"Bad America" Comes to Munich

Vice President J.D. Vance went and spoke at a security conference in Munich. A message was sent. Many in Europe are now setting their hair on fire. What is up with this?

93. "Bad America" Comes to Munich

Vice President J.D. Vance went to Munich and gave a speech to the Munich Security Conference. It sent a message. It is important for us to understand what was being said and how it was received. You should do yourself a favour and watch the address:

German author,

eugyppius

, wrote a good piece detailing the speech and some of the response from European politicos and media types. I am not going to repeat what he said. Read it here:

"There is no room for firewalls": U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance denounces the closed and exclusionary European political elite to their faces

With the preliminaries out of the way, what should we think about this? The Trump administration has been making a flurry of moves since taking office, signing pardons for the J6 prisoners, flooding the zone with numerous Presidential Orders, cutting Elon Musk’s DOGE team loose on profligate patronage spending at USAID, beginning the deportation of illegal immigrants, albeit slowly, threatening to impose tariffs on Canada and Mexico, promising to make Canada the 51st state, and telling the Democrat outrage machine that they aren’t going to cancel employees for “racist” tweets at their behest. From the perspective of many on the online right, especially Americans, it was now all winning, all the time. “Are you tired of the winning yet?” The only obvious answer is: no.

Outside of the US border, it has been a little harder to make sense of what is happening, especially in a place like Canada where I am. We have to approach the Vice President’s speech asking two questions: What is the Trump administration hoping to accomplish? What kind of effect will the speech have outside of the US? A lot of this will end up being speculative as we don’t have access to behind the scenes strategy sessions. But looking at what is being said and the actions being taken, there are things that can be divined from the tea leaves.

So what did Vice President Vance say? He made three broad points. First, Europe will be expected to increase its defense spending. The indications are that the Trump administration is looking at numbers like a 5% of GDP target. There have been reports that the administration intends to pull back some of its military presence in Europe. What might this mean? Most obviously, the administration is saying that as of today, America is tired of carrying the financial weight of defending the world. What might the downstream effects of this be? If America really is signaling that it will not longer play the role of global policeman, it is, in effect, encouraging a new era of multipolarity. Will Europe band together in common defense? There has been some talk over the last few years regarding a common European Union army. Will multipolarity mean major defense zones encompassing large political entities like Russia, China, America and Europe? Or will Europe fracture, returning to a condition where each nation pursues its own independent course and defense. What I believe is certain is that the “global world order” is pretty much done and multipolarity is back. It just is not financially sustainable for the US to act as the global policeman anymore. If countries are defending themselves again, this will by necessity mean increased sovereignty. Is this a play for undermining the European Union as an economic competitor? That also seems a safe assumption. The chart below might explain why the Trump administration is interested in stressing the relationships between European Union partners:

As a block, Europe is much more economically intimidating than they are as a collection of individual sovereign nations tasked with defending their own borders.

Second, Vice President Vance spoke about the “threat from within.” By this, he was not talking about the threat from right wing populism, but rather the state forces which are keeping populism at bay. He specifically mentioned the Romanian election that was overturned. Time was spent in his speech drawing attention to concerns about “disinformation,” “hateful comments,” “misogyny,” and even Christian prayers in public spaces. Part of his address pointed to concerns over Russian meddling in elections with the vice president chiding the audience that if your democracy is so fragile that it cannot withstand the influence of a social media campaign funded with as little as a few hundred thousand dollars from Russia, how strong is this democracy anyways? Alongside of this, there was a distinct message sent that the US will no longer tolerate the suppression of populist political movements and parties. J.D. Vance claimed that the administration of which he was a part has a populist mandate and they clearly want to see more populist movements emerging from what is known today as the “dissident right.” He pretty much declared that Europe’s leaders lack a clear and unambiguous mandate from the people, meaning that they are inherently illegitimate in their rule. He said to them that if they actually believe in democracy as they say they do, they should not be afraid to let the people speak. Vance was saying that European leaders need to let nationalist movements have their say in the public sphere without being shouted down as racists or misogynists, and if this is who the people choose to rule them, then their will must be respected. This marks a sea change.

Third, he raised the issue of mass migration. It was interesting on a couple of levels. First is that his own wife is a second generation Indian immigrant. Here, it would likely be argued, is a success story of immigration. A family came, assimilated and intermarried. We are told that this is the way immigration is supposed to work. Additionally, he made no distinction in his address between legal and illegal immigration. The major category was unassimilated populations, one in five people now living in Europe were born outside the European Union. He made no mention of their status or legality. The mere fact of their presence is the problem that must be confronted and dealt with. Populism is on the rise, he argued, because this was all done without consulting the people directly, that is, without a mandate from the people. They were bullied and propagandized into this and the negative effects have been suppressed and kept from the people. Basically, Europe’s leaders were forced to notice and acknowledge the problems generated by mass immigration, such as a terror attack right in Munich during the vice president’s stay.

Vice President Vance directly challenged the underlying philosophical foundations of mass migrations, that people are all fundamentally the same. He used strong language here saying that people are more than merely “educated animals,” and that they are “not the interchangeable cogs of a global economy.” Left unsaid is that all of these people here, the one in five, twenty percent of the population, come from an alien, foreign culture that is largely incompatible with the culture, values and faith of the European West. Again, this marks a sea change in discourse and, one expects, in policy.

So what do we make of this?

First, I want to note that there is, on the surface, an inherent contradiction at play in these objectives. The US withdraws militarily from Europe forcing them to pay for more, or all of their own defense. The Trump administration seems to be calling for a greater sense of national identity from individual European countries as opposed to strengthening the larger block of the European Union. American trade policy appears to be moving to a more mercantilist environment with tariffs on foreign goods coming into the US with the hope of bolstering American industry as opposed to a unilateral global free trade zone maintained by American military strength and presence throughout the world. Yet, the tone of Vice President Vance’s speech seem to carry with it the idea that we will still be a more or less unified west and that there will still be global trade, it just won’t be secured exclusively by America anymore. At least this was the impression the speech left with me. There is an open question as to whether or not global managerial institutions and the standardization which makes global trade relatively smooth and easy will be sustainable in a world where the number of competing interests is increasing. And will the world see a noticeable drop in standard of living as a result? Will this affect the American standard of living? And maybe this is a calculated gamble, that in this reset to a multipolar world, that even if Americans experience a short term drop in prosperity, that they will come out ahead in the long term the relative to everyone else. I am of the mind that you can’t break up the global system and keep all of the benefits of the global system. Something has to give.

Secondly, and most importantly, the reaction to the three core points, that Europeans will have to start paying for their own defense, that censorship regimes of European governments will have to end, and people must be allowed to choose for themselves who will represent them, even if the current ruling coalitions think that they lie outside the bounds acceptable political thinking and discourse, and the end to mass migration has caused a very weird reaction. Among the politicos it could be expected. One gets that Vance’s speech would not have been welcome in the halls of power as he was demanding from the them political suicide. But on the ground, among many of the average people, there was a similar reaction. Why wouldn’t regular people want free speech and parties which better represent their interests? Why wouldn’t they want an end to immigration? Here in Canada, where we were also threatened with tariffs, rather than it sparking anger at our current ruling elites in both major parties, the Liberal Party of Canada and the Conservative Party of Canada, it drove ordinary citizens into their arms in a frenzy of anti-American sentiment. So what is up with this?

It comes down to how a certain portion of the American public are perceived outside of the borders of the US. In Europe, and in places such as Canada, there are two types of Americans. There are “good Americans” who are concerned with the global order and living in a civilized, cultured world, who value the institutions of “democracy” and so forth. These “good Americans” are largely represented in both major American political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans. These two parties exist largely to contain the influence of “bad Americans.” These are the people who watch NASCAR, own guns and go to church and actually believe in Jesus. They love America. They are the ones doing the, “USA, USA, USA!” chants at international sporting events. The are perceived as gun toting cowboys, or fat, ignorant tourists. Rebel flag flying Ku Klux Klan members, every one of them. These are unkind characterizations, and mostly false, I know. But these are the kinds of things that people whose country isn’t America won’t necessarily tell you to your face, however unfair they are.

So, you have two Americas. There is “good America,” that holds up its responsibilities in the global community. More than that, “good America” has supported the global world order in various ways. Yes, there is a price to be paid for that. They are expected to carry water for the crazy, radical progressive left in the US. And there is “bad America.” One of the expectations, and you can see this even at home among the American political class, is that part of their job is to keep “bad America” in its place and make sure that they don’t get a “seat at the table.” These are the people to whom Donald Trump and J.D. Vance made their appeal. And so, when Vance comes to Munich and tells them that they need to take away all the protections against unacceptable speech and unacceptable political organization, he is telling them, basically, that what is needed is to encourage some version of “bad America” everywhere. He is essentially calling for an end to the current political order everywhere.

There is an open question as to whether or not a party such as Germany’s AfD is actually similar in disposition to Trump’s populist voting base. There are distinct differences between the European right and the American populist MAGA movement. One is the role of Evangelical Protestants, which are not really a thing in Europe the way they are in US. There are Christians in Europe, but it really does not play a significant role in politics. There is not the same fervor over moral issues like abortion or gay marriage. Immigration is definitely a hot button issue on the ground and this is a major driver of political discontent. It was interesting that Vance made specific reference to the persecution of Christian prayer in public spaces, tying it to the abortion issue. It seemed more like red meat for the domestic American audience than as a real political program for overseas. Yet it was telling that these are the people to whom he was speaking, giving specific examples in the European context.

But for much of the post World War 2 period, European elites have worked very hard to propagandize against anything remotely like populist “Red America.” The closest analogue might be the rise of something like Tommy Robinson in the UK or British football hooligans. Even ethno-nationalism can take the form of socialist politics outside the US, as places like Quebec or Ireland can attest. So it is not clear that a party with ethno-nationalist sentiments would be aligned ideologically with the base that voted Donald Trump and J.D. Vance into the White House. It would be natural, from the American perspective, if Vance is seen being critical of the European governing class, that this would say to the people on the ground that “America has your back.” But that is not necessarily how it would be heard and, at least in the sort term, had the effect of pushing people, even people on the ground who might otherwise think of themselves as populists, to affirm “European democratic values.” Or, in the case of Canada, it pushed them right into the arms of the two ruling class parties who were quite happy to sabre rattle and encourage the anti-American sentiment.

Basically, what people were hearing from Vance, once translated into the European context, is that the US was declaring its support for what are perceived to be the worst, least civilized, downscale people. He gave a thumbs up to the hooligans. “Civilized” Europeans heard Vance as giving a thumbs up for hooliganism as a political platform across Europe. He is basically saying that what Europe needs is a version of “bad America.” It is time for the Bible thumping, gun toting, country loving hillbillies the world over to rise up and take their place on the world stage for the good of their own countries everywhere. And Vance told the European leadership to stop suppressing them and to give them what they want, an end to mass immigration. It is no wonder they have set their hair on fire. And the way that the general populations have been propagandized in the post-war period up until now, it is not shocking that this is creating unexpected reactions from people on the ground, people who might otherwise be open to this message.

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