'Pointlessly confrontational': Libertarian rips JD Vance’s new 'culture-war tirade'

During his fourth years in the White House, former President Joe Biden aggressively championed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Biden applauded NATO's expansion when Sweden and Finland decided to join the alliance, and he made it clear that he regarded the United States' European allies as vitally important to American interests.

President Donald Trump, in contrast, is vehemently critical of NATO, often characterizing it as a costly burden for the U.S. And Vice President JD Vance had a condescending tone toward European allies during his Munich Security Conference speech, claiming that they are censoring conservatives while failing to protect their borders.

Libertarian/conservative journalist Cathy Young offers a scathing critique of Vance's speech in an article published by The Bulwark on February 17.

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Young argues, "JD Vance’s vice presidential debut on the international scene — his belligerent February 14 speech at the Munich Security Conference, in which he chided Europeans for their failings on democracy and free speech — elicited strong reactions from current and former European leaders as well as effusions of joy on the American right….. Vance's culture-war tirade was not only pointlessly confrontational and ill-informed; it was also delivered at a moment when lectures on democracy from America have inevitable 'Physician, heal thyself' overtones."

During a Fox News appearance, The Federalist's Mollie Hemingway applauded Vance's speech as "almost Reaganesque" — to which Young responds, "Funny, I don't remember Ronald Reagan ripping into America's European allies while giving the dictator in the Kremlin a pass."

"In a way," Young observes, "Vance's diatribe was addressed less to his audience at the security conference than to the MAGA base in the United States and perhaps to populist audiences in Europe, with its depiction of Europe as a place where free speech is routinely muzzled by the woke left, 'mass migration' continues to wreak havoc despite the voters' will, and democracy is thwarted when it threatens the elites. This broad caricature is grotesquely hyperbolic even when it touches on real problems."

Young continues, "But, perhaps most insidiously, Vance coupled it with a contemptuous dismissal of the threat from Russia, at a time when there is growing evidence of Russia's increasingly aggressive subversion campaign against European democracies — a hybrid war that includes not only the corruption of media and politics, but potentially devastating sabotage and vandalism and even assassination attempts."

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Cathy Young's full article for The Bulwark is available at this link.