It was meant to shock. And shock it did.
The European functionaries, heads of state, defense ministers, and NATO bigwigs assembled at Munich’s Bayerische Hof last Friday expected the US vice president to enlighten them on the peace plan for Ukraine just launched by President Donald Trump.
Instead, they were treated to a nineteen-minute diatribe on the betrayal of democratic values by European elites. Vance accused them of resorting to “Soviet-style words” to censure opinions that did not fit their groupthink, using extra-democratic means to exclude populist challengers from power, and more generally showing every sign of growing out of touch with electorates. According to Vance, this was the “enemy from within,” more dangerous than Russia or China.
The killer line was: “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.”
So far, European responses have overwhelmingly been negative.
German defense minister Boris Pistorius’s reaction was typical. Vance’s statements, said Pistorius, “were unacceptable.” Among equals, it is simply not OK to lecture one another on the way democracy is done at home. Instead, we respect one another’s history and traditions — and assume in good faith that the key values of democracy and liberalism are at the root of those traditions.
A second type of response read the speech as an outpouring of the philosophy underlying Trump’s MAGA movement. Here, the piece by the Guardian’s diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour may, again, stand in for many other responses. According to Wintour, the speech marked an ideological rupture between the United States and Europe, a conflict between two different worldviews. In general, an astute observation.
Things get more complicated when Wintour reads into the speech liberal clichés about the MAGA…
Auteur: Ewald Engelen
