With Russia’s war machine poised to redraw Europe’s borders, the Munich Security Conference’s agenda seemed obvious. Defence budgets needed to swell to deter the Russian bear; diplomatic terms had to be hammered out to bring peace to Ukraine.
Yet when America’s vice president JD Vance took the stage, he veered off script, training his sights not on Moscow but on Europe’s leaders — many of whom sat before him.
It was not threats from Russia, China, or any external actor that Vance said worried him most, but “the threat from within — the retreat of Europe from its most fundamental values, values it once shared with the United States.”
Silence. Shock rippled through the room as Vance laid out, one by one, his charge sheet of what he saw as Europe’s slide toward authoritarianism. Soviet-style EU “commissars” were stifling free expression; religious liberties had eroded; democracy trampled by bureaucrats “running scared” of their own voters.
This might have flown under Joe Biden, but there was, as he put it, “a new sheriff in town.” Vance reminded listeners who wore the trousers in the U.S.-EU relationship, declaring that American aid to Europe was granted “in the name of our shared democratic values” — values that must be upheld.
There was little time to digest this first helping of home truths before a second course was served. “Of all the pressing challenges the nations represented here face,” Vance said, “I believe there is nothing more urgent than mass migration.”
A deathly pallor fell over the room as Vance swung his axe dangerously close to a sacred cow. “Today, almost one in five people living in this country (Germany) moved here from abroad,” he said. “That is, of course, an all-time high.”
This drastic shift, he stressed, did not “materialize in a vacuum.” It was the result of deliberate decisions made by politicians across the continent.
For half a century, Europeans airing such views could expect to be ostracized from polite society and mainstream politics. Now, a U.S. leader — representing the very power that guarantees Europe’s security — had said the unsayable. And he was only warming up.
Against the will of the people, Vance declared, European leaders had “opened the floodgates” to millions of unvetted migrants. Some listeners were no doubt now reaching for the smelling salts.
“No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants,” he said.
With that, the continent’s most cherished political illusions — of Europe as a model of democratic harmony — was set ablaze, a bonfire of the vanities seen by a global audience. The room remained mostly silent. Some seethed, scrambling to rewrite their speeches. Others kept a poker face, simply watching in disbelief.
As if to prove Vance’s point, when it was time for the German defence minister to speak, he thundered: “This is not acceptable!” He was the first in a chorus of Eurocrats to reject Vance’s characterization of their democracies.
But the facts speak for themselves. European publics have consistently opposed mass migration; yet their leaders have for decades declined to stem the flow. A day before Vance delivered his remarks, the consequences of Europe’s porous borders were grimly illustrated just miles from the conference venue. An Afghan asylum seeker ploughed a car into a crowd, injuring 39 people and killing a mother and her child.
Vance extended his condolences and asked the uncomfortable but obvious question: “Why did this happen in the first place?”
Indiscriminate, nihilistic violence of this kind has become disturbingly routine in Europe as the continent absorbs millions of predominantly young men from the world’s most dysfunctional regions.
Yet Europe’s response — if it responds at all — is to look the other way. Politicians worry more about a potential backlash than the crime itself, cracking down on speech while assuring voters that “diversity is our strength” and hoping for the best.
Vance had a different answer. The facts of this latest outrage were ones “we’ve heard way too many times,” he said.
“An asylum seeker, often a young man in his mid-20s, already known to police, rams a car into a crowd and shatters a community.
“How many times must we suffer these appalling setbacks before we change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction?”
This is the right question. The real question for Europe’s establishment is: why did it take an American to ask it?
National Post
Michael Murphy is a journalist based in London. He writes for the Daily Telegraph and presented the documentary ‘Ireland is full! Anti-immigration backlash in Ireland’. You can follow him on X: @michaelmurph_y.