Munich, Germany: a city where Europe’s history was decided once before and where its future might just have been decided as well.
In 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain went to Munich to see the Austrian painter, who had just invaded Czechoslovakia. The man with the big moustache obtained guarantees from the man with the little one that the invasions and aggression would now be at an end. Thus far—no more. Chamberlain waved those guarantees proudly as he boarded the plane back to London, for all the assembled press to see. “Peace in our time,” he proclaimed.
Hardly.
Instead, within a year, Europe was plunged into another bloody conflagration that would cost tens of millions of lives and reshape the global political landscape. The British Empire bankrupted, then destroyed. Germany dismembered. Half of Europe under the communist jackboot, and the other half a series of launching pads and staging posts for American troops, planes, missiles and economic self-interest.
The continent was changed, perhaps irrecoverably.
Of course, we can debate whether Munich was the real turning point. War was probably inevitable long before 1938, not least of all because it’s clear, as the historian Sean McMeekin has shown, in his excellent book Stalin’s War, that Uncle Joe was hellbent on a showdown with Hitler—it’s just that Hitler beat him to the punch.
Anyway, this isn’t the place for a lesson in World War II revisionism.
On Friday, it was Vice President JD Vance’s turn to visit Munich, for the Munich Security Conference. Unlike Chamberlain, Vance wasn’t seeking guarantees of good behaviour from Europe’s politicians. He had a message to deliver to them, a simple, direct message about the state of their own house and who is to blame for it.
“The threat that I worry most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia,” Vance said. “It’s not China. It’s not any external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values.”
Europe is crumbling and it’s your fault.
I think I’ve said this before here, but it bears repeating: people don’t like being told they conspire in their own misfortune, that they are the architects of their own demise. And they certainly don’t like being told that in public either. Quite the opposite.
The atmosphere in the conference hall was positively funereal. At times, it seemed like the only hands being brought together in the rhythmic gesture of applause we call “clapping” were those of Vance’s own entourage. Everyone else was stock still—transfixed, horrified. The camera cut to Ursula Von der Leyen, President of the European Commission: she looked bloodless, even by her own vampiric standards—like she had just discovered a thick black hair in her steak tartare or a fly in her gazpacho.
Vance’s speech is being portrayed almost as an act of war, as a fundamental betrayal of Europe by the emissary of a leader—Donald Trump—who we all know is really just a stooge of the Kremlin and a would-be dictator himself. Orange Hitler.
As I look across the sitting-room floor, I see JD looking fearsome on the front page of today’s Financial Times: “Vance Lays Blame for Europe’s Plight on ‘Threat from Within’: US Vice President Sparks Fury: Democratic Values Questioned: Russia Menace Played Down.” The lead article tells me German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius called the speech “unacceptable” and that a “senior diplomat” called it “totally mad… and very dangerous.”
The day before the conference, an Afghan man drove a into a crowd in Munich, that very city, injuring 39, and killing a mother and her two-year-old child. The man is believed to have had an Islamic motive for the attack, which he has already confessed to police was deliberate.
The idea that liberalism could be to blame for that atrocity, and countless others like it—the Bataclan, Nice, Charlie Hebdo, 7/7…—still seems totally alien to Europe’s smug, self-satisfied elite. Such attacks have nothing to do with decades of liberal policies, with mass immigration, multicultural pandering, absurd new politically correct speech codes and the harsh policing of patriotism and dissent. To say otherwise—well, that’s totally mad and very dangerous!
Vance, at least, doesn’t have to play along with that charade. He can say what he wants. He’s American, after all.
“How many times must we suffer these appalling setbacks before we change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction?” He asked.
In truth, Vance’s message was not one of division. It was a message of unity. Americans and Europeans have suffered together under the same liberal globalist yoke. Americans, like Europeans, have seen their birthright sold out from under them by the same people—a detached, disenchanted political and economic elite—and for the same reasons.
America, under Donald Trump, is now in the process of throwing off that yoke, and Europe can do so too.
America will help Europe to do it, but first Europeans must help themselves. America won’t help Europe’s elites if they continue to betray their people and the values—freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of inquiry—that have defined European civilization and made it the greatest in history.
Vance delivered a masterclass, justifying ten times over Donald Trump’s faith in him as his wingman. Vance looks like he may very well be the most consequential vice president of the post-War period. This was certainly one of the most consequential speeches ever given by a vice president—and we’re just three weeks into President Trump’s new term. Vance has the time and space to grow and become a great presidential candidate, and I’m sure he will. 2028 looks very promising indeed.
There were some real surprises in the speech too. For me, most surprising was Vance’s insistence that Americans and Europeans are not “interchangeable:” “the citizens of our nations are not interchangeable cogs in a global economy,” were his exact words. He seemed to be referencing, obliquely but barely, the Great Replacement. Contrary to what the ADL might want you to believe, the Great Replacement is not an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. As formulated by Renaud Camus, the Great Replacement is simply a description of demographic fact—the native populations of the West are being replaced in their homelands by foreigners—and the causes of it. The Great Replacement has little to do with anyone in particular, with no single group, but rather with the spread of a pernicious mindset Camus calls “replace-ism.” It’s replace-ism that tells us, and especially our rulers, that people are interchangeable, that they’re beans that can be counted and moved around and swapped to keep lines on a graph moving up and in the right direction. They aren’t, and the sooner we remember this, the sooner we’ll get out of this terrible mess we’re in.
Remarkable, like I said. Just remarkable.
When JD Vance went to Munich, he offered Europe’s politicians a choice. Stand with America for freedom and patriotism, for the things that made you great, or risk being swept aside by your own people when they make a different choice. It’s that simple.
Your move.