US Vice President JD Vance vented at European leaders Friday, telling them that the biggest threat to their security was “from within,” rather than China and Russia.
Vance used his first major speech as vice president to lambast European politicians, claiming they are suppressing free speech, losing control of immigration and refusing to work with hard-right parties in government.
The audience at the Munich Security Conference was expecting to hear about the Trump administration’s plans to end the war in Ukraine, but instead were treated to a bombastic rejection of liberal orthodoxies that have prevailed in Western Europe since the Second World War, in a speech that downplayed the threats to the continent posed by Russia and China.
“The threat that I worry most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, 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,” Vance told a stone-faced audience.
The vice president — who met with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky at the conference — said “shutting down” unorthodox viewpoints is the “most surefire way to destroy democracy,” and called on European leaders – who have been elected by their respective peoples – to “embrace what your people tell you.”
“If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk,” he said.
The extraordinary remarks come after a campaign where Donald Trump vowed to disrupt the international status quo – and in office he has done exactly that at remarkable speed.
Trump’s early moves – including threats of retaliatory tariffs, a pullback in international aid and an improbable overture to acquire Greenland, the autonomous Danish territory – have increasingly concerned America’s allies. Compounding tensions, Elon Musk, the tech billionaire and prominent Trump ally, has amplified far-right movements across Europe without facing public reproach from the White House.
The administration’s actions this past week have only heightened anxieties across the Western world. Speaking Wednesday from Berlin, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asserted that Ukraine shouldn’t expect to reclaim its pre-war borders from Russia and would remain outside NATO. Hours later, Trump, following a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, announced that negotiations to end the war in Ukraine would commence “immediately” — potentially without Zelensky at the table.
While Hegseth later attempted to soften his remarks, his clarification did little to allay Europe concerns that Washington and Moscow had already forged a deal with scant regard for Kyiv’s position.
Against that fraught backdrop, some anticipated Vance to address the administration’s position on the path to a Russia-Ukraine settlement. Instead, he delivered a jarring blow.
Vance listed a string of what he cast as an oppressive European responses to political expression, from the United Kingdom arresting a man for praying near an abortion clinic to Sweden convicting an anti-Islam campaigner for burning Korans in public.
While many had expected the vice president to echo Hegseth’s calls for European countries to hike their defense spending as a precondition for continued American support, Vance’s message was blunter: “If you are running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you.”
Strikingly, Vance compared today’s democratically elected European leaders to the tyrants that led swaths of the continent during the Cold War.
He zeroed in on a decision by Romania’s constitutional court to cancel the country’s presidential election last year, after its intelligence service uncovered a campaign “coordinated by a state actor” to help elect Calin Georgescu, an ultranationalist virtually unknown before the election who unexpectedly won the first-round vote.
“When we see European courts canceling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we need to ask whether we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard,” Vance said.
Vance asked “what happened to some of the Cold War’s winners,” suggesting they had abandoned the values that allied them to prevail against “tyrannical forces” on the continent.
“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,” he said.
The vice president’s remarks in Munich come just over a week before the German national elections, in which the country is widely expected to swing right after a campaign season where immigration ranked among the key issues.
Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has been courting both the Trump administration and Elon Musk, is polling at roughly 21% ahead of the February 23 election, which would make the party the second largest political force in Germany and the first far-right party to hold such a position since the Second World War.
Vance on Friday criticized the “firewall” that caused other major parties within Germany to shun the AfD.
“What no democracy – American, German, or European – will survive, is telling millions of voters that their thoughts and concerns, their aspirations, their pleas for relief, are invalid and unworthy of even being considered,” Vance said. “Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There’s no room for firewalls.”
After his remarks, Vance met with AfD leader Alice Weidel for about 30 minutes, where the two discussed the war in Ukraine and German domestic politics, a spokesperson for Weidel’s office said. The vice president also met with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Friedrich Merz, who CNN reported earlier this month is the frontrunner to become next chancellor.
Germany’s Defense Minister Boris Pistorius later called Vance’s criticism of European leaders “unacceptable.”
Pistorius, who has been campaigning for Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) ahead of the country’s federal election, said Germany democracy allows for a plurality of views, meaning AfD can campaign “just like any other party.”
“I strongly oppose the impression that Vice President Vance has created that minorities are being suppressed or silenced in our democracy,” Pistorius said.
Notably, Vance did not criticize countries like Russia and Belarus, which have been ruled by the same leaders for decades and allow only stage-managed elections.
The vice president said he “understands” the argument that Romania canceled its election – which has been rescheduled for May – because “Russian disinformation had infected” the electoral process, but said European leaders needed to get some “perspective.”
“If your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with,” he said.
Vance said that Europe’s assaults on free speech extended into the digital realm, claiming that leaders had “threatened and bullied social media companies to censor so-called misinformation,” citing the example of the Covid-19 lab leak theory.
“It looks more and more like old entrenched interest, hiding behind ugly, Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation, who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion,” he added.
Asked to respond to Vance’s remarks later Friday, Trump said he believed they were “brilliant” and “well received.”
“And I think it’s true, in Europe, they’re losing their wonderful right of freedom of speech,” Trump said. He later added Europe “has to be careful” and said the continent “has a big immigration problem.”
Speaking in Munich a day after a 24-year-old Afghan asylum seeker drove a car into a crowd in the same city, injuring at least 36 people, Vance said the attack showed the “horrors wrought by” Europe’s migration policies.
“No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants,” Vance said, paying tribute to the victims of Thursday’s attack.
Also read: Ukraine war talks start now, Trump says after Putin call
Featured photo source: france24.com
Source: CNN
