European—and especially German—officials have responded angrily to U.S. Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the Munich security conference on Friday, February 14th, accusing him of going after the very democratic values which they have themselves betrayed.
“The Trump administration,” said German Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, “is launching a frontal attack on Western values.”
Berlin’s current leadership was particularly agitated by Vance’s insistence that there is no room for “firewalls” around populist parties in actual democracies—an obvious reference to the censuring of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), Germany’s second most popular party. Chancellor Olaf Scholz described the comments as “not appropriate” and said there were “good reasons” not to work with the AfD, while defence minister Boris Pistorius maintained that the party can campaign “just like any other.” This came just weeks after lawmakers called for parliament to debate banning the right-wing opposition ahead of national elections.
In France too, Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot—apparently blind to the attacks on fundamental liberties taking place around him—cast aside Vance’s other criticisms and declared that “freedom of speech is guaranteed in Europe.” At europeanconservative.com, we publish stories every week which give the lie to this statement, while many other cases undoubtedly—and, so far as Brussels is concerned, conveniently—go unnoticed.
Some have been so shaken by Vance’s dose of honesty that they have called time on even pretending to maintain friendly relations with the U.S. According to one European diplomat
We have to realise that we’re looking at a new United States, perhaps one that has less and less to do with the Marvel hero we have seen it as in the past.
Former French PM Dominique de Villepin said Europe’s leaders “cannot accept the fact that what was the U.S. is not the U.S. anymore,” and that—as NBC paraphrased—the continent could no longer call it an ally.
Such figures must have found it all the more difficult to cope when Trump said his VP’s speech was “brilliant” and “well received”—although it actually was by many.
In the UK, former Conservative Party minister Michael Portillo joked that he “started cheering” when Vance referred to European Commissioners as “commissars,” adding: “I think a lot of people will have cheered,” especially when seeing the shocked reactions on the faces of officials.
Belgian politician Maurits Vande Reyde added that the fact many has responded by branding the U.S. an ‘enemy’ “proves the point the U.S. came out with the wrecking ball to make this week”:
Europe has become a morally superior continent of tears that refuses to see how the rest of the world sees us.
Even in the U.S., CBS host Margaret Brennan sided with European censors by making the astonishing claim the Nazi Holocaust occurred because “free speech was weaponised” in Germany, to which Secretary of State Marco Rubio tentatively highlighted that “free speech was not used to conduct a genocide, the genocide was conducted by an authoritarian Nazi regime.”
Vance’s speech, it appears, may take a little time to sink in positively—if, indeed, it is ever taken on board. But Paul Coleman from the Alliance Defending Freedom legal advocacy group wonders whether it is simply a matter of waiting until Europe views his message as being similarly significant to Winston Churchill’s 1946 ‘Iron Curtain’ speech, credited with bringing Britain and the U.S. together against a common Soviet threat.
