By: Dominic Green – wsj.com – February 17, 2025

He confronts a governing class that has abandoned the values America and the Continent share.

In Munich, a historic byword for appeasement, Mr. Vance issued a call to arms. The most worrisome threat to Europe, he said, isn’t from Russia or China. It is “the threat from within.” Really, this is a threat from above. Europe’s governing class has eviscerated the “fundamental values” that Europe shares with the U.S. It has reneged on its military commitments to America and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It has opened its gates to mass immigration and Islamist terrorism. To evade the electoral reckoning, it censors, smears and suppresses the objections of the lawful majority: a “surefire way to destroy democracy.”

Mr. Vance’s Munich speech came three days after his equally devastating address at the Paris AI Action Summit. The European Union, he said, has fallen behind in tech development because it manages artificial intelligence through risk aversion and regulatory restriction. Mr. Vance called this a “terrible mistake” that America “cannot and will not accept.” Europe’s self-imposed incapacity will create markets for “autocratic governments” and technologies of repression. The alternative is to embrace the future with “optimism rather than trepidation.”

Combine the two speeches and you have the classic American one-two. Economic and individual freedom support each other. Innovation, competitiveness and risk-taking are the natural partners of liberty, free speech and democracy. Europe should be the natural partner of the U.S. and a key link in the emerging American-led alignment. But Europe is divorced from reality. President Trump and Vladimir Putin’s negotiations on ending the war in Ukraine will, like many recent heavyweight boxing bouts, be held in Saudi Arabia. While Mr. Vance was dispensing tough love in Europe, the president had more important things to do, such as hosting a state visit by Narendra Modi of India.

Friends don’t let friends drift into the strategic twilight. Nor do they censor American social-media companies, as British and European politicians frequently threaten. They don’t petition the legislature to ban their country’s second most popular political party, as 124 German lawmakers did in January; or overturn election results, as recently happened in Romania; or, in a British case that Mr. Vance described, arrest people for silent prayer across the road from an abortion clinic. Liberalism was born in Britain. It will die there if this goes on.

The recent contraction of speech rights in the U.K. and Europe is as undeniable as its causes are obvious. No one voted for mass immigration or to dissolve freedom and national identity into an unelected bureaucracy in Brussels. No one chose to live in societies where keeping the peace means the return of de facto blasphemy laws amid constant irruptions of Islamist terrorism. When Europe’s voters back parties that oppose out-of-control migration, official Europe calls them “far right.” As Mr. Vance said in Munich, no democracy can survive “telling millions of voters that their thoughts and concerns, their aspirations, their pleas for relief, are invalid or unworthy of even being considered.”

The Afghan asylum seeker who rammed his car into a crowd of union demonstrators in Munich the day before Mr. Vance spoke—killing a 2-year-old girl and her mother and injuring more than 30 people—made the vice president’s argument for him. So did German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, who said Mr. Vance’s Munich speech was “not acceptable.” Kaja Kallas, a vice president of the European Commission, accused Mr. Vance of “trying to pick a fight.” Senior European diplomats were quoted calling the speech “mad,” “dangerous,” and “outrageous.” While Britain’s Labour leadership ducked from sight, a “government source” told London’s Times that Mr. Vance was “bat s—.”

Mr. Vance caused snobbish panic in all the right places. In reality, not all the gaps between Europe and the U.S. are as wide as the Atlantic Ocean. Defense spending in Europe has risen steadily since Barack Obama started complaining about “free riders” in NATO. A U.S.-Russian agreement on Ukraine offers a chance to rebind Russia and its energy sector to Europe under American supervision. On the other hand, the gap on China is wide and set to widen further. Germany is committed to a pro-China export policy, and the import of Chinese-made solar panels and electric cars is a European Union policy priority.

Another commonality between the U.S. and Europe is the popular search for what Mr. Vance called a “new direction.” When Mr. Vance connected the dots among “end of history” vanity, swollen welfare budgets, speech controls and a willed failure to defend borders, he could have been describing his own country under the leadership of Mr. Obama and Joe Biden. Like Americans, Europeans are in revolt against illegal immigration, Islamism, rule by bureaucracy, judicial activism, media bias and government censorship. Europe’s leaders fear this popular Atlanticism. Of course they want to censor it. The last thing they want is another American revolution.

But the people of Europe may get the deciding vote. They, not their failed rulers, are Mr. Vance’s real audience. Like Reagan in 1987 and John F. Kennedy in 1963, Mr. Vance went to Germany to give hope to the beleaguered.

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Source: JD Vance’s Message at Munich – WSJ