- Wolfgang Munchau
There is no longer any doubt that Europe and America are parting ways. The death of the transatlantic relationship was foretold many times, but at the Munich Security Conference this weekend, it finally ended.
The great American-European divorce has played out in three areas — Ukraine, free speech, and trade. Last week, Donald Trump blindsided the Europeans with his announcement of peace talks with Vladimir Putin. (He said he would do this during his election campaign, but Europe’s leaders were clearly not paying attention.) Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine, told the Europeans on Saturday that they will not be included in high-level peace negotiations.
Europe’s leaders are aghast. Some of them, including Keir Starmer, were still peddling the idea of future Nato membership for Ukraine when Trump announced that Ukraine will not become a Nato member. Trump said that, from a Russian perspective, it was the prospect of Ukraine’s Nato membership that triggered the war — a version of events the Europeans profoundly disagree with. He has also concluded that Ukraine cannot possibly win the war (a point on which I agree).
The outlines of a peace deal are emerging: no Nato membership for Ukraine; a frontier that respects the current military situation; a demilitarised zone around the new frontier; and, I presume, a return of Russia’s frozen assets, and a gradual lifting of the sanctions. Trump even wants Russia back in the G7.
This has left the Europeans furious. The European media, and numerous academics, keep up the increasingly implausible narrative that Ukraine can win the war only if the West maintains its support. But this is how people talk with no skin in the game. Robert Skidelsky, the British economic historian, recently pointed out the uniformity of pro-war views in the British media. Ukraine’s unconditional supporters within the British media, European think tanks, and US university history departments have all failed to heed an important lesson from the German military historian Carl von Clausewitz: do not go to war unless you know how to end it. For the Europeans, war is a spectator sport. Their support for Ukraine was all about principles and promises; there was no strategic planning, no endgame, no agreement on second-best outcomes, no concrete planning for post-war scenarios.
The Ukraine war must end because Ukraine has lost. It’s as simple as that. Russia has shifted to a war economy, and outproduces the West in military gear and ammunition by a large margin. There’s no way it can lose now. A Ukrainian victory would have required the US and Europe to have taken different policy decisions early on: a complete oil and gas embargo on day one, a total cut-off of all Russian banks from international financial networks, an immediate increase in defence industrial investments, and a readiness to make sacrifices. Ukraine needed brave supporters. It got cheerleaders instead.
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“Ukraine needed brave supporters. It got cheerleaders instead.”
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Having been relegated to the kids’ table of international diplomacy, the Europeans hoped for some soothing words from the Americans at the Munich Security Conference. Instead, they got a scolding from J.D. Vance, the US Vice President. He told them that the biggest threat to the West is not Russia or China, but the suppression of free speech in Europe. You might think this is an odd issue to raise at a conference about security, but for Vance the two issues are linked.
The Vice President cited a number of outrageous cases of state censorship, the most extreme of which was the cancellation of Romania’s presidential election last year, after the wrong candidate won. The decision was widely applauded in the EU, which I also see as an alarming sign of how censorship has been normalised in modern Europe. The argument for cancellation was Russian interference. Someone, apparently, had lied on TikTok.
Vance then repeated a threat he’d first made shortly after the American election — that any attempt to censor US-owned social media companies by the EU would lead to US disengagement from Nato. “I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions, and the conscience that guide your very own people,” he said. “Europe faces many challenges, but the crisis this continent faces right now… is one of our own making. If you are running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you.”
Europe was at a loss to respond. Its centrist governments are running out of ideas in the fight against the Right. They fear that uncontrolled free speech could turn into an existential threat to European integration. After all, the EU was never a bottom-up democratic project, and support for the euro was feeble from the outset. There was, for example, no majority in Germany in favour of the euro. This lack of popular support is what paralysed the EU during the sovereign debt crisis.
What sustains the EU is not a democratic mandate, but the mainstream media, academia, and think tanks — a blob of organisations that together exert indirect control over what gets discussed and published. You will not find editorials in German newspapers in support of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), despite the fact that this party now accounts for approximately 20% of popular support. The new Right-wing parties communicate through social media instead. This is why the EU is so focused on content moderation for social media, and it’s why we have seen a recent explosion of fact-checking units in broadcasting companies and media organisations.
But the Left is rarely subjected to such fact-checking. Quite a few members of the blob have abandoned X for the alternative Bluesky, which resembles the old Twitter. There, on a much smaller scale, the old echo chamber still works. There, users describe the Trump presidency as a coup d’état, and still think that Ukraine is winning the war. No one interrupts them — or checks any facts.
The Germans believe they are champions of free speech, but in reality they are among the worst offenders. The only censorship I myself have ever experienced was from a well-known German news magazine.
When Vance threatened in November to link censorship of US social media to America’s continued support for Nato, hardly anyone in Europe took him seriously. Vance is the kind of American character Europeans habitually underestimate. This is why his speech came as a shock. The Germans were particularly outraged, because Vance called on them to drop the political firewall against the AfD. He made a point of snubbing Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, but met with the AfD leader Alice Weidel at Munich.
The BBC described Vance’s speech “extraordinarily poorly judged”. And yet the intelligent way for the Brits and Europeans to respond to America’s new regime would be to stop hyperventilating and take matters into their own hands. The EU and the UK are now responsible for the security of the European continent — the question is whether they can rise to the occasion. They will need to find more money for defence, and to coordinate and pool their defence procurement more intelligently — EU countries, for example, have 12 types of battle tank, while the US only has one.
The trouble is that in Europe, every nation has its red lines. The Germans don’t want to send any troops anywhere. Emmanuel Macron is already calling for defence to be funded by European debt. The Poles reject a European army, while the Brits don’t want to take orders from the EU. If they are to get through this, they will all need to be pragmatic and fast. The brutal reality is that Europe’s governments have starved their militaries for decades, shifting their resources into social programmes, which they will now struggle to reverse.
There’s no denying that Trump is throwing Europe under the bus. Angela Merkel predicted this in 2018, when she gave an agitated speech in a Bavarian beer tent shortly after meeting with Trump. She said then that Europe needed to become less dependent on the US. But then she did nothing, as did everyone else. And so here we are, with EU leaders meeting to sit around yet another table. They are the Norma Desmonds of geopolitics — convinced that they are still the stars.
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Wolfgang Münchau is the Director of Eurointelligence and UnHerd columnist.