one of the handful of Americans who not only understands the situation, but is forthright enough to talk about what he sees. And indeed, Vance’s previous comments about the futility of American involvement in Ukraine, and the need to deal with freeloading by the smaller NATO countries, made me suspect that he would agree with my reading of the strategic situation, which I have written about many times.
For instance, in this article from 2022, and this one from 2023, I faulted the West for failing to have a “theory of mind” for Russians, and I also faulted Russia for its corruption, brutality, and lack of a positive moral vision beyond anger toward the West. My longest essay on foreign affairs is called “The Poland Paradox: How Faraway Allies Make Small Countries Less Safe.” The gist of it is that, by neglecting their own militaries and outsourcing their defense to a faraway ally whose commitment to fight, if push came to shove, was questionable, the nations of Europe doomed themselves to a disaster that never would have happened if countries like Poland, Hungary, and their neighbors had stepped into the power vacuum and rebuilt their militaries the way Russia did. (There is a similar situation in East Asia — the combined naval and air forces of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Vietnam are more than enough to contain Chinese power if they build local alliances and stop relying so heavily on the Americans — but at the moment, there is no political will to make this happen.)
But America’s new vice president chose not to make weapons, strategy, or military alliances the topic of his speech at Munich. As he explained near the beginning:
We gather at this conference, of course, to discuss security. And normally we mean threats to our external security. I see many, many great military leaders gathered here today. But while the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine — and we also believe that it’s important in the coming years for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defense — the threat that I worry the most about vis-à-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.
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. For years we’ve been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values.
My thesis last year on the Romanian Constitutional Court’s cancelation of that country’s elections was that the sort of managed democracy that Europe’s technocrats are setting up — one where the people are allowed to vote as a sort of ceremonial ritual, but where election outcomes are carefully prevented from influencing any issue on which the non-democratic arm of the government has a strong opinion — is the kind of government that Iran has. (Iranians get to vote in multiparty elections every four years, but elected officials, including the president, are figureheads who can’t say or do anything of which the supreme leader or Guardian Council disapprove.)
Vance was too polite to use the Iran analogy. But he was blunt in saying that Europe can’t claim to care about “democratic values” if Romania’s top courts can get praises from all over the continent by canceling a presidential election on the grounds of “Russian influence” even though (1) Romania’s written laws and constitution don’t give the court this power, (2) there was no actual vote fraud, just allegations of dark-money ad-buying of the sort that occurs to some extent in every election, and (3) the simultaneous parliamentary election was not canceled or annulled, due to its having been won by a coalition of center and left-wing parties.
The ambitions that numerous German statesmen have of banning Alternative für Deutschland — a party that is constantly being compared to the Nazis even though its most “radical” policy is its desire to reverse the mass migration that has made Germany a much more dangerous place to live over the last ten or eleven years — got the same contempt from J.D. Vance.
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.
Vance followed this up with a full-throated defense of free speech, telling the Europeans that, as much as they might think of themselves as the winners of the Cold War, so long as people in the “democratic” part of Europe can be arrested for burning the Quran, or posting rude things on social media, or even just for silent prayer on a public street — and if the ruling parties of present-day Europe feel more threatened by the recent decensoring of Twitter/X than by any of this — then the West’s victory in the Cold War was hollow.
I believe that dismissing people, dismissing their concerns or worse yet, shutting down media, shutting down elections or shutting people out of the political process protects nothing. In fact, it is the most surefire way to destroy democracy. Speaking up and expressing opinions isn’t election interference. Even when people express views outside your own country, and even when those people are very influential — and trust me, I say this with all humor — if American democracy can survive ten years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.
Vance was also candid about his own country’s failures to live up to some of these ideals in the recent past:
In the interests of comity, my friends, but also in the interest of truth, I will admit that sometimes the loudest voices for censorship have come not from within Europe, but from within my own country, where the prior administration threatened and bullied social media companies to censor so-called misinformation. Misinformation, like, for example, the idea that coronavirus had likely leaked from a laboratory in China. Our own government encouraged private companies to silence people who dared to utter what turned out to be an obvious truth. ... [But] in Washington, there is a new sheriff in town. And under Donald Trump’s leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer them in the public square.
There was little clapping during the Vance speech, and after it was over, a lot of prominent Europeans reacted very rudely to it. For instance, on Saturday, the British newspaper The Guardian published a headline that read, “JD Vance’s Munich Speech Laid Bare the Collapse of the Transatlantic Alliance.” It was subtitled “The US vice-president was hypocritical and insensitive, but bracingly clear in his resetting of relationships.”
German chancellor Olaf Shulz was even blunter, telling the conference, “That is not appropriate, especially not among friends and allies. We firmly reject that.”
Just how a country like Germany — which exists as a unified entity only because of the American victory in the Cold War, whose military expenditure is one fourteenth of the United States’, and whose economy never recovered from the double-blow of COVID and the loss of cheap Russian gas — is supposed to “firmly reject” what J.D. Vance said remains a mystery. Likewise, the fact that so many Europeans are willing to accept the end of their alliance with the United States, rather than reconsidering their hatred of free speech, bodes poorly for the future.
Europe is going to have a tough row to hoe over the next few decades. Americans have grown increasingly tired of the smaller NATO countries’ freeloading. And whereas Europe’s leaders are full of indignation about what Russia is doing (but not over the bigger threat posed by Middle Eastern migrants, some of whose crimes J.D. Vance described in detail), these people haven’t shown the courage or foresight to do much about either threat.
Too many European elites see “democracy” in much the same way that America’s Democrat party does — i.e., as something other than a system of government in which the voters are in charge, and where they sometimes do things that the elites disapprove of. To the Eurocrats, real democracy is a mere stepping stone — two steps above the conservative Christian monarchies that began collapsing in 1917, one step above the communist governments that fell in 1989, and one step below the Soros/Schwab-style technocratic society that they are trying to build — a society built on the principle of “you will own nothing, and you will be happy.”
J.D. Vance, for the sake of politeness, chose to finish his speech with an offer of continued friendship to Europeans who still care about the old values. But at the end of the day, there is a kernel of truth to the left’s claim that the speech was mostly aimed at Vance’s domestic base. After all, J.D. Vance is an American. He has authority only in the United States. If Europe is to be turned around, it will take a lot more European courage and European leadership than Europe appears to have at the moment.
The quiet reaction to Romania’s canceled election back in December bodes poorly. After all, when communism fell in 1989, it fell because millions of protesters were willing to react to government abuses by dragging furniture into the streets to make barricades, knowing full well that they might end up getting shot (as had happened a generation earlier in Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968.) The fact that, 35 years later, Romania’s top court was able to cancel a presidential election without provoking similar unrest isn’t just an outrage, but an embarrassment. And the ordinary Romanians who let it happen aren’t just victims; they’re cowards.
At the moment, Romania has rescheduled its elections for May of this year. But nobody knows if the authorities intend to let all the parties get a fair chance to compete, or if, should another right-wing victory seem likely, they’ll disqualify one or more candidates on specious grounds.
Watching Europeans submit to autocracy in such a supine way makes it hard for people on the other side of the ocean to care whether or not the autocrats they submit to happen to live in Moscow. As Vance said during his speech:
I’ve heard a lot about what you need to defend yourselves from, and of course that’s important. But what has seemed a little bit less clear to me, and certainly I think to many of the citizens of Europe, is what exactly it is that you’re defending yourselves for. What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important?
What are you defending yourselves for?
That is a question that Europeans are going to have to think about long and hard in the coming years. J.D. Vance, as an outsider, can’t answer it for them. But he can make it clear that not every answer to that question is equally worthy of the American people’s respect — or of their continued military support.
