Bret Stephens, a conservative New York Times columnist, called Vice President Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference last week a “disgrace” and criticized Vance for meeting with the leader of a far-right political party in Germany.
“The vice president’s speech last week at the Munich Security Conference — in which the man who refuses to say that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election lectured his audience about Europe’s retreat from democratic values — combined with his meeting with the leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, party, has caused a scandal because it is a scandal, a monument of arrogance based on a foundation of hypocrisy,” Stephens wrote in his op-ed published Tuesday.
Stephens compared Vance’s Munich trip to the failed appeasement efforts of World War II-era British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who flew to Munich in 1938 and agreed to let Germany annex the Sudetenland in the hope of staving off a larger war.
“Much like a certain British prime minister long ago, an American vice president went to Munich to carry on about his idealism while breaking bread with those who would obliterate democratic ideals. A disgrace,” Stephens wrote.
Vance on Friday used his first major speech on the international stage to accuse European leaders of retreating from “fundamental values.”
He argued the biggest threats facing Europe were neither China nor Russia, but mass migration and laws that restrict free speech.
“While the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine … the threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor,” Vance said.
“And what I worry about is the threat from within,” he continued. “The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.”
Stephens, in his column, acknowledged the merit in some of Vance’s arguments about how “some European governments go too far to curtail legitimate free speech” and about “the many ways that Europe’s supposedly mainstream right-of-center parties, particularly Germany’s Christian Democrats under Merkel, adopted left-leaning positions on migration, domestic security, fiscal policy, energy policy and other issues that drove conservative voters into the arms of the far right.”
Stephens defended Germany, however, for the way it has grappled with its totalitarian past, describing it as “unmistakably democratic not because it unthinkingly honors a principle of unfettered liberty (no democracy does) but because it vigilantly monitors the enemies of democracy while maintaining a memory of what the nation once was.”
