By Ulrike Franke* – World Politics Review
The terms “wakeup call” and “shock treatment” have been overused in debates about European security and the trans-Atlantic alliance over the past few years. As fitting as these descriptions may be, given the fundamental challenges that Europe is currently faced with, there are only so many times that Europeans can wake up or be shocked before the terms—and the mental states they refer to—become meaningless.
And yet somehow, after U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term in office between 2016 and 2020, after three years of high-intensity warfare on the European continent since 2022, and even after the tumultuous first four weeks of Trump’s second administration, Vice President JD Vance still managed to thoroughly shock many Europeans with his speech at the Munich Security Conference last week.
This wasn’t because Vance told European leaders gathered in Munich that they were on their own in terms of their security needs. Europeans have been mentally and to some extent practically preparing themselves for that message for a while now. The shock was due to the fact that, contrary to what Europeans had been bracing themselves for, Vance instead decided to mount an attack on what Europeans have long thought makes the trans-Atlantic relationship special: the U.S. and Europe’s shared values.
To put a finer point on it, Vance used the most important annual gathering of the trans-Atlantic defense community to discuss and criticize European domestic politics, specifically the way some European governments have been dealing with migration, free speech and elections. He drew from an eclectic mix of examples, from the annulled first round of Romania’s presidential election—which the country’s highest court ordered rerun because of Russian interference—to the sentencing by a British court of a man who in 2022 breached a safe zone around an abortion clinic and refused police requests to vacate the premises. For Vance, these and other instances of court decisions on domestic political and criminal cases amount to trampling on democratic values.
He also made the case that free speech should be absolute—a longstanding point of divergence between the U.S. and European approaches to speech protections— and that any restriction of hateful content or disinformation, which he characterized as an “ugly Soviet-era word,” was wrong. And he argued that in seeking to exclude far-right parties, some of which have their roots in fascist and neo-Nazi movements, from government, Europeans were “running in fear of [their] own voters,” adding that “there’s no room for firewalls” in a democracy. This reference probably shocked Vance’s German hosts most, as the “firewall” is the colloquial term for the agreement among mainstream German political parties not to form or enter a coalition government with the far-right AfD party, whose representatives have called the Holocaust “just a speck of bird poop” and regularly use Nazi slogans. In fact, the AfD is monitored by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, as it is suspected of behavior that is hostile to and seeks to undermine the German constitution.
Vance’s speech hit hard because it called into question the very foundation of Europe’s relationship with the U.S., namely shared values like the commitment to democracy, the rule of law and the dignity of all people.
Despite these concerns, Vance met with AfD party leader Alice Weidel for half an hour following his speech, while refusing to meet with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. As Rym Momtaz, an analyst of European security at the Carnegie Endowment, eloquently put it, 80 years after the end of World War II, “Vance called on Germany to get rid of its firewall against neo-Nazis, the heirs to the very political movement 416,800 American soldiers died to defeat.”
Beyond the objectionable substance of Vance’s speech, it also wasn’t very well argued. “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 declared, revealing his ignorance of the very concept of asymmetric operations, in which actions with minimal cost can have outsize destructive impact. And while most Europeans did not want to go there, they noted the hypocrisy of this sermon coming from the representative of an administration that in just the preceding weeks had suspended a media outlet from the Oval Office for not using the term “Gulf of America” and made the National Science Foundation remove or edit scientific research from its website based on lists of banned words—to say nothing of the fact that Trump, as well as his supporters and Cabinet nominees, still refuse to publicly admit that he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden.
But for all its obvious flaws, the speech nevertheless hit hard because it called into question the very foundation of Europe’s relationship with the U.S., namely shared values like the commitment to democracy, the rule of law and the dignity of all people. Europeans believe the U.S. and Europe are friends and partners, rather than simply allies of convenience, and that their ties are based on more than just common interests. Or at least they used to.
Admittedly, some have long argued that this belief that the Western bond is somehow special has always been naïve. As the old joke goes, every European state thinks it has a “special relationship” with the United States. According to this line of criticism, it is just Europeans’ soft side and misunderstanding of great power politics that makes them think that friendship plays a role in international relations. At the same time, prior to Trump, U.S. administrations regularly made reference to this foundation of shared values and explained the U.S. commitment to Europe through them.
Other clear-eyed observers have warned that while there might have been a values-based relationship in the past, it has been over for a while now. Constanze Stelzenmueller, a German expert on trans-Atlantic relations at the Brookings Institution, argued in February 2018 that the first Trump administration was driven by a “quasiadversarial ideology.” In an almost prophetic essay published the following year, she described the U.S. as a “hostile ally.”
But regardless of how real the values-based special relationship ever was, this year’s Munich Security Conference will likely go down in history not only as the moment when the trans-Atlantic relationship was finally fractured, but as the moment when the Western-led global order was finally buried. A speech that focused on free speech and democracy felt adversarial in a way no speech announcing even the most drastic U.S. troop reductions in Europe could have.
As a result, it might be this speech, which in the moment felt so misplaced because of its odd choice of topic, that finally makes Europeans come to grips with the fact that things really have changed. “I fundamentally believe that we are on the same team,” Vance said at one point in Munich. But there are few left in Europe who believe him.
*Ulrike Franke is a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, based in Paris. She focuses on German and European security and defense, the future of warfare and the impact of new technologies such as drones and artificial intelligence. Her bi-weekly WPR column appears every other Wednesday.