Newly minted US Vice President JD Vance gave a magnificent address to the Munich Security Conference on February 14th. One would think that he would have spent most of the speech talking about the Russo-Ukraine War, arms production, and defense expenditures vis-à-vis GDP. In fact, he touched on these topics only very briefly.
Instead of orating on defense matters, he took his European hosts to task for their suppression of free speech on the continent. He went on the attack and didn’t mince words. His first topic was the annulment of the Romanian presidential election on dubious grounds. He even alluded to, but didn’t name the bad actors in Germany who are eager to take the Alternative for Germany Party off the ballot. He gave examples of instances in Sweden where people were prosecuted for criticizing feminism, as well as criminal prosecutions for Koran burning. He referenced folks going to jail in Britain for praying silently outside an abortion clinic. So as not to sound self-righteous, he mentioned the Biden administration’s threats to tech companies to remove alleged “misinformation” on the Wuhan virus off the web or be punished.
The Vice President condemned European governments that gave flimsy excuses for clamping down on free expression. He said, “If your country can be destroyed with a few hundred dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.” Vance also brought up the fact that the very conference at which he was speaking had banned “lawmakers from the left and the right.” He defended the idea of pursuing dialogue between populist parties and the establishment.
To use an old expression from the American Left, Vance was truly speaking “truth to power.” The kinds of speeches given at such conferences are usually full of stale bromides and stilted expressions with perhaps a few policy ideas brought up gently. Vance put the EU political class on notice that Trump was the new sheriff in town and things will be different.
I was one of those people who felt that NATO should have been dismantled two or three years after the end of the Cold War. I don’t see Trump leaving the alliance, but I do see him as a man who will refuse to be led around by the nose by German chancellors, British prime ministers and French presidents. The social, cultural, and fraternal bonds between our two continents are strong. The blood of Europe courses through the veins of more than 60% of Americans. What truly educated American man can say that the intellectual patrimony of Europe is unrelated to ours? However, the days of the US poking its nose into every European dispute is over.
This speech very much redeemed Vance in my eyes. Don’t get me wrong, I was an early supporter of his being chosen for the vice presidency after having read his book on his difficult upbringing in poverty and despair. In recent weeks, however, his ties with the “tech-bro” and neoreactionary elements of the Trump coalition made me begin to suspect that his main loyalties were with billionaire tech oligarchs. I constantly worry about MAGA losing its dedication to the welfare of the much ignored working and lower-middle classes. This speech reassures me that he has political interests other than making tech billionaires more money.
