Vance stuns Europeans with lesson on whom to trust

Munich: US Vice President J.D. Vance has told European leaders that their biggest security threat was not military aggression from Russia or China, or election meddling from Moscow. Rather, he claimed, it was what he called “the enemy within” – their own suppression of abortion protests and other forms of free speech and the sidelining of parties considered extremist.

The address stunned and silenced hundreds of attendees at the Munich Security Conference on Friday, a forum where top-level politicians, diplomats and analysts had gathered expecting to hear the Trump administration’s plans for ending the war in Ukraine and Europe’s defence against a rising Russian threat in the future.

US Vice President J.D. Vance stuns the audience at the 61st Munich Security Conference with his intervention in European politics.Credit: Getty Images

Instead, Vance offered what may be a preview of a new kind of trans-Atlantic relationship under Trump – one not built on post-war bonds of stability between allied governments, but rather on ties with once-fringe political parties that share a common approach to migration, identity and internet speech.

Vance singled out his German hosts, who will elect a new chancellor next weekend, and told them to drop their objections to working with a party that has often revelled in banned Nazi slogans and has been shunned from government as a result.

It was an extraordinary intervention in the domestic politics of a democratic US ally, and it brought some gasps in the crowd.

He did not mention the party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), by name but made a direct reference to the long-standing agreement by mainstream German politicians to freeze out the group, parts of which have been formally classified as extremist by German intelligence.

“There is no room for firewalls,” Vance said near the end of his speech.

The AfD has surged to second in the polls with its call to crack down on immigration, and its members have a history of use of Nazi language and antisemitic and racist comments, along with plots to overthrow the federal government.

Vance did not note that baggage nor did he mention any extremist elements of anti-immigration political parties. Without naming any parties specifically, he cast the AfD and its counterparts across Europe as legitimate vessels of voter anger over the millions of refugees who have entered the European Union from the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere over the last decade.

He also met outside the conference with AfD leader Alice Weidel, a candidate for chancellor, and other leaders.

German leaders, across most party lines, bridled at his speech. They immediately rejected Vance’s suggestion that they should drop their firewall against the AfD, pointing to past comments by AfD members in support of the National Socialists, or Nazis.

“This is our business,” said Thomas Silberhorn, a member of parliament for the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian sister party of the Christian Democrats. “My message to the US administration is: German extremists who explicitly refer to National Socialism – part of the AfD – are clearly anti the US that liberated us from National Socialism.”

Boris Pistorius, the German defence minister and a member of the governing Social Democrats, deviated from his planned speech on Friday afternoon to rebuke Vance.

“If I understood him correctly he is comparing parts of Europe with authoritarian regimes. This is not acceptable,” Pistorius said, drawing sustained applause. “This is not the Europe, not the democracy, where I live.”

Germany has been the most successful major European power at shutting its hard-right party out of power, along with France, where a group of rival parties engaged in strategic voting over the summer to deny the hard-right National Rally a parliamentary majority.

Other firewalls have fallen around Europe, including in the Netherlands, Hungary and Italy. In Austria, the hard-right Freedom Party has been part of federal coalitions and appeared set to lead its next government, before negotiations with a centre-right party collapsed this week.

Vance is now the second figure in the Trump administration who has tried to chip away at the efforts to isolate the far right before the German elections on February 23, by attempting to destigmatise the AfD.

Billionaire Elon Musk, a top adviser to Trump, endorsed the AfD late last year in a post on social media. He has publicly interviewed Weidel.

In an address to party members this month, Musk said Germany has “too much focus on past guilt”. That was a clear reference to Adolf Hitler’s long shadow, which continues to dominate mainstream German politics, including in tight legal restrictions against Nazi language.

In his speech, Vance seemed to lump those restrictions into a long list of what he called European deviations from democratic values and attacks on free speech.

He said that included efforts to restrict misinformation and other content on social media, and laws against abortion protests that he said unfairly silenced Christians.

Particularly since the start of the war in Ukraine, European intelligence agencies have raised alarms about what they consider to be a systematic effort by Russia at mass disinformation and propaganda, often by using fake social media accounts to sow division and doubt about democratic systems.

Vance ridiculed and diminished that threat.

“It looks more and more like old entrenched interests 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, or, God forbid, vote a different way, or, even worse, win an election,” he told a largely stony audience.

Vance poured scorn on the decision in “remote Romania”, as he called it, to cancel a presidential election because of clear evidence of Russian manipulation of the political campaign.

“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.

Such statements came as something of a shock for attendees who had hoped to learn more about the administration’s plans for peace negotiations with Russia. Vance barely mentioned Ukraine and only referred to the conflict in passing. (He met with European leaders before the speech where he told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that Trump wanted the war to come to a close. Zelensky, in turn, thanked the US support but said, “We need real security guarantees”.)

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (second from left) meets with Vance (right) during their bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the Munich conference.Credit: AP

“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 defence,” Vance said. “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.”

Vance also decried the mass migration into Germany and other nations in 2015, which included many asylum-seekers fleeing wars in Afghanistan and Syria. He tied the migration to terrorist crimes, including a car attack in Munich on Thursday by an Afghan asylum-seeker, which injured 30 people.

“Over the span of a decade, we saw the horrors wrought by these decisions yesterday in this very city,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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