What Vance’s Munich Speech Really Means

The Europeans are furious. Last week, America’s vice president swaggered into Munich and on Friday unleashed a blistering tirade against Europe.

At least, that’s how pearl-clutching Eurocrats received Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech at the annual Munich Security Conference.

This knee-jerk reaction misses the point. Vance didn’t do the rhetorical equivalent of giving Europe the middle finger. Nor did he announce Washington’s divorce from lady Europa. Rather, he laid out a vision of the collective West in the age of what some call “multipolarity,” a flabby term that fails to signal what it actually points to: a clash of civilizations.

Referring to an incident just one day before, when an Afghan asylum-seeker drove a car into a crowd in Munich, killing a mother and her 2-year-old daughter, Vance asked: “How many times must we suffer these appalling setbacks before we change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction?” 

The speech didn’t merely offend the Europeans in the audience, but mystified them, in part because they didn’t understand what statements like that had to do with international security, the ostensible theme of the conference. Why, they have asked, did the vice president harp on about mass migration and authoritarian liberalism, rather than sketch out a Russia–Ukraine peace deal?

What they fail to grasp is that the world has entered a new geopolitical paradigm that raises issues of civilizational import. The era lasting from the end of the Second World War through the Cold War to the demise of U.S. global hegemony is done. Perhaps the new era began four years ago, when Washington withdrew from Afghanistan, or three years ago, when Moscow invaded Ukraine, or maybe just a month ago, when President Donald Trump returned to the White House. Whenever it began, the Europeans still haven’t noticed. Vance was there to deliver the memo.

That was the meaning of the speech the vice president gave in Munich, and the reason he centered it on themes more fundamental than even security: identity, first principles, and the fragility of Western civilization. In the year 2025, the West, like the Soviet Union in its final years, needs new thinking about foundational questions. Vance used his keynote address to get the process started.

The befuddled Eurocrats in Munich were like the “normal” scientists described in Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), who solve puzzles within a dominant theoretical paradigm that they don’t question or even necessarily recognize. Eventually, the strictures of the settled paradigm start to stultify. Anomalies accumulate, contradictions emerge, consensus fails to solidify, and an alternative framework becomes necessary, within which old puzzles can be solved and new ones posed.

Two days before Vance’s speech, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had laid out the military dimension of America’s new geopolitical thinking and emphasized the broader significance for the Western world: U.S. power will retrench and reconfigure, therefore Europeans need to step up on their own continent. The conclusion follows from the premise inexorably, yet these remarks too have exasperated the Eurocrats, as though their nations were entitled to perpetual dependence on a superpower whose hegemony never wanes. In truth, Hegseth had simply notified the Europeans that America, the world’s sheriff, could no longer promise to protect them. I’m advising you to get a gun.   

Vance, by contrast, not only avoided military matters in the speech but drew attention to that fact: “I’ve heard a lot about what you need to defend yourselves from, and of course that’s important. But what seemed a little bit less clear to me, and certainly I think to many of the citizens of Europe, is what exactly it is that you’re defending yourselves for.” 

Surveying the sorry state of European politics, Vance noted a contradiction, one of those puzzles produced by and insoluble within an outdated paradigm: Europe, the birthplace of liberal democracy, has lately been annulling election outcomes and suppressing freedom of speech and religion. In Vance’s telling, global liberalism has generated crises in the democratic West that European governments have managed, ineptly, by illiberal and undemocratic means. 

While European citizens still take pride in their ancestral homeland and in themselves as a distinct people with legitimate interests, European elites treat them like “interchangeable cogs of a global economy,” Vance said. Worse, European elites have turned the old continent into a refugee camp for non-Europeans:

Of all the pressing challenges that the nations represented here face, I believe there is nothing more urgent than mass migration. Today, almost one in five people living in this country moved here from abroad. That is, of course, an all-time high. It’s a similar number, by the way, in the United States, also an all-time high. The number of immigrants who entered the EU from non-EU countries doubled between 2021 and 2022 alone. And of course, it’s gotten much higher since.

The speech, and especially this passage, was a badly needed corrective to the excesses of post–Cold War liberalism, but in truth, Vance wasn’t very clear on what he thinks the Europeans are defending themselves for—nor who he thinks we Westerners really are. Watching the speech, at times I got the impression that Vance, whose wife is of Indian heritage, was about to veer toward the sort of answers offered by the alt-right. My impression was mistaken. The vice president, with recurring praise for free speech and fair elections, never exited the frame of civic nationalism. 

Still, the question of identity loomed large. Vance used the first-person plural several times, presupposing a shared sense of belonging that united the Americans and Europeans in the room, and in one key moment making it explicit. “We ought to ask whether we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard,” Vance insisted. “And I say ‘ourselves,’ because I fundamentally believe that we are on the same team.” The true nature of this elemental commonality, and the source of its endurance, were never elaborated.

Perhaps this is the first puzzle that Westerners can wrestle with in the new geopolitical paradigm that America’s vice president heralded and the blinkered bureaucrats of Brussels have been blind to: Who are we?