So, About VP Vance's Speech

Christoph, I can tell you it played well in Statesboro

Over the weekend, I listened to/watched Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in the background while I was doing other things while putter’n around the house.

Hey, I was a career US Navy officer. I can multi-task.

Over the next couple of days after, I started to read the commentary after the speech, the reaction to it—especially from the guy above, Christoph Heusgen, who was running it. Yes, he was one of the German diplomats who laughed at President Trump during his 2018 UN speech when Trump warned the Germans about reliance on Russian energy…and there he is a few days ago, crying over…Vance’s speech?

BTW, according to his bio, Heusgen spent some of his undergrad time at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, Georgia. BZ to him. I can’t say he’s never seen America outside the Acela Corridor.

However, Christoph, the tears. Dude. There’s no man-crying in Statesboro unless your dog died, your tractor broke, or your daughter gets married. Didn’t you learn anything, son? Sad.

So, back to the speech. Fair note, as you may have gathered, I like the speech a lot—so biases up front. Regulars know that it echos many of the positions I have staked out, and warnings I have given here over the last two decades—many written in the years I lived on the Continent as as NATO staff officer.

I’m sorry…much of the commentary, and Heusgen’s strange reaction, just didn’t seem to mesh with the speech I heard. As I learned a long time ago, when in doubt, go to the primary source, first-person, and the transcript.

So, that is what we’re going to do. This isn’t a full Fisking, but I think we need to be clear about what Vance said. Once we do that, I will largely leave it up to you as to why so many in the European and Western left are reacting the way they are.

Just strange…but let’s dive in to it.

In the opening, does this sound like the start of a hostile attack, or perhaps the affectionate words of a friend?

…the first time I was ever in Munich was with my wife, actually, who’s here with me today on a personal trip, and I’ve always loved the city of Munich, and I’ve always loved its people, and I just want to say that we’re very moved, and our thoughts and prayers are with Munich and everybody affected by the evil inflicted on this beautiful community. We’re thinking about you, we’re praying for you, and we will certainly be rooting for you in the days and weeks to come.

This is what has the Europeans upset. They are not used to having to reflect on what they are doing. Friends don’t let friends self-destruct. BZ to Vance to speak to friends as a friend.

…the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine, and we also believe that it’s important in the coming years for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defense, the threat that I worry the most about vis-a-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.

Now 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.

Now 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.

I had an exchange with a colleague on the continent who is a good faith actor on the national security stage and has significant concerns. His points were solid and very understandable from an European perspective.

Here, in part, was my response to his concerns;

However, a lot of the disconnect is, as we’ve discussed here before, the European press.

Since the WaPo and NYT—both located in one-party leftist enclaves—do not understand anyone to the right of Sen. Warner (D-VA), Europeans don’t either. It does not help that those who “have been to America” have usually just spent time in the deeply Democratic DC to Boston corridor. They have no idea what the American “right” is—a vastly different creature than European “right.” Since Obama’s second term, it has only gotten worse than it was when I lived for years on the Continent in the 00s.

The American left, and Democrats in general, are easier for Europeans to understand because they receive friendly treatment in WaPo and NYT and, as internationalists, comfortably fit into the European center-left/center-right uniparty.

When it comes to right of center and libertarian minded Americans like Vance when they speak of freedom of speech/religion etc, it is helpful to remember that the USA is a revolutionary nation, and the center-right in the USA still holds to those ideals as outlined in our Constitution.

We had a revolution (also a civil war, especially in my part of the country that was generally pro-Crown), specifically against an oppressive state that clamped down on speech (1st Amendment), press (1st A), protest (assembly 1st A), organizations (1st A., association), religion (1st A, the NY colony was anti-Catholic, Virginia anti-Quaker, and the Wars of Religion were still not ancient history). The British government wanted to enforce it by disarming the public, which is why we have the right to be armed (2nd A).

It is baked in the the American character, to the left and right of center, to hold any government and its desire to control the people in question. It was the whole purpose to our revolution…the first of The Enlightenment that eventually seeped—from The Enlightenment not the USA—to Europe, especially after Napoleon and 1848 etc.

So, back to the Vance speech—this is when he really started to bite.

And we believe those things are certainly connected. And 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.”

And 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.

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.

Now 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.

Well meaning Europeans, friends of the USA, had no problem pointing out America’s failures to live up to its ideals when it came to the civil rights struggles in the 1960s.

This is no different.

As I and other warned starting over two decades ago, Europe’s inaction on migration will eventually force it to behave in ways that it does not want to behave, to do things it did not want to do.

I thought it was going to be against the illegal immigrants and unassimilated migrants, but I was mostly wrong. Most of Europe is instead going after its indigenous population that has been there since the Late Bronze Age Collapse.

Vance made an effort to be fair. We have similar issues on our side of the Atlantic as well.

And in the interest of (comity), 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.

As we have the same values from The Enlightenment, we also have similar opponents of those values.

So 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.

How could this idea, the marketplace of idea, be “not acceptable” in a free society, confident in itself, its culture, and its people?

Are we in the West better than this? Of course we are.

Now 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.

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.

The saying goes, “Follow the money.”

For others who did not care about the Western Values issues, they do care about spending money on defense. This is where they got upset.

…President Trump has made abundantly clear, he believes that our European friends must play a bigger role in the future of this continent. We don’t think, 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.

A decade before President Trump came down the Trump Tower escalator, many of us who, like Vance, are pro-Europe and pro-NATO, have been warning about the corrosive effect on this side of the Atlantic of the under-investment on defense by the Europeans. If, in 2025, this is still shocking to you, then for the sake of world peace, get out of the national security arena.

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. 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.

This becomes an even larger burr under the European saddle. It is easy to come to these conferences and look to other nations as your problem, to tut-tut how disappointed you are in others, it is something different to have a friend tell you that you need to fix yourself first. It is hard to hear, but it is what friends do to those who they truly value. They don’t let them destroy themselves.

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.

…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.

Now 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, the citizens of all of our nations don’t generally think of themselves as educated animals or as interchangeable cogs of a global economy.

And 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.

And 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.

Why can’t everyone at least agree on that point?

Regulars here know that none of what Vance said should be new to anyone. We have been discussing it here for over two decades and others with much broader reach have as well.

Vance’s speech ends with a message that should not be 'unacceptable' to any fair-minded person concerned with the future of Europe.

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.

And 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.

And 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.

Americans cannot love Europe more than the Europeans. What we can do is love Western values that come from the best of The Enlightenment, those values that brought civilization to an uncivilized planet.

If the Europeans cannot stand for what we believe to be Western values, then they will have to define what values they do stand for.

If you don’t have freedom of speech, respect for the democratic system, and a focus on raising the quality of life for your citizens, then what exactly will you have in Europe? Is that something the American people will continue to want to risk global nuclear war to defend?

Read the text yourself. Does it rate this response from the German Defense Minister?

Europe has issues. The American Vice President, Europe’s friend, is not one of them.

He is just holding up a mirror.