US vice-president questions whether European values are worth defending as he rails against ‘threat from within’
The US vice-president, JD Vance, has launched a brutal ideological assault on Europe, accusing its leaders of suppressing free speech, failing to halt illegal migration, and running in fear from voters’ true beliefs.
In a chastising speech on Friday that openly questioned whether current European values warranted defence by the US, he painted a picture of European politics infected by media censorship, cancelled elections and political correctness.
Arguing that the true threat to Europe stemmed not from external actors such as Russia or China, but Europe’s own internal retreat from some of its “most fundamental values”, he repeatedly questioned whether the US and Europe any longer had a shared agenda. “What I worry about is the threat from within,” Vance said.
Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, the vice-president had been expected to address the critical question of the Ukraine war and security differences between Washington and Europe. Instead, he widely skated over these to give a lecture on what he claimed was the continent’s failure to listen to the populist concerns of voters.
Vance said of Donald Trump’s re-election: “There is a new sheriff in town.” He said: “Democracy will not survive if their people’s concerns are deemed invalid or even worse not worth being considered.”
The blistering and confrontational remarks were met with shock at the conference and were later condemned by the EU and Germany, while drawing praise from Russian state television. They signalled a deepening of the transatlantic chasm beyond different perceptions of Russia to an even deeper societal rupture about values and the nature of democracy.
Vance said: “If you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people … If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you, nor for that matter is there anything you can do for the American people.”
Accusing European politicians, and the organisers of the Munich Security Conference, of refusing to address issues such as migration, he urged a shocked and largely silent hall in Munich to realise they should not exclude politicians representing populist parties.
In Germany, a firewall has long existed preventing mainstream parties from engaging with the far-right Alternative für Deutschland owing to its Nazi origins. But Vance said there was no room for such firewalls.
“People dismissing voters’ concerns, shutting down their media, protects nothing. It is the most surefire way to destroy democracy.”
He described “old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation” to impose censorship.
Many in the hall were swift to say that Vance had still refused to accept that Trump lost the US presidential election in 2020, a refusal that ultimately resulted in a mob of the president’s supporters attacking the US Capitol.
Vance said: “For years we have been told everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values, everything from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship is billed as a defence of democracy, but when we see European courts cancelling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others we ought to ask ourselves if we are holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard.”
Banning politicians representing populist parties was wrong, he argued. “We do not have to agree with everything or anything people say, but when political leaders represent an important constituency it is incumbent on us to listen.”
His attack on mainstream European politicians drew a stern response from German and EU officials. The German defence minister, Boris Pistorius, said he could not let the speech go without comment. “If I understood him correctly, he is comparing conditions in parts of Europe with those in authoritarian regimes,” Pistorius said. “That is unacceptable, and it is not the Europe and not the democracy in which I live and am currently campaigning.”
The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said allies should be focusing on bigger threats such as Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. “Listening to that speech, they try to pick a fight with us and we don’t want to a pick a fight with our friends,” Kallas said at the Munich event.
The speech drew effusive praise on Russian state TV, where a correspondent, Asya Emelyanova, said on Rossiya 1: “It was very nice to hear Vance’s very strong speech. It was a public caning, I can’t call it anything else.”
In remarks that will delight the German far right days before elections there, Vance said: “Of all the pressing challenges that the nations represented here face, I believe there is nothing more urgent than mass migration.”
His speech came a day after a 24-year-old Afghan man was arrested in Munich over a car-ramming attack that injured 36 people. Vance seized on the case to reinforce his point. “How many times must we suffer these appalling setbacks before we change course and take our shared civilisation in a new direction?” he asked.
Instead, he claimed, “in Britain and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat”. He listed a string of cases that he claimed were evidence of this, railing against Romania for cancelling presidential elections and Sweden for arresting a man for burning a Qur’an in public. Britain was singled out for arresting a man praying near an abortion clinic.
Attempting to underplay Moscow’s role in the rise of the populist right, he said it was wrong for Russia to buy social media to influence European elections, but “if your democracy can be destroyed by a few thousand dollars of digital media from a foreign country it was not very strong to begin with.”
Before Vance’s speech, the German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, accused Trump and tech barons of being willing to destroy democracy. He said: “It is clear that the new American administration holds a worldview that is very different from our own. One that shows no regard for established rules, for partnerships or for the trust that has been built over time. But I am convinced that it is not in the interest of the international community for this worldview to become the dominant paradigm.”
