JD Vance was right. So right.
Back in February, the Vice President travelled to Munich, Germany, with a message for Europe’s entire political elite. It was a message they didn’t want to hear, but the VP was determined to deliver it anyway.
“The threat I worry most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia,” Vance told a stunned, deathly silent auditorium.
“It’s not China. It’s not any external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values.”
This was actually a polite way of telling Europe’s elite they are traitors to their nations and people; that they are destroying what it is their sacred duty to protect.
The message was received.
The only people clapping were members of the Vice President’s entourage. At least one European politician—and a man, at that—actually burst into tears afterwards, so great was his shock about being confronted with the truth. Ursula Von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, looked like she’d taken a silver stake to her shrivelled little heart.
Europe’s politicians and media united to portray the speech as a declaration of war against Europe, as a betrayal in its own right. The nation that once saved Europe has now turned its back. Allies no more.
But Vance’s speech was nothing of the sort. In fact, it was a speech of unity, not division. Here’s what he was saying. The American and European people have suffered under the same yoke—the yoke of globalism, of open borders at all costs, of rootless cosmopolitanism and the desire for endless growth—but now the American people are throwing it off. If the European people want America’s help to do the same, it will be forthcoming. But America will not help Europe’s elites to continue burying the ideals and the people that made European civilization the greatest the world has ever seen.
The real question the Vice President was posing at Munich was whether Europe’s elite would get behind their people and support them in their bid for freedom, or instead be forced to get out of the way.
Eight weeks later, it already looks like they’ve made their choice.
In just the last week, in France we’ve seen presidential frontrunner Marine LePen barred from running in the 2027 election through a very convenient judicial decision. For the supposed crime of embezzling EU funds, a judge decided LePen would be unable to stand for political office for five years. She’s also been sentenced to four years in prison and a 100,000 euro fine. She’s unlikely ever to see the inside of a jail cell—half of the sentence will probably be served under some form of house arrest with an electronic tag, the other half will be suspended—but that’s cold comfort for LePen, whose presidential ambitions, cultivated for decades, have effectively been dashed.
The ruling doesn’t prevent LePen’s charismatic and handsome deputy Bardella from running in her stead, but make no mistake, this is a deliberate and devastating strike at the French right, which is rising on the back of widespread anger at the effects of mass immigration and other globalist policies. LePen is most responsible for “modernising” the party and making it electorally successful. She has shaped the party, remaking it in her own image rather than her father’s, and in doing so brought it to the cusp of power. There’s no way this ruling doesn’t seriously damage the party’s chances at the ballot box in two years’ time. LePen can of course appeal, but it’s unlikely she’ll be heard before the election.
A fait accompli, that’s called.
The verdict has been attacked by President Trump and Elon Musk. Musk wrote on Twitter, “When the radical left can’t win via democratic vote, they abuse the legal system to jail their opponents.”
Here’s Italy’s Matteo Salvini, another populist leader, again on Twitter: “This is a declaration of war by Brussels. We will not be intimidated, we will not stop.”
LePen now joins a growing list of European politicians, including Salvini and also Romania’s Georgescu, who have been attacked through the courts by their globalist enemies, just like Donald Trump was.
And if the lawfare fails, the case of Trump’s long persecution shows us what might happen next. I mean assassination. I don’t think I’m being dramatic. If it happened twice in America in a single presidential campaign, it can certainly happen in Europe. The stakes are just as high, and the enemies of national revival there are just as determined.
It’s also possible that we’ll see parties like the Alternative for Germany (AfD) outlawed. The leader of Germany’s intelligence service and members of the Bundestag have already suggested doing so—“to save democracy.”
To save democracy, it seems, America and Europe really are now on divergent paths, with totally different understandings of what that means. As Trump’s tariff war, just begun, escalates, the distance across the Atlantic will only widen, and negotiations over the end of the Russia-Ukraine war also threaten to do the same. My only hope is that the gap will not prove so wide it cannot be crossed when the time is right for Europe, finally, to seek its freedom.