The response in Europe to J.D Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference last Friday was one of predictable outrage. Media outlets described it as a ‘rant’ or a ‘sermon’, and politicians and diplomats queued up to criticise the vice-president of America. Kaja Kallas, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, accused the Trump administration of ‘try[ing] to pick a fight with us, and we don’t want to a pick a fight with our friends’.
Apparently, there were ‘dry laughs’ from some of the audience when Vance talked about ‘shared’ values. European diplomats have laughed at Trump before, notably in 2018 at the UN General Assembly, when he warned that ‘Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course.’
The dry laughs and indignation in Munich soon abated, as news broke on Saturday afternoon of another deadly attack by an immigrant; this one in the quiet Austrian town of Villach, where a Syrian reportedly laughed as he fatally stabbed a 14-year-old and wounded several others. As I wrote hours before the attack, living in Europe has become a lottery: will it be me in the wrong place at the wrong time when a ‘Westernophobe’ goes berserk?
The continent’s disastrous immigration policy was just one of several areas in which Vance ripped Europe apart in Munich. He also highlighted Europe’s failure to invest in its defence, commenting ‘that it’s important in the coming years for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defence’.
In ‘sermonising’ to Europe about its reluctance to spend money on defence, Vance was continuing an American tradition that began during the presidency of George W Bush.
In a speech in November 2002 in Prague, Bush declared that Nato needed to adapt to new threats and this would require every member to ‘make a military contribution to that alliance. For some allies, this will require higher defence spending.’
In ‘sermonising’ to Europe about its reluctance to spend money on defence, Vance was continuing an American tradition that began during the presidency of George W Bush
This never materialised in most cases, to the regret of Bush who, at his last Nato summit in 2008, said that ‘a strong NATO Alliance also requires a strong European defence capacity. So at this summit, I will encourage our European partners to increase their defence investments’.
When Barack Obama became president in 2009 his administration took a more aggressive line towards Europe. In a speech in February 2010, Defence Secretary Robert Gates said Nato faced ‘very serious, long-term, systemic problems’.
These had been caused, explained Gates, by ‘the demilitarisation of Europe, where large swathes of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with’.
Noting that only five of Nato’s 28 members had hit their target of spending two percent of GDP in defence, Gates warned that Europe’s unwillingness to invest in defence might be a ‘temptation to miscalculation and aggression’ by hostile states.
And how did Europe respond to Gates’ warning? In most cases it decreased spending in the decade that followed. Germany’s spending went from 1.35 per cent of GDP in 2010 to 1.20 per cent in 2016, the year Donald Trump was elected president for the first time.
In the same period, France’s spending fell from 1.96 per cent to 1.79 per cent ; Britain’s from 2.48 per cent to 2.18 per cent and Italy’s from 1.35 per cent to 1.12 per cent. Overall, Europe’s spending from 2010 to 2016 dropped from 1.63 per cent to 1.45 per cent of GDP.
Obama tried to whip Europe into line, admonishing EU countries in 2014 in a speech in which he declared that there ‘is a certain irreducible commitment that countries have to make if they’re serious about NATO and the defence alliance.’
America, which spent 4.2 per cent of its GDP on defence between 2009 and 2013, was beginning to lose patience with Europe, added Obama. ‘We don’t expect every country to duplicate exactly what we do,’ he said, but ‘we can’t have a situation in which the United States is consistently spending over three percent of our GDP on defence, much of that focused on Europe….and Europe is spending, let’s say, one percent. The gap becomes too large.’
That gap has remained large. In the first year after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the USA committed approximately €43 billion in military aid, more than Europe combined. A few European nations have pulled their weight, like the Czech Republic, whose contribution was €566m. France, on the other, despite all the grandstanding of Emmanuel Macron, chipped in with €447m, despite it being five times the size of the Czech Republic.
France and Germany, who like to boast that they are the engine of the EU, embody the lazy, hypocritical, arrogant complacency of Europe in the 21st Century. Their presidents and chancellors like to lecture the world, from America to Africa, while consistently making bad decisions, whether it is migrant policy, Net Zero or defence spending.
Vance’s speech in Munich was neither a rant nor a sermon; it was a heart-to-heart from a concerned parent to their spoiled brat of a teenager. Uncomfortable truths were aired about where they were going wrong in their life. As Vance put it: it is time for Europe to ‘change course’ before it’s too late and they go off the rails for good.
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