Last month, JD Vance berated European leaders in Munich over “the threat from within”. His speech was nuts.
At the Munich Security Conference held in Germany last month, United States vice president JD Vance made a startling statement: “…the threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. And what I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values – values shared with the United States of America.”
Instead of talking about the actual threat posed by autocratic, expansionist invaders on Europe’s borders, which had killed hundreds of thousands of people both combatant and civilian, Vance’s speech (full text) conjured up a Europe that is on the verge of becoming an Orwellian dystopia, with totalitarian governments who silence critics, ignore the concerns of citizens (especially about immigration), and defy elections.
The audience was stunned into silence.
Romanian election
In support of his argument that the decay of liberal democratic values in Europe is the threat that concerns the US the most, Vance cited several examples.
“I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election. He warned that if things don’t go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany, too.”
The Romanian constitutional court did annul the country’s presidential election of 6 December 2024, on the grounds that declassified documents from Romanian intelligence services exposed evidence of voting manipulation through social media platforms, illegal campaign financing on TikTok, cyber-attacks orchestrated by external forces and suspected Russian interference.
Vance called these “flimsy suspicions”, though I very much doubt he read the court transcripts. Judges do not make weighty, unprecedented and controversial decisions based only on “flimsy suspicions”.
“As I understand it,” said Vance, “the argument was that Russian disinformation had infected the Romanian elections, but I’d ask my European friends to have some perspective. You can believe it’s wrong for Russia to buy social media advertisements to influence your elections. We certainly do. You can condemn it on the world stage even. But 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.”
To start with, democracy was not destroyed. The election annullment was certainly controversial, and led to the resignation of its president, but Romania is due to hold new elections in May 2025.
Russia didn’t merely “buy social media advertisements”. It ran a network of at least 800 fake social media accounts that artificially boosted Calin Georgescu, a far-right anti-NATO pro-Russian candidate who previously had been virtually unknown. Russia’s intervention catapulted Georgescu from obscurity into a run-off election.
Vance’s objection to the court’s decision, and his snarky quip about the fragility of other countries’ democracies, are ironic in light of his boss’s insistence that the 2020 election was stolen from him, that there was no Russian interference in the 2016 election that he won, and that the insurrection of 6 January 2021 in which a mob attacked police officers and tried to overturn the election, was merely a “day of love”.
Far-right populists
His reference to the same thing happening in Germany referred to the Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, or AfD), a far-right populist movement that is anti-EU, pro-Russia, and anti-immigration. Its members use Nazi rhetoric like “Volk” and “Vaterland”, repudiate Germany’s shame over Nazi atrocities, participate in pro-Nazi social media groups, and believe the Holocaust was largely Allied and/or Jewish propaganda.
It stands to reason that a country with Germany’s history, a country that once swore “never again”, would reject neo-fascism and Holocaust denial, and consider the AfD a dangerous extremist organisation.
But Vance thinks it is undemocratic to suppress neo-Nazis. He considers that to be tantamount to the suppression of dissent of the “tyrannical forces” that were defeated during the Cold War.
Vance said he believes it is wrong for Russia to interfere in elections, yet here he is, interfering in Germany’s elections on behalf of the AfD (which lost, thankfully).
Hate speech
He challenged European initiatives to curb hate speech, and address disinformation and misinformation online.
Arguably, he has a good point. While misinformation is a serious threat to democracy, to public health, and to public safety, it is illiberal to cede the power to determine what is and isn’t true to the government, and to censor those who say things the government thinks are wrong – even if the government happens to be right. It has no business policing misinformation.
But comparing hate speech laws or anti-disinformation campaigns to the totalitarian powers of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc is ridiculous. The boy who steals bread because he’s hungry might be a thief, but he isn’t an organised crime boss.
Abortion protests
“And perhaps most concerningly,” Vance continued, “I look to our very dear friends, the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons, in particular, in the crosshairs.
“A little over two years ago, the British government charged Adam Smith-Connor, a 51-year-old physiotherapist and an army veteran, with the heinous crime of standing 50 meters from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes – not obstructing anyone, not interacting with anyone, just silently praying on his own.
“And after British law enforcement spotted him and demanded to know what he was praying for, Adam replied, simply, it was on behalf of the unborn son he and his former girlfriend had aborted years before.
“Now, the officers were not moved. Adam was found guilty of breaking the government’s new ‘buffer zones’ law, which criminalizes silent prayer and other actions that could ‘influence’ a person’s decision within 200 meters of an abortion facility. He was sentenced to pay thousands of pounds in legal costs to the prosecution.”
If that is what concerns Vance the most – the very most, among all of Europe’s security concerns – he is truly mad.
As it happens, 75% of the local community supported the introduction of a 150m buffer zone around that particular abortion clinic. Similar levels of public support led to the introduction of a law that bans activity in favour or against abortion services, including protests, harassment, and vigils, near all other abortion clinics.
The fellow in question deliberately violated the buffer zone, emailed the council in advance to let them know, and a community officer spoke to him for an hour and 40 minutes in an attempt to convince him to leave, but he refused.
That he was charged ought to be no more controversial than prohibiting protests where they cause undue disruption, undue risk to the targets of protests, or undue threats to national security.
Free speech!
“So, I come here today not just with an observation but with an offer,” Vance said, patronisingly. “And just as the Biden administration seemed desperate to silence people for speaking their minds, so the Trump administration will do precisely the opposite, and I hope that we can work together on that.
“In Washington, there is a new sheriff in town. And under Donald Trump’s leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer it in the public square, agree or disagree.”
Yeah! Free speech!
Like this: “All federal funding will STOP for any College, School or University that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS!”
That’s what US president Donald Trump, Vance’s boss, posted to his own Truth Social last week.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) pointed out that Trump does not have the legal authority to do this, but he did pull $400 million of federal funding from Columbia for permitting pro-Palestinian protests that he claimed constituted harrassment of Jewish students.
Wrote FIRE: “Even the most controversial political speech is protected by the First Amendment. As the Supreme Court reminds us, in America, we don’t use the law to punish those with whom we disagree. Instead, ‘[a]s a Nation we have chosen a different course – to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.’”
Vance has the temerity to lecture European countries about how they limit free speech and silence dissidents, while back across the pond, his own president is doing the exact same thing.
Hypocrisy
Vance denounced the Biden administration, which, he said, “threatened and bullied social media companies to censor so-called misinformation… Our own government encouraged private companies to silence people who dared to utter what turned out to be an obvious truth.”
Yet “encouraging” private companies to police misinformation on their platforms is, legally speaking, not a violation of the free speech rights of Americans. Its First Amendment binds only the state: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
It says nothing about what private companies may do on their own private property. “Encouraging” them to act in a certain way is not the same as making a law to abridge freedom of speech.
(Legally speaking, Trump might get away with pulling funding as a means of coercing organisations to silence dissent, since pulling funding is also not the same as making a law. Federal governments have long strong-armed States and private institutions in this manner.)
“We shouldn’t be afraid of our people,” intoned Vance imperiously, “even when they express views that disagree with their leadership.”
Which will be why Trump’s newly-appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission has reinstated three complaints against broadcast stations accused of bias against Trump; complaints which had been dismissed by his predecessor on free speech grounds.
The hypocrisy is staggering. It seems Vance objects to the suppression of far-right views, but not to the suppression of far-left views. He objects to the oppression of neo-Nazis, but not to the oppression of immigrants.
Internal matters
Even if we accept that Vance is correct about at least some of the examples he gave, they are internal matters. They are up to the citizens of European countries to decide.
If 75% of residents support a law to create no-protest buffer zones around sensitive institutions, to protect the vulnerable people who go there, then the government is doing exactly what Vance claims to want: it is listening to its people.
If the people of Europe don’t like their laws, they are free to vote for governments that will take a more liberal approach to free speech.
It is none of the United States’s business what limits Europeans place on free speech, or how they combat neo-fascist extremism (or, for that matter, left-wing or Islamist terrorism).
Equivalence
To draw an equivalence between the hate speech laws, limits on disruptive protests, and campaigns to combat misinformation of liberal democracies, and the suppression of dissent in the former Soviet Union, is absurd.
By saying that these instances concern him more than the threat of Russia or China, Vance is saying that Russia’s punitive prison sentences for peaceful anti-war speech are less serious. That raiding and forcibly closing human rights groups and newspapers are less serious. That criminalising assistance to foreign and international bodies to which Russia is not a party is less serious.
He is saying that imprisoning opposition politicians like Ilya Yashin for “false information” is less serious. That sending another opposition politician, Vladimir Kara-Murza, to a maximum security prison for 25 years over charges of treason, false information, and involvement with an undesirable organisation, is less serious. That arresting and detaining, without trial, two women for staging a play about brides of members of Islamic State, on “justification of terrorism” charges, is less serious. That sentencing journalist Abdulmumin Gadjiyev to 17 years in a maximum-security prison on trumped-up terrorism charges over his reporting is less serious.
He is saying that convicting people for reposting publications by “undesirable media” is less serious. That prosecuting streaming services for showing films that contain LGBT content is less serious. That forcing telecommunications companies to enable deep packet inspection that allows the state to filter and reroute internet traffic is less serious. That arbitrarily blocking websites without court orders is less serious.
He is saying that imprisoning foreign journalists on charges of spying or failing to register as a “foreign agent” is less serious. That using facial recognition technology to prosecute peaceful protesters is less serious.
He is saying that causing dissidents to “accidentally” fall out of windows is less serious. That assassinating dissidents on foreign soil is less serious. That invading a sovereign neighbour is less serious.
And let’s not even start on China’s dismal record on human rights and liberal democratic values.
These authoritarian powers are the countries that bother Vance less than the UK and Germany. It beggars belief.
Appeasement
Vance had a lot to say about immigration, which is also a domestic matter. It is none of America’s business how European governments choose to deal with immigration.
Despite it being a security conference, the only thing Vance said about the Ukraine war was: “…the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine.”
That is true only in the sense that the US is capable of forcing Ukraine into surrendering its Donetsk and Luhansk regions in return for a tenuous peace.
That is reminiscent of the tenuous peace secured by Britain’s Neville Chamberlain and France’s Édouard Daladier in 1938. They went along with the “Italian Plan” proposed by Italy’s fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini (a plan that turned out to have been written by the German Foreign Office) to force Czechslovakia to surrender the Sudetenland to Hitler.
Ironically, that deal was struck in the same city where Vance was speaking.
Chamberlain returned home to a hero’s welcome, believing that the Munich Agreement had secured “peace with honour… peace for our time.”
His fiercest critic, Winston Churchill retorted: “You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war.”
We all know who was right.
The Trump/Vance administration’s appeasement of Vladimir Putin over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has startling parallels with Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler.
That makes Vance’s claim that its own neglect of liberal democratic values is the greater threat to Europe all the more preposterous.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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Image: US vice president JD Vance addresses the Munich Security Conference on Friday 14 February 2025. Photo made available under a Creative Commons Licence by Malaysia Free Press.