Europe and the liberal democracies of the west face a reckoning this week in Munich: will they be willing, or able, to pull away from a hostile America and forge the capacity to see off Russia’s war against Europe?
Last year, JD Vance, the US vice president, signalled his contempt for Europe and his disdain for reality when he warned that Europe was vulnerable to an “enemy within”.
He did not mean locally recruited saboteurs who have since attacked targets from the UK to Poland, most recently Warsaw’s rail system. He did not mean the drone pilots spying on European and British airfields and military camps.
And he certainly did not mean Moscow’s useful idiots amplifying lies intended to undermine the concept of truth itself and to shatter western belief in the very systems of democracies they depend on – because he is one of them.
Last year, he said: “The threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor.
“What I worry about is the threat from within,” he told the assembled securocrats, heads of government and world media in Munich.
This absurd statement was the kind of rubbish that the Kremlin has worked for years to get fed into the bloodstream of the liberal democracies of the west, because it is their freedoms that represent the greatest threat to Putin’s autocracy.
In Manchester, Munich or Madrid, if you toss political critics out of windows on behalf of your government you risk arrest. In Moscow, you don’t.
Nowhere on earth threatens Vladimir Putin’s rule more than the existence of a pro-western Ukraine on track to join the EU that enjoyed democratic elections, a burgeoning tech sector and rapid growth while much of Russia remained in Soviet-style dark ages.
Russians peering over the border fence at the good life in Ukraine would have only endured Putin’s kleptocracy a little longer before sweeping him away like a Romanov.
So three years ago this month he invaded. And a year ago America switched from being an ally of Ukraine and Europe to being a threat to its stability.
For evidence, one just has to look at where Marco Rubio is going after Munich. The US secretary of state is heading to Slovakia and Hungary – both ruled by anti-European pro-Moscow quislings – and Germany, where Trump’s Maga movement enjoys close links with the far right AfD party.
According to a report by New York University’s Rule of Law Lab published this week: “Hungary’s media landscape now serves as the most sophisticated example of media capture in the European Union.
“The ruling party, Fidesz, is estimated to directly or indirectly control roughly 80 per cent of the country’s media. Hungarians’ trust in news is amongst the lowest in Europe.
“Between 2010 and 2025, Hungary’s ranking in Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index fell from 23rd to 68th out of 180 countries measured, leaving it among the lowest-ranked member states in the EU.”
But it is not the loss of media diversity that worries and angers the White House, it is British and European legislation to force US-based social media giants to curb hate speech that so exercises the Oval Office.
The Maga-sphere is sincere in its beliefs and believes only its own sources, many of them Russian bots in farms churning out the kind of madness that got Vance to raise Europe’s immigration policies last year at Munich as a security issue.
And then to get them enshrined into the US national security strategy with entirely untrue claims that Europe faces “civilisational erasure” at the hands of non-European immigrants – and that four nations were soon to be entirely overwhelmed.
This racist great replacement theory has its roots in apartheid South Africa’s fear of a “swart gevaar”, black danger – and so do many tech billionaires members of the Maga-sphere, notably Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
Donald Trump has further served Russia’s interests by weakening Nato more widely with outright threats against Greenland, part of Denmark (a Nato member), and his representative to peace talks between Ukraine and Russia – Steve Witkoff – has consistently taken Moscow’s side.
Europeans, including the UK and Norway, are at a crossroads and need to work harder together to form an alliance that can function outside of US control and no longer dependent on American resources.
On paper, these midsized powers have more tanks, armour, artillery and planes than the US. They are more than a match for Russia. But they lack the political will to drive the extra effort that taking control of their own defence will demand of their citizens in terms of manpower and money.
A paper published this week by the Tony Blair Institute co-authored by the UK’s former chief of defence staff general Sir Nick Carter and experts from France, Italy, Germany and Poland spelled out the problem.
“Europe should be a superpower: economically, politically and militarily. With its economic weight, population, technological base and global interests, Europe has always had both the means and the responsibility to act as a serious security power in its own region and in defence of its strategic interests abroad.
“Its failure to do so is long-standing – even if recent transatlantic debates have brought renewed focus on Europe’s role – and reflects decades of strategic complacency,” they said.
In Munich we can expect that complacency to get another shake.
