Watch: Vance Torched The European Elite Face-to-Face and They Absolutely Hated It

Europe is obsessed with external threats but is so morally lost it isn’t even clear what it’s defending itself for any more, JD Vance warned in an excoriating speech to the continent’s security elite on Friday.

Traditionally, applause is a well-worn gauge of how well a message is going down in a conference-hall. In most cases an audience can bring itself to at least raise half-hearted, polite applause but in Munich on Friday Vance couldn’t even get that: in a room of hundreds, perhaps a thousand top military, security, and political figures at times it seemed like there can’t have been anyone more than Vance’s own team putting their hands together.

The response was particularly frosty mid-speech as Vance listed some particularly egregious recent cases in European states where the government has cracked down on liberties, from arresting Christians for silent prayer to cancelling elections, and when he outright accused the leaders of the continent of Soviet, anti-democratic attitudes. Worst of all, he said, they held these feelings towards their own people.

If Europe’s paternalist elites hated this shock therapy, populists in Europe loved it. Britain’s Nigel Farage amplified the notion Vance had better articulated the future of Europe than those elites could, while Reform MP Rupert Lowe called it a “brutal” tour-de-force of “Truth, after truth, after truth.”

Beyond a laundry list of failings by European governments to respect freedom for their own people, Vance diagnosed a continent lost for its own failure to understand what it stands for any why, and even worse one that scorns the views of its own people. He said: “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”.

Of the terror attack that took place in Germany just the day before, Vance nodded at the long and shameful history of such assaults in Europe, stating: “How many times must we suffer these appalling setbacks before we change course and take our shared civilisation in a new direction?”.

“In Britain and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat”, the Vice President said, in a rallying cry for Europe to find new respect for democracy — real democracy, where voters have a voice to be respected no matter if what they say is agreeable to the paternalistic elite or not — and told leaders to have more respect for their own nations. Vance said: “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 hundreds-of-thousands [of dollars] of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.”

But there’s good news, Vance said, because democracy can be strong as long as the general attitude towards voters isn’t that they are bad people with bad opinions to be denegrated and ignored. Telling European leaders, and those in Germany in particular — which is nine days out from its national elections — to respect populists, not fear them, he continued: “the organizers of this very conference have banned lawmakers representing populist parties on both the left and the right from participating in these conversations.”

It is “incumbent” upon leaders to participate in dialogue with this not-so-silent majority of Europeans — words carefully chosen to nettle, no doubt, given the motto of the Munich conference is resolving problems through dialogue — and in his most damning rhetoric Vance told his struck-silent audience:

Now 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.

… 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… But 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 are defending in the first place?

… 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. And 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.

Britain’s left-wing Guardian called the speech a “blistering” and “chastising” attack and emphasised that it would go down well in Moscow, playing up the old idea that Donald Trump is some sort of crypto-Russian asset. Germany’s Die Welt notes the comments of politician Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, of governing party the corporatist FDP, replying: “Our liberal world is under extreme threat”.

Settling on deriding Vance’s intelligence as the most effective line of attack — and in doing so demonstrating the haughty attitude to populism illustrated by the Vice President in his speech — Strack-Zimmermann said: “US Vice President Vance’s speech at the MSC was a bizarre intellectual low-flyer and has no place at an international security conference”. The German defence minister Boris Pistorius, who like Strack-Zimmermann is likely to see his party booted out of government in nine days, called Vance’s comments “unacceptable” to applause in the MSC hall.