Vance’s offensive in Munich shows the growing transatlantic gulf – Firstpost

The unique German word Weltschmerz translates to world-weary melancholia and emotional pain. This was the state of teary-eyed Christoph Heusgen, the Munich Security Conference Chairman, and a former Angela Merkel aide, when he said: “Our common values are not so common anymore.”

US Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the premier security gathering is arguably the most consequential since Vladimir Putin’s 2007 speech that raised warning bells on NATO expansion and Moscow’s unwillingness to play by unilateral US diktats. “The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within,” said Vance. “What I worry about is the threat from within and the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values: values shared with the United States of America”, he added.

Transvaluation of Values

Clearly, there’s a gulf between Vance and his European interlocutors on what the ‘values’ are. The fundamental, rather indefeasible, values, as the US Founding Fathers most succinctly put it, are life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. And free speech, free enterprise, and unfettered public franchise. These are all ideology-agnostic, or better, can be best realised through the confluence and convergence of ideas, and not shaming and traducing.

What European agora needs today is the ‘Conservative-Liberal-Socialist’ of Polish philosopher Leszlek Kolakowski, and not Woke Ombudsmen (and women), and Citizen-Commissars with mimic Leninist ardor.

The transatlantic partnership was burnished by foreign policy practitioners such as Spykman, George Marshall, and Dean Acheson. It wasn’t predicated on the Woke cannon, speak-no-evil squeamishness, DEI cult, or kowtowing at the altar of political correctness, what the author Dorris Lessing termed “the most powerful mental tyranny in the free world, which is everywhere, and as invisible like poison gas”.

There’s an Internet joke that the US innovates, China catches and scales up, while Europe regulates. As the competition with China heats up, the US can neither rest on its laurels nor take the status quo for granted or be complacent in regulatory and interventionist zeal—the two favourite hobbies of the mandarins and the credentialed class.

The future of a renewed transatlantic partnership as well as security architecture cannot be decided without the consent of the major partner, the US. Cracks in the system of Washington Consensus as well as European Security Architecture are out in the open, and can’t be pushed under the rug. The European economy is under a slowdown as German automakers face competition from Chinese EV makers.

The political and social landscape is witnessing upheavals since the war in Ukraine, which the European bien pensants want to continue forever in the name of wuzzy, nebulous ideals and pathologies that need to be exorcised.

Nothing Lasts Forever

Naive idealism, myopia, and hoping to find succour in the zealotry of ‘End of History’, is a weak nostrum passed as panacea.

Vance’s speech is a reminder that the extended honeymoon or ‘holiday from history’ of Clintonian Belle Epoque has ended.

European leaders should know better about the epochs and paradigms in history that abruptly change course when one least expects it. Nothing lasts forever, and zeitgeists certainly never do, as Hegel would have stated.

The origins of the grand concert called European Union lie not in any great liberating ideas or sweeping social solidarity programs, but the historic Franco-German tangles over coal and steel, the hard reality of decolonisation, the necessities of trade, tariff, mutual suspicion, and above all the Marshall Plan aid and Cold War imperatives. These were all constructs forged in the crucible of self-interest and realpolitik.

“The European entity that began to emerge in the 1950s was in certain vital respects, an accident. It was neither predicted nor predictable—in either its form or its membership.” writes historian Tony Judt in his masterful essay, ‘Europe: The Grand Illusion’.

Whatever made possible the Western Europe we now have was almost certainly unique—and unrepeatable. To suppose that it can be projected indefinitely into the future is an illusion, however worthy and well intentioned.”

Kiev Quagmire

The former ‘bloodlands’ and killing fields of Europe become safe, secure, and prosperous only on the back of American post-war reconstruction aid and security guarantees to contain the Soviet sphere of influence.

The Soviet Union is long dead, and the Neocons who wanted a continuation of the Cold War mentality and viewed the Kremlin as the biggest foe, have now been pushed to the backseat. The rosy-eyed Neo-Liberals have conceded that trickle down has been way slower and unequal than they expected. Statistical parables and expert doublespeak and jugglery means nothing to the guy on the street who doesn’t know the sauvignon sipping bien pensants.

Democracy export is a costly and futile business, as Washington has learnt from a series of misadventures in the Middle East.

Milovan Djilas, the former Yugoslavian politician, intellectual, and dissident, said in an interview that communism was just one temporary phase in our long, arduous history. The same holds true for the ideological and political cartography of Project Europe.

Ukraine is as complex and contested as the Balkan tinderbox, and only stranger to history arsonists or naively deluded interventionists would want to be pulled into that vortex. JD Vance knows it. And this is what he had in his mind in the prescient New York Times op-ed ‘The Math on Ukraine Doesn’t Add Up’.

One can’t be a zealous interventionist on borrowed bullion, subsidised military expenditure, reduced weapons outlay, and diminishing heft. Brussels needs to realise this.

The writer is a communications professional who is intrigued by the intersection of society, popular culture, technology, and history of ideas. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.