JD Vance Lobs a Hand Grenade into the Munich Security Conference
Feb. 16—President Donald Trump sent his least diplomatic spokesman, Vice President JD Vance, to deliver a clear message to his European allies attending the Munich Security Conference, which event has turned into an annual NATO love fest: To adapt the famous saying from Charles Schultz’ Charlie Brown character, “we have met the enemy, and it is you,” or more precisely, the Europeans’ fear of the changes sweeping the world that causes their governments to limit what their citizens are allowed to know and censor what they are allowed to express.
Vance’s blunt words, attacking the European Establishment that faces rebellion from its citizens, was first met with stunned silence; then after these dimwits realized that they had been lectured on their internal polices by this “uncultured American” in the same language that they reproach their so-claimed enemies, Russia and China, there was universal anger and rage, that made it into NATO’s propaganda machine.
The assembled cast of NATO misleaders and others in attendance had hoped that they would be both briefed on and included in the peace process that Trump and Russian President Valdimir Putin had initiated to end NATO’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. But that is not going to happen, as Trump intends to control that process, by leaving NATO and Europe out. Vance, who at Trump’s behest, met with NATO’s sock puppet dictator of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who was at the conference, would only mention ,Ukraine in passing, stating that Trump and he believe “that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine.”
While repeating Trump’s mantra that Europe needs to step up in a big way to provide for its own defense, Vance then stated, “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. 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.”
“There is a certain irony about Vance and Trump lecturing the Europeans about censoring views that they find inconvenient,” a source pointed out. “This, after Trump signed executive orders attacking people on college campuses for speaking out about the International Court of Justice-cited Israeli genocide against Palestinians, stating that people who oppose Israel and say so, are anti-Semites. But there is also something important in Vance’s very undiplomatic message to the European establishment. He is telling them that Trump knows who is really behind the attacks on him, his policies against NATO and its endless wars, and the comparison between him and Hitler, that has been placed into circulation internationally, as well as the attempts to censor him, by not covering what he really says—these efforts are coming from the NATO establishment, and most directly our British allies.
'Trump is thumbing his nose at these people, and their assets in the United States," the source continued. "He speaks of 'democratic mandates,' that are given by the people with their votes and other expressions of support. He has been swept into office, in part because the people rejected the policies of the NATO whores in the Biden Administration and the trans-Atlantic Establishment. He is an agent of change, who operates by provoking chaos. It is his method. If you don’t like it or him, that’s fine. But he intends to carry out his perceived mandate—the NATO Establishment be damned.”
We present below the middle and last sections of Vance’s speech, to let you judge for yourselves the truth of the Vance-Trump message to NATO:
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.
These cavalier statements are shocking to American ears. For years, we’ve been told that 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 defense of democracy.
But when we see European courts canceling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard. And I say “ourselves” because I fundamentally believe that we are on the same team. We must do more than talk about democratic values, we must live them.
Lessons from the Cold War
Within living memory of many of you in this room, the Cold War positioned defenders of democracy against much more tyrannical forces on this continent. And consider the side in that fight that censored dissidents, that closed churches, that canceled elections. Were they the good guys? Certainly not.
Thank God they lost the Cold War. They lost because they neither valued nor respected all of the extraordinary blessings of liberty. The freedom to surprise, to make mistakes, to invent, to build. As it turns out, you can’t mandate innovation or creativity just as you can’t force [on] people what to think, what to feel, or what to believe.
We believe those things are certainly connected. Unfortunately, when I look at Europe today, it’s sometimes not so clear what happened to some of the Cold War’s winners. I look to Brussels, where EU commissars warn citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest the moment they spot what they’ve judged to be, quote, “hateful content.” I look to my own country, where police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online as part of, quote, “combating misogyny on the internet, a day of action.”
I look to Sweden, where two weeks ago the government convicted a Christian activist for participating in Koran burnings that resulted in his friend’s murder. As the judge in his case chillingly noted, Sweden’s laws to supposedly protect free expression do not, in fact, grant, and I’m quoting, “a free pass to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief.”
Concerns About Religious Freedom in the UK
Perhaps most concerningly, I look to our very dear friends in 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. 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.
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.
I wish I could say that this was a fluke, a one-off crazy example of a badly written law being enacted against a single person.
But no, this last October, just a few months ago, the Scottish government began distributing letters to citizens whose houses lay within so-called safe access zones, warning them that even private prayer within their own homes may amount to breaking the law. Naturally, the government urged readers to report any fellow citizens suspected guilty of thought crime. In Britain and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat.
Censorship in the United States
In the interest of comedy, my friends, but also in the interest of truth, I will admit that sometimes the loudest voices for censorship have come not from within Europe, but from within my own country, where the prior administration threatened and bullied social media companies to censor so-called misinformation. Misinformation, like, for example, the idea that coronavirus had likely leaked from a laboratory in China, our own government encouraged private companies to silence people who dared to utter what turned out to be an obvious truth.
I come here today not just with an observation, but with an offer. 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.
Election Cancellation in Romania
We’re at the point, of course, that the situation has gotten so bad that this December, Romania straight-up canceled the results of a presidential election, based on the flimsy suspicions of an intelligence agency and enormous pressure from its continental neighbors.
As I understand it, 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.
The good news is that I happen to think your democracies are substantially less brittle than many people apparently fear, and I really do believe that allowing our citizens to speak their mind will make them stronger still. Which of course brings us back to Munich, where the organizers of this very conference have banned lawmakers representing parties on both the left and the right from participating in these conversations.
Now again, we don’t have to agree with everything or anything that people say, but when people represent, when political leaders represent an important constituency, it is incumbent upon us to at least participate in dialogue with them. To many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion or, God forbid, vote a different way or even worse, win an election.
Defense Spending and European Security
This is a security conference and I’m sure you all came here prepared to talk about how exactly you intend to increase defense spending over the next few years in line with some new target. And that’s great, because as President Trump has made abundantly clear, he believes that our European friends must play a bigger role in the future of this continent. You hear this term, “burden sharing,” but we think it’s an important part of being in a shared alliance together that the Europeans step up while America focuses on areas of the world that are in great danger.
Let me also ask you, how will you even begin to think through the kinds of budgeting questions if we don’t know what it is that we’re defending in the first place? I’ve heard a lot already in my conversations, and I’ve had many, many great conversations with many people gathered here in this room. I’ve heard a lot about what you need to defend yourselves from, and of course that’s important.
But what has seemed a little bit less clear to me, and certainly I think to many of the citizens of Europe, is what exactly it is that you’re defending yourselves for.
What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important? I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions, and the conscience that guide your very own people. Europe faces many challenges, but the crisis this continent faces right now, the crisis I believe we all face together, is one of our own making. 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 that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump.
You need democratic mandates to accomplish anything of value in the coming years. Have we learned nothing that thin mandates produce unstable results?
The Importance of Democratic Mandates
But there is so much of value that can be accomplished with the kind of democratic mandate that I think will come from being more responsive to the voices of your citizens. If you’re going to enjoy competitive economies, if you’re going to enjoy affordable energy and secure supply chains, then you need mandates to govern, because you have to make difficult choices to enjoy all of these things, and of course we know that very well in America.
You cannot win a democratic mandate by censoring your opponents or putting them in jail, whether that’s the leader of the opposition, a humble Christian praying in her own home, or a journalist trying to report the news. Nor can you win one by disregarding your basic electorate on questions like who gets to be a part of our shared society.
The Challenge of Mass Migration
Of all the pressing challenges that the nations represented here face, I believe there is nothing more urgent than mass migration. Today, almost one in five people living in this country moved here from abroad. That is, of course, an all-time high. It’s a similar number, by the way, in the United States, also an all-time high. The number of immigrants who entered the EU from non-EU countries doubled between 2021 and 2022 alone, and of course it’s gotten much higher since.
We know the situation; it didn’t materialize in a vacuum. It’s the result of a series of conscious decisions made by politicians all over the continent and others across the world over the span of a decade. We saw the horrors wrought by these decisions yesterday in this very city.
Of course, I can’t bring it up again without thinking about the terrible victims who had a beautiful winter day in Munich ruined. Our thoughts and prayers are with them and will remain with them.
Why did this happen in the first place? It’s a terrible story, but it’s one we’ve heard way too many times in Europe and unfortunately too many times in the United States as well. An asylum seeker, often a young man in his mid-twenties, 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? No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants. But you know what they did vote for? In England, they voted for Brexit, and, agree or disagree, they voted for it. And more and more all over Europe, they’re voting for political leaders who promise to put an end to out-of-control migration.
I happen to agree with a lot of these concerns, but you don’t have to agree with me. I just think that people care about their homes, they care about their dreams, they care about their safety and their capacity to provide for themselves and their children.
And they’re smart. I think this is one of the most important things I’ve learned in my brief time in politics. Contrary to what you might hear a couple of mountains over in Davos [Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting], the citizens of all of our nations don’t generally think of themselves as educated animals or as interchangeable cogs of a global economy.
It’s hardly surprising that they don’t want to be shuffled about or relentlessly ignored by their leaders. It is the business of democracy to adjudicate these big questions at the ballot box. I believe that dismissing people, dismissing their concerns, or worse yet, shutting down media, shutting down elections, or shutting people out of the political process, protects nothing. In fact, it is the most sure-fire way to destroy democracy.
Speaking up and expressing opinions isn’t “election interference,” even when people express views outside your own country and even when those people are very influential. And trust me, I say this with all humor, if American Democracy can survive ten years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.
The Importance of Listening to the People
But what no democracy—American, German, or European—will survive, is telling millions of voters that their thoughts and concerns, their aspirations, their pleas for relief are invalid or unworthy of even being considered. Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There’s no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle or you don’t.
Europeans, the people, have a voice. European leaders have a choice. And my strong belief is that we do not need to be afraid of the future. You can embrace what your people tell you, even when it’s surprising, even when you don’t agree.
If you do so, you can face the future with certainty and with confidence, knowing that the nation stands behind each of you. And that, to me, is the great magic of democracy. It’s not in these stone buildings or beautiful hotels. It’s not even in the great institutions that we have built together as a shared society. To believe in democracy is to understand that each of our citizens has wisdom and has a voice.
If we refuse to listen to that voice, even our most successful fights will secure very little. As Pope John Paul II, in my view, one of the most extraordinary champions of democracy on this continent or any other, once said, “Do not be afraid.” We shouldn’t be afraid of our people, even when they express views that disagree with their leadership. Thank you all.
Good luck to all of you. God bless you.