On what grounds did JD Vance upbraid European leaders in Munich?

US Vice President JD Vance gave European leaders a tongue-lashing that left them reeling at the Munich Security Conference and prompted German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius to slam his performance as “not acceptable”.

Vance’s audience was so stunned, indeed, that his joke on Elon Musk failed to raise so much as a titter.

In an expected attempt at humor, Vance quipped that if US democracy was strong enough to survive years of “scolding from Greta Thunberg, you can survive a few months of Elon Musk,” reports The Independent.

This was just one interlude in a 22-minute lambasting that bombed for the Vice President who ended his trip to Germany by meeting with the far-right Alternative for Germany’s leader, Alice Weidel.

Steering clear of the pressing issue of Ukraine, Vance launched into a relentless attack on Europe’s vision of democracy and what, in fact, European leaders believed NATO was defending.

Flagging up “the threat from within”, his first attack was directed at Romania and its presidential election that was annulled last December after declassified documents indicated it had been the subject of a “highly organized” campaign of Russian interference in favor of far-right candidate Călin Georgescu.

Vance told the conference: “If your democracy can be destroyed with a few $100,000 of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn't very strong to begin with.”

Vance failed to note at this point that, to date, his own President, Donald Trump, has failed to recognize the result of the 2020 US election.

Barely pausing for breath, Vance moved onto an issue close to his heart – that of abortion – not the right to have one, but the right to protest against it, attacking the UK’s law that prevents protestors against it to demonstrate within a certain range of an abortion clinic.

Vance insisted that the “basic liberties of religious Britons, in particular” were under threat, despite the fact that the protestor in question had been asked by the authorities to move beyond the buffer zone four times.

Gathering momentum, Vance told German leaders they needed to do away with the firewall that guards against government collaboration with either far-left or far-right parties.

“Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters,” Vance said. “There's no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle or you don’t,” he said.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz later responded with “The AfD is a party from the ranks of which National Socialism and its monstrous crimes, crimes against humanity, like the ones committed in Dachau, were trivialized as just a ‘speck of bird s h i t in Germany history,” The Guardian reports. Vance had visited Dachau earlier that week, as Scholz reminded him.

After laying into Brussels and Sweden for alleged anti-democratic behaviors, Vance ended by blaming European leaders for inviting masses of migrants into their countries against their citizens’ wishes.

This, he said, had resulted in the Munich car ramming suspected to have been carried out by an Afghan asylum seeker on February 13 which killed a mother and child and injured 37.

But according to Europol, of the 120 terrorist attacks in seven member states in 2023, only 14 were committed by actors with a migrant or asylum-seeking profile. The majority – 70 – were committed by separatists.

But Vance’s message was loud and clear, amounting to a radical reset of relations between the EU and the US.

“Decades of the old relationship between Europe and America are ending,” was President Volodymyr Zelensky’s take away from the conference. “From now on, things will be different, and Europe needs to adjust to that.”

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