If it weren’t so serious, it would genuinely be funny. Here was a Vice President whose administration has spent these last weeks lauding or at least cordially embracing a Russian regime where freedom of speech does not exist, whilst chastising and insulting democratic allies where it most certainly does. Here was a Vice President scolding European leaders for allowing the pillars of their democracy to fray, whose boss was the head of an actual insurrection in the American Congress. Here is a Vice President lecturing others about freedom of speech, who says he is concerned by the rise of relativism of truth, who does not even dare to say aloud the unalterable objective fact: that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. In Munich irony died, was exhumed, only for Vance to sever its head again.
Vance’s speech, alongside Hegseth’s comments on Ukraine earlier this week, remind us of several things. First, this is a government of the radicalised online right, for the radicalised online right, by the radicalised online right. It’s government by Breitbart. They don’t care about actual freedom and security, again, the sort Ukrainians are dying for- because there’s frenzied stuff to say about largely imagined attacks on freedom of speech which will get 100k likes on Elon’s Twitter. Second, this is the first US administration since before Roosevelt, probably ever, that not only makes no distinction between democracies and autocracies, but actually prefers the latter. The very things which make liberal democracies liberal democracies- division of power, protection of minority rights, laws which govern freedom of speech, adherence to international law, independent judiciaries- are disliked by the current US government, because they believe they are part of a liberal cosmopolitan plot. Thirdly, they combined this with a preference for great power politics. The sight of Trump saying that he and Putin would, bilaterally negotiate an outcome to the Ukraine war, was a sickening one, bypassing the very people who have spent so much blood for their democratic future, for their actual freedom of speech. In so doing, Trump gave what Putin wanted from the beginning: a Yalta type moment when the future of Europe would be decided by them, and themselves alone. This rejects precisely what this entire war is about: the right of Ukraine to choose its own path, to choose to be a liberal democracy in the European orbit, and not a Russian satellite: how much freedom of speech does JD Vance think Ukrainians held in the occupied Donbas enjoy right now? Any deal fashioned in the way Trump has talked this week would make America, man’s last best hope, an accessory to an imperial adventure. The transatlantic alliance is vanishing before our eyes: for the first time since 1945 the US is neutral about Europe, or worse. Here was Vance saying the only way a Trump White House might care again is if its governments were to Make Europe Great Again- ie adopt a MAGA type programme and philosophy. In the meantime, they have Russia, who already sits closer to MAGA in much of their cultural mores and therefore we have the nightmare scenario of an active compact between Washington and Moscow, with Europe caught in the middle. This is all strategically brand new. NATO no longer means much, if anything at all. It is the world order that Vladimir Putin always wanted to create, handed to him by an American president. It defies belief.
England
