ANALYSIS || A year ago JD Vance attacked European liberal democracies to shock everyone. This time Munich already knows what to expect
Damage caused by a wrecking ball is certainly more difficult to manage if it is swinging from inside the house.
As Europe’s security establishment meets in Germany this weekend, the organizers of the Munich Security Conference have already heralded the (creative) destruction of global norms ushered in by US President Donald Trump as an era of “wrecking man”.
Although this has been presented as an opportunity, it is actually unclear how constructive the conference will be. The dust from the previous year’s Munich massacre by senior US officials has not settled but has become obscured in a wider cloud, as weak foundations cause the pillars of Pax Americana – the peace in the West since World War II – to begin to crumble.
This time last year, US Vice President JD Vance’s tirade against Europe’s liberal democracies shocked his audience – attacking what he falsely called a violation of free speech and a setback to democracy.
Now, this contrary view is political: enshrined in black and white in both the White House and Pentagon national security and defense strategies. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio is leaving no room for shocks this time – he is instead telling his hosts to brace themselves – visiting two Trump-worshipping prime ministers, Slovakia’s Robert Fico and Hungary’s Viktor Orban, days before arriving in Germany. Do you understand, it seems that the United States is asking?
Europe does. It would be tempting to forget the rollercoaster of a week that was Trump’s attack on Danish sovereignty, which forced other European NATO members to send troops to Greenland in a show of continental unity. But the lessons Europe has learned from the lightning crisis are twofold and may provide comfort at the usually tedious three-day meeting in Munich.
First, Trump often says what seems exciting to him simply to see where it will get him, not for the sake of astutely detailed policy. The “Midnight Truth” social posts could mark the culmination of months of military planning to capture Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. Or they can dissolve a vast crisis created by Trump himself, such as the departure of NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte to change his position on Greenland, moving from the threat of aggression to negotiations. Those negotiations continue, Vance said recently, but their resonance is partially lost in the white noise of growing U.S. pressure on Iran and the global fallout from the release of more files related to Jeffrey Epstein. There is simply too much madness to catch up on for singular crises to ring out long enough, let alone echo.
The second lesson is that, when confronted by allies, Trump seems to dislike being disliked. Rutte’s exit ramp was seized with enthusiasm and the threat of invasion of Greenland quickly evaporated. Trump all but apologized to British troops after suggesting that NATO forces who fought alongside the US in Afghanistan did so “a little bit behind, a little bit off the front lines”. Britain lost 457 soldiers in the conflict. Populists like to stay popular. The “king” likes to have allied courtiers fawning over him. Europe’s challenge is to change enough, now that the old world order is broken, to ensure its own security, but not so irrevocably that it cannot revert to welcoming a more stable successor to Trump. One European diplomat described the mood before Munich as: “Careful confidence that we have found our feet, yet with a sense of dread of the task ahead.”
There are nine months left until the North American midterm elections, which could affect the president and give the starting gun to Vance’s likely candidacy to succeed Trump. From there, a combination of global calm and sycophantic allies could serve those seeking to follow Trump in the two years leading up to the 2028 presidential election. While each week of Trump’s foreign policy may seem like an eternity, his time in office is limited.
Practical changes, so far, are reassuringly few. US forces could withdraw from the NATO supply chain to Ukraine as it continues to fight the Russian invasion and ask Europe to pay much more. The White House, while trying to negotiate with Moscow, and perhaps as a matter of broader sympathy or diplomatic expediency, has stopped openly calling Russia a threat.
But we have not yet seen the mass departure of American troops from Europe. Or the end of information sharing between the US and Kiev. Or a radical alteration of Washington’s nuclear doctrines. Instead, Europe’s biggest powers have committed to spending 5% of GDP on defense by 2035, a step that most European officials seem to think was long overdue. The threat from Russia, which is barely able to dominate its much smaller Ukrainian neighbor, is surely not so great that a rich continent of 500 million inhabitants must rely on the United States for its defense? What was the point of decades of greater European integration if these nations did not seek autonomy over their own security?
With a sour, unpredictable but indispensable key ally, Europe’s tactics – month by month – increasingly resemble Kiev’s. Europe must maintain its red lines, avoiding angry outbursts from the US president, hoping to remain out of Trump’s immediate crosshairs, but always appearing grateful for US support. It is Volodymyr Zelensky’s survival mode and offers no room to thrive.
But Europe has, for now, few alternatives, and continuing to exist more or less as it is – in this turmoil in which everything seems threatened but little is done – may seem like victory enough.
The broader wrecking ball threat comes from within the NATO alliance and concerns the erosion of public decency and the rise of far-right populism.
National Regroupment, Reform UK and the AfD pose serious challenges to the stable, centrist leaders of France, the UK and Germany respectively.
But the Trump-adjacent European far right made the limits of its New Americanism felt by expressing its disgust during the Greenland disaster. Right-wing Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is far from a catalyst for Trump’s wildest tendencies, but rather a moderating whisper, used in moments of crisis in the EU. The Munich Security Report, published earlier this month, released a series of surveys that indicate that European citizens do not see a bright future ahead and are seeking urgent change. But the debt shackles of Covid-19, the Russian threat and a world order redefined by the Trump administration will remain the same, however far to the right the G7 European economies move in the coming years. There are limits to Europe’s deviation to the right.
Europe is simply facing a moment when its future is its own. If you tried to tell a group of the richest and freest democracies in the world otherwise, the protests would be deafening. The pageantry of Munich is an appropriate place to remind European voters of the value of decency, stability and finding a way to be creatively positive in the dust of destruction.
