Vice President JD Vance told European leaders on Friday that their biggest security threat was not military aggression from Russia or China, or election meddling from Moscow. Rather, he said, it was what he called “the enemy within” — their own suppression of abortion protests and other forms of free speech and the sidelining of parties considered extremist.
The address stunned and silenced hundreds of attendees at the Munich Security Conference, a forum where top-level politicians, diplomats and analysts had gathered expecting to hear the Trump administration’s plans for ending the war in Ukraine and Europe’s defenseagainst a rising Russian threat in the future.
Instead, the vice president offered what may be a preview of a new kind of trans-Atlantic relationship under Mr. Trump — one not built on postwar bonds of stability between allied governments, but rather on ties betweenonce-fringe political parties that share a common approach to migration, identity and internet speech.
Mr. Vance singled out his German hosts, who will elect a new chancellor next weekend, and told them to drop their objections to working with a party that has often reveled in banned Nazi slogans and has been shunned from government as a result.
It was an extraordinary intervention in the domestic politics of a democratic American ally, and it brought some gasps in the hall.
He did not mention the party, the Alternative for Germany or AfD, by name but made a direct reference to the longstanding agreement by mainstream German politicians to freeze out the group, parts of which have been formally classified as extremist by German intelligence.
“There is no room for firewalls,” Mr. Vance said near the end of his speech.
The AfD has surged to second in the polls with its call to crack down on immigration, and its members have a history of use of Nazi language and antisemitic and racist comments, along with plots to overthrow the federal government.
Mr. Vance did not note that baggage, nor did he mention any extremist elements of anti-immigration political parties. Without naming any parties specifically, he cast the AfD and its counterparts across Europe as legitimate vessels of voter anger over the millions of refugees who have entered the European Union from the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere over the last decade.
German leaders, across party lines, bridled at the speech. They immediately rejected Mr. Vance’s suggestion that they should drop their firewall against the AfD, pointing to past comments by AfD members in support of the National Socialists, or 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. “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.”
Boris Pistorius, the German defense minister and a member of the governing Social Democrats, deviated from his planned speech on Friday afternoon to rebuke Mr. Vance.
“If I understood him correctly he is comparing parts of Europe with authoritarian regimes. This is not acceptable,” Mr. Pistorius said, drawing sustained applause. “This is not the Europe, not the democracy, where I live.”
Germany has been the most successful major European power at shutting its hard-right party out of power, along with France, where a group of rival parties engaged in strategic voting last summer to deny the hard-right National Rally a parliamentary majority.
Other firewalls have fallen around Europe, including in the Netherlands, Hungary and Italy. In Austria, the hard-right Freedom Party has been part of federal coalitions and appeared set to lead its next government, before negotiations with a center-right party collapsed this week.
Mr. Vance is now the second figure in the Trump administration who has tried to chip away at the efforts to isolate the far right ahead of the German elections next Sunday, by attempting to destigmatize the AfD.
The billionaire Elon Musk, a top adviser to Mr. Trump, endorsed the AfD late last year in a post on social media. He has publicly interviewed its chancellor candidate, Alice Weidel.
In an address to party members this month, Mr. Musk said Germany has “too much focus on past guilt.” That was a clear reference to Hitler’s long shadow, which continues to dominate mainstream German politics, including in tight legal restrictions against Nazi language.
In his speech, Mr. Vance seemed to lump those restrictions into a long list of what he called European deviations from democratic values and attacks on free speech.
Those failures, Mr. Vance said, included efforts to restrict misinformation and other content on social media, and laws against abortion protests that he said unfairly silenced Christians.
Particularly since the start of the war in Ukraine, European intelligence agencies have raised alarms about what they consider to be a systematic effort by Russia at mass disinformation and propaganda, often by using fake social media accounts to sow division and doubt about democratic systems.
Mr. Vance ridiculed and diminished that threat.
“It looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet era words like misinformation and disinformation, who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion, or, God forbid, vote a different way, or, even worse, win an election,” he told a largely stony audience.
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.
Such statements came as something of a shock for attendees who had hoped to learn more about the administration’s plans for peace negotiations with Russia. Mr. Vance barely mentioned Ukraine and only referred to the conflict in passing.
“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, Mr. Vance said. “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.”
He added, “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.”
Mr. Vance also decried the mass migration into Germany and other nations in 2015, which included many asylum seekers fleeing wars in Afghanistan and Syria. He tied the migration 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.
Even before Mr. Vance spoke, experts at the security conference were warning European leaders that they could be in for a fast and painful reordering of the continent’s relationship with the United States.
Mr. Trump’s push to negotiate directly with Russia’s president over Ukraine — potentially sidelining European leaders — and his transactional approach to trade policy and military spending dominated a breakfast panel discussion, hosted by the American Council on Germany and the global accounting firm KPMG.
One panelist, Jana Puglierin, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin, said that it was possible Mr. Trump would build a new Euro-American alliance between parties that share core values of immigration opposition, unregulated social media speech and “anti-woke” attitudes.
“We have an American government that has different values,” she said, “and a different vision of what the West should be.”
The council released new polling this week that suggests that value shift has already resonated in Europe. It found that majorities of Europeans now view America as a “necessary partner” and not an “ally” under Mr. Trump. It also found that Mr. Trump’s return to the White House was most celebrated in Europe among members of several hard-right parties.
There is one, perhaps paradoxical, exception to that trend. The poll found that members of the AfD were more likely to say Mr. Trump’s election would be bad for Germany than to say it would be good.
