This year’s Munich Security Conference (MSC) was supposed to be primarily about two things: how to end the war in Ukraine without giving in to Russia, and how Europe needed to boost its spending on defence.
But the most senior American present, US Vice President JD Vance, used his time at the podium to talk about neither.
Instead, he shocked delegates on Friday by roundly attacking Washington’s allies, including Britain, in a blistering attack decrying misinformation, disinformation, and the rights of free speech.
It was a very weird 20 minutes – one met largely with silence from delegates in the hall.
Even a joke, “if American democracy can survive 10 years of [climate campaigner] Greta Thunberg scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk”, failed to raise a single laugh.
He accused European governments of retreating from their values, and ignoring voter concerns on migration and free speech.
Vance’s speech went down very badly – unequivocally badly. It was extraordinarily poorly judged.
But who was it aimed at?
A US commentator said to me afterwards: “That was all for US domestic consumption.”
The vice president did, however, go on to meet the embattled Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who did his best to sound positive.
The pair had “a good conversation”, according to Zelensky, who said it marked “our first meeting, not last, I’m sure”. The Ukrainian leader emphasised the need for Washington and Kyiv to speak more and work together “to prepare the plan [on] how to stop Putin and finish the war”.
“We want, really, we want peace very much. But we need real security guarantees,” Zelensky added.
According to US President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin also wants peace, but that is peace on his terms. Unless those have secretly changed, they involve capitulation to Russia’s demands and the permanent ceding of territory to Moscow.
Vance’s speech came days after President Trump effectively pulled the rug out from Ukraine’s negotiating position by conceding, via his Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, that restoring Ukraine’s territory to where it was before the first Russian invasion in 2014 is simply “not realistic”.
The US also dashed Kyiv’s hopes of joining Nato, a key ambition of President Zelensky, and ruled out sending US troops to help protect Ukraine’s borders from the next time Russia decides to invade.
Ahead of the Munich conference Europe was stunned by news that Trump had held an apparently cordial 90-minute phone call with Putin, thus abruptly ending the West’s three-year freeze in talking to the Russian leader that has been in place since the time of the 2022 invasion.
The delegates in Munich are scheduled to focus on the war in Ukraine in a high-profile debate on Saturday.
The fear in Munich amongst European leaders and their delegations is that in Donald Trump’s rush to secure a peace deal in Ukraine, Putin will emerge victorious, stronger and planning to seize more parcels of land in Europe.
