Vice President JD Vance told European leaders on Friday that their biggest security threat was not military aggression from Russia or China, but their own suppression of free speech — including efforts to block hard-right parties from joining governments.
An audience that was largely expecting Mr. Vance to lay out the Trump administration’s priorities for the trans-Atlantic alliance, NATO military spending and negotiations with Russia over ending the war in Ukraine, instead received a lecture on what Mr. Vance described as the continent’s own failures in living up to democratic ideals.
Those failures, Mr. Vance said, included efforts to restrict so-called “misinformation” and other content on social media and laws against abortion protests that he said unfairly silenced Christians.
Perhaps most strikingly, the vice president called on Europeans to drop their opposition to working with anti-immigration parties, calling them a legitimate expression of the will of voters angered by high levels of migration over the last decade. Those parties include the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, parts of which have been classified as extremist by German intelligence.
All other parties in Germany refuse to join with the AfD in forming governments, an effort known as a “firewall” against extremism in a country where memories of the Nazis still dominate its political culture.
“There is no room for firewalls,” Mr. Vance said. He added: “If you are running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you.”
Germany’s political class, including the conservative Christian Democrats who currently lead the polls to form the next government, has largely adopted more restrictive measures on migration in recent years, following the AfD. But they distinguish the AfD itself as extreme, because of some of its members’ history of use of Nazi language and antisemitic and racist comments, along with plots to overthrow the federal government.
Mr. Vance did not make that distinction, nor did he mention any extremist elements of anti-immigration political parties.
German leaders immediately rejected Mr. Vance’s suggestion, pointing to past AfD member comments in support of the national socialists, the party of the Nazis.
“This is our business,” said Thomas Silberhorn, a member of parliament for the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian sister party of the Christian Democrats, and a former federal defense official. “My message to the U.S. administration is: German extremists who explicitly refer to national socialism — part of the AfD — are clearly anti the U.S. that liberated us from national socialism.”
Mr. Vance also barely mentioned Ukraine, even after meeting with its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, earlier in the day. Last year at this conference, Mr. Vance, then a U.S. senator, notably refused to meet with Mr. Zelensky.
Mr. Vance’s only references to the Ukraine conflict came in passing, disappointing attendees who had hoped to learn more about the administration’s plans for peace negotiations.
“While the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine, and we also believe that it’s important in the coming years for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defense, 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,” Mr. Vance said.
“What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.”
Mr. Vance suggested that European efforts to counter election influence campaigns by Russia were instead suppressing legitimate speech, at one point obliquely comparing some of the continent’s current leaders to the former Soviet bloc.
He poured scorn on the decision in “remote Romania,” as he called it, to cancel a presidential election because of clear evidence of Russian manipulation of the political campaign.
“If your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with,” he said.
Mr. Vance also decried the mass migration into Germany and Europe in 2015, tying it to terrorist crimes, including a car attack in Munich on Thursday by an Afghan asylum seeker, which injured 30 people.
“Over the span of a decade, we saw the horrors wrought by these decisions yesterday in this very city,” he said.
