U.S. Vice President JD Vance followed up his headline-grabbing Munich speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington on Thursday, making the key points — that may have been missed amid Europe’s generally furious and despairing response — even clearer.
The key point, as expressed by President Trump’s ad-hoc emissary to the European governments, is that the security of the continent is massively subsidised by the U.S. military, and this in turn is funded by American taxpayers. In a democracy this expenditure has to be justified, Vance said, and if it gets to a point that American voters think of European governments as dabbling with authoritarianism, the American public simply won’t approve of continuing.
Tempering his comments by assuring it wouldn’t be a matter of alliances simply ending, Vance nevertheless said the countries with the most recognisably traditional-Western values like real democracy and freedom of thought and expression could expect to have the strongest relationships. He said:
…obviously we’re going to continue to have important alliances with Europe, but I really do think the strength of those alliances is going to depend on whether we take our societies in the right direction.
Think about this: Germany’s entire defence is subsidised by the American taxpayer. There are thousands upon thousands of American troops in Germany today. Do you think the American taxpayer is going to stand for that if you’re going to get thrown in jail in Germany for posting a mean tweet? Of course not.
The point I’m making to our European friends… that friendship is based on shared values. You do not have shared values if you’re jailing people for saying ‘close down our borders’.
In pointed comments made just days before Germany goes to the polls for the national Federal elections to choose the composition of its next parliament and government, Vance particularly enunciated that “if you’re so afraid of your own people that you silence them and shut them up” and not defending democracy, then there’s no shared civilisation with the United States of America.
Mainstream German political parties have said no matter how well the sovereigntist-populist right wing Alternative for Germany party performs on Sunday, they would absolutely refuse to work with them in a governing coalition, freezing that party — and its millions of voters — out of any meaningful interaction with the democratic system.
One of the major areas where Vance diagnoses an overly paternal attitude from European political elites is on mass migration: European people vote agianst it, their leaders impose it anyway. He said: “The greatest threat in Europe… is that you’ve had the leaders of the West decide that they should send millions and millions of unvetted foreign migrants into their countries. That is the biggest threat to Europe…. we cannot rebuild Western civilisation, we cannot rebuild the United States of America, or Europe, by letting millions and millions of unvetted migrants into our countries”.
Europe had been happy to dance to Joe Biden’s tune of open borders and censorship regimes, Vance said, inviting them to now do the same for the Trump erma with its message of border control and freedom.
Breitbart News
Read the full article .
