JD Vance Shocks European Leaders With Warning - Threat To Europe Is From Within

JD Vance Shocks European Leaders With Warning - Threat To Europe Is From Within

 JONATHAN TOBIN

During the past decade, Europe's political, intellectual and cultural establishment has shown little restraint when it came to venting its disdain for President Donald Trump and Americans who support him and his policies.

Like Trump's American political opponents, European leaders and pundits did so in a manner that made their disdain quite clear, not merely for him personally. It was also rooted in an elitist contempt for his populist approach to politics. It was his stances on immigration and culture-war issues, however, that particularly appalled them. Moreover, their critiques were rooted in a sense of their own moral superiority.

Indeed, it was typical during Trump's first term for many in Europe and America to refer to German Chancellor Angela Merkel as the true leader of the Western world and not the president of the United States. Trump was routinely depicted as not merely unworthy of the title but disinterested in defending Western values.

And so, the audience that gathered at the annual Munich Security Conference this past week was not merely unprepared to listen to a speech in which an American leader turned the tables on them. They are so stuck in their own preconceptions about what constitutes the threats that the conference is supposed to be assessing that they were not only astonished but actually insulted by U.S. Vice President JD Vance's decision to talk about the most fundamental threats to democracy in the 21st century.

Speaking to a stunned and largely hostile audience, Vance made it clear that the United States remained committed to Europe's security. But he was primarily interested in sending a message to America's partners that it was time for everyone to stop obsessing solely about external threats, be they from China or Russia. It was more important at this moment, he said, to ask what it was they believed they were defending.

What followed was a seminal statement in defense of democracy and opposition to censorship of free speech. It also demanded that Europe's leaders consider whether their open borders policies, which have let into their nations millions of unvetted migrants from Muslim and Arab nations that oppose Western values, were undermining their societies and harming their citizenry.

As such Vance's speech was, as First Amendment scholar Jonathan Turley observed, analogous to Winston Churchill's 1945 "Iron Curtain" speech that rallied the West to defend democracy against Soviet tyranny in the aftermath of the Second World War. Nearly 80 years later, Vance articulated a similar obvious truth.

It is often forgotten that Churchill was roundly criticized by American and European elites at the time for his willingness to tell the truth about the Communist threat rather than appeasing it. So, too, Vance is also being widely denounced for his temerity in calling attention to how European democracies have discarded the basic values of democracy in order to silence views they oppose, as well as to how their policies threaten the survival of Western values.

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