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At last week’s Munich Security Conference, Vice President JD Vance delivered some harsh truths to the Europeans within the audience. “If you are afraid of the voices, the opinions, and the conscience that guide your very own people,” Vance said, then “there is nothing America can do for you.” Among the problems that Vance went on to adumbrate were governments “dismissing voters’ concerns,” “shutting down their media,” and violating the “basic liberties” of the “religious.” Most provocatively of all, Vance accused Europe of having begun to borrow tactics from that old enemy of the transatlantic alliance, the Soviet Union. In practice, he submitted, Europe’s thicket of censorship laws represented little more than “old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation.”
In response, the German defense minister, Boris Pistorius, said that Vance’s words were “not acceptable.”