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 barriers.
“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.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/14/jd-vance-stuns-munich-conference-with-blistering-attack-on-europes-leaders
