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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.
Vance defends democracy
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.
The AfD problem
He is accused of interfering in German elections by questioning the "firewall" placed around the far-right AfD party, which is likely to have a good showing in that country's parliamentary elections scheduled to be held next month. In doing so, he has been attacked as somehow supportive of authoritarian forces and antisemitism.
His seeming support for AfD—whose leader, Alice Weidel, Vance met with on this trip—may be unwise. But that doesn't detract from the truth of his assertions. Rather than merely dismissing his speech, as liberal elites on both sides of the Atlantic routinely do to Trump administration policies and positions, it is incumbent on those who claim to be defenders of democracy to heed his warnings.
Moreover, it ill-behooves those who claim to worry about the spread of antisemitism around the world to attack Vance or the administration he serves on this issue. Israel is still fighting for its life against the real-life 21st-century Nazis of our time—the Hamas terrorist organization, and its supporters and enablers—and American and European Jews are reeling from the surge in Jew-hatred caused by the Oct. 7, 2023 massacres of Jews in southern Israel. Yet the Europeans who reject Vance's speech either stand ineffectively on the sidelines on this issue or are actively cheering on the bizarre red-green alliance of leftists and Islamists who are behind this war on the Jews; it is the Trump administration that is firmly opposing both these forces.
During his first administration, from time to time Trump broke with the postwar tradition of treating America's European allies with kid gloves. He urged them to spend more on their own defense rather than relying almost completely on the generosity of U.S. taxpayers to fulfill that vital task. He did occasionally question whether the NATO alliance had long ago reached obsolescence in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War, coupled with the collapse of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in which Europeans had made some token contributions.
That was labeled as isolationist, if not a heretical abandonment of American allies, though Trump's prodding about defense spending did more to bolster the alliance than anything that his recent predecessors had done. And so, the security conference was a ripe moment for the Trump 2.0 administration to call the world's attention to the way the West and the alliance are just as much threatened by internal forces as they are by external foes.
Free speech in decline
Vance's position on free speech seems right to anyone who believes in democracy. As he discussed at some length, the problem goes beyond German laws that specifically target those who seek to resurrect the language or symbolism of the Nazis. Nor is it limited to efforts to isolate the AfD Party, which, as I've written previously, is distinct from other right-wing nationalist European parties because of its difficulties in distancing itself from Germany's horrific past and recruitment of parliamentary candidates that refuse, unlike Weidel herself, to do so.
In contemporary Europe, support for freedom of expression is not only a priority; it is under attack specifically from those forces that talk the most about democracy. As Vance noted, "Everything from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship is billed as a defense of democracy."
He recalled that during NATO's heyday during the Cold War, there was no doubt about which side was guilty of oppression. It was the Soviets that "censored dissidents, "closed churches" and "canceled elections." They lost the Cold War "because they neither valued nor respected all of the extraordinary blessings of liberty."
These days, the winners of the Cold War—or at least America's European allies—are doing those things. They do so to silence those who dissent against woke ideology or the unfettered immigration of Muslim and Islamist populations that is more than just a security threat (as the latest instance of terrorism in Munich itself demonstrated).
Vance listed examples of this contempt for democratic norms and free speech in the European Union, Sweden, Romania, and especially, in the United Kingdom, where posting dissent against leftist woke orthodoxies on social media are sometimes considered criminal offenses. The crackdown on heretical conservative thoughts about abortion, immigration or gender ideology there is bad enough. But it is especially egregious when the same authorities turn a blind eye to the open support for the genocidal Islamists of Hamas and the massive incitement against Jews in that country, especially since Oct. 7.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz treated Vance's speech as somehow indifferent to the threat from Nazism today in a subsequent address to the same conference, which was widely applauded by the attending elites. This isn't so much wrongheaded as it is a form of gaslighting.
I understand that many other democratic countries do not have the same respect for free speech that America does, with its First Amendment rights that are so deeply embedded in our political culture. And German laws about the Nazis are based on that nation's efforts to transcend the legacy of its Hitlerian past and rejoin the community of nations as they regained independence following the Allied occupation. Vance and key Trump advisor Elon Musk are wrong to embrace AfD without first requiring it to completely clean up their act as other right-wing European parties have done.
As I've also previously written, Vance and Trump are also wrong to continue to associate with former Fox News TV host Tucker Carlson, whose platforming and cheerleading for antisemitism and anti-Zionism have become habitual on the show that he airs on Musk's X social-media platform.
But they are right when they say that the issues of free speech and immigration are of sufficient importance to transcend those concerns at this moment in history.
Some defend censorship policies because of the supposed threat to democracy posed by Russian meddling, which has come in the form of social-media ads. But as Vance says, though he and Trump disapprove of such conduct, "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 real threat to Jews
The primary contemporary threat to the West or the Jews isn't, for all of their manifest flaws, AfD, Carlson or Europeans who don't wish their countries to be transformed for the worst by a flood of immigrants who oppose their core values. Nor is it Vladimir Putin's Russia, whose despotism and illegal invasion of Ukraine are awful, though that war should be ended as soon as possible.
The most pressing problem facing defenders of Western democracy comes from the censorious and anti-democratic forces that exist within the West. That includes the United States, where the Biden administration colluded with social-media companies to censor and shut down free speech and even reporting about subjects they wished to silence.
Whatever you may think of the Trump administration, its clarion call in defense of freedom uttered by Vance is exactly what is needed right now. Along those lines, the issue of immigration is not disconnected from that of antisemitism.
On the contrary, the shift of many European nations against Israel, its defense against genocidal terrorists, and their toleration and mainstreaming of antisemitism is directly and tragically connected to the growing constituency for Jew-hatred among the many millions of Muslim migrants to those countries in the last decade. The fateful decisions of E.U. nations, especially Germany when Merkel was chancellor, to open the floodgates to these immigrants is why AfD and other nationalist parties throughout Europe have gone mainstream, and are either in government or potentially on the cusp of doing so.
Vance's exhortation to the Munich Conference to listen to their citizens, rather than dismiss or silence them, should be heeded. Rather than attacking the Trump administration for allegedly insulting them, they should be joining with it to defend free speech and Western civilization against those on the left or among Islamists who wish to tear it down.
Tolerance for opposing views within democratic societies is hard for the European and American liberal elites who look down their noses at Trump, Vance and Musk. While claiming to champion liberalism, their behavior and policies are fundamentally illiberal. But as Vance joked, "If American democracy can survive ten years of Greta Thunberg's [anti-democratic global warming extremism) scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk."
Both defenders of democracy and those who purport to speak for the Jews need to pivot away from leftist groupthink or the assumptions about the world that dominated the period from the 1940s to the 1980s. They should now be focused on defeating the forces on the left and from the Muslim world that provide the most disturbing potent to our safety and freedom. And we should be grateful for an American administration that—whether you back it or not—is not afraid to say as much.
We don't know whether, as Turley clearly hopes, opinion about Vance's Munich speech will shift as it did about Churchill's "Iron Curtain" address. Too much of the journalistic and foreign-policy establishment is invested in shutting down conservative speech and advocating for open borders, as well as demonizing Trump, Vance and Musk, to acknowledge their mistakes.
Vance is correct to say that European and American elites alike should listen to the people rather than high-handedly reject their concerns as racist or xenophobic.
The election results in the United States and some European countries illustrate that more and more people are waking up to the threat that woke and Islamist attacks on the West pose to civilization, freedoms and security. Rather than refuse to listen to Vance because of disagreement with him and the administration on some points, that threat and the way it fuels antisemitism must be our primary focus.
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Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of Jewish News Syndicate. He's been a JWR contributor since 1998.