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At Munich, Vance Was Channeling Putin, Not Chamberlain [1]
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Date: 2025-02-19
Following J D Vance’s speech, or rather, rant, at the Munich Security Conference, some commentators took to comparing him (and by extension, Trump) to Neville Chamberlain, who infamously sold out Czechoslovakia in return for “peace in our time.” (It’s been speculated that he was really trying to buy time to build up Britain’s military, which was not then in any shape to fight a war. But I digress.) For example, George Will brought up Chamberlain in his WaPo column yesterday: A spurious U.S. ‘realism’ about Ukraine flirts with catastrophe. But I think a better reference would be to Putin: Vance, and Trump, are promoting Putin’s view of the world, not Chamberlain’s.
I do not like Bret Stephens, though I generally browse his weekly chat with Gail Collins (why, I’m not sure); he seems congenitally incapable of praising Biden or any other Democrat). But his column this morning caught my eye: Vance’s Munich Disgrace. He argues that, much as the Nazis used the protections of democracy to undermine it, Vance is doing the same thing with his refusal to meet the current chancellor while cozying up to the neo-Nazi AfD (Allianz fuer Deutschland):
The vice president’s speech last week at the Munich Security Conference — in which the man who refuses to say that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election lectured his audience about Europe’s retreat from democratic values — combined with his meeting with the leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, party, has caused a scandal because it is a scandal, a monument of arrogance based on a foundation of hypocrisy.
Stephens also takes note of AfD’s ties to Russia:
Last year, The Times’s Erika Solomon reported on a secret session in the German Parliament in which lawmakers heard evidence of ties between AfD politicians and Kremlin-connected operatives.
Although Stephens did end with a nod to Chamberlain, the point remains that Chamberlain placated the Nazis in order to preserve democracy in Britain, while Vance (and for that matter, Musk) is promoting the German far right in order to break democracy in Europe. While there is a superficial resemblance between Chamberlain’s sellout of Czechoslovakia and Trump/Vance’s efforts to sell out Ukraine, their goals are complete opposites.
As for Vance channeling Putin, a guest post in WaPo this morning is helpful: Putin raised the anti-woke banner long before it flew over Washington.
Vance’s recent talk in Munich ticked many of the boxes of today’s Russian ideology: anti-migrant rhetoric, curbs on abortion, and the equation of “cancel culture” with infringement of free speech.
(along with rants against LGBTQ, Woke, and western liberal values in general, while promoting White Christian supremacy — Orthodox Christian, in Putin’s case.)
In another NYT op-ed, Farah Stockman made this point: A U.S. Betrayal Is Surreal for Europeans.
The Trump administration isn’t just demanding that allies pay more for their own military defense. It is threatening to incite a trade war that could make raising money for that purpose more difficult. The administration is championing illiberal, pro-Russian political parties across Europe that could undermine the European project from within. And it’s striking a conciliatory tone toward Russia and setting up meetings about Ukraine’s fate without including Washington’s closest European allies.
(Curiously, Vance also threatened Putin while in Paris last week: Vance Wields Threat of Sanctions, Military Action to Push Putin Into Ukraine Deal. However, this is very likely a false flag signal to make it look like the US is forcing Putin to compromise while in fact giving him everything he wants.)
This isn’t a reluctant Britain trying to placate a German enemy. This is the United States actively supporting what would normally and naturally be an adversary, and doing it as much for ideological reasons as anything else.
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