Mudslinging in Munich — Reading Room

Europe’s recurring nightmare is turning into reality.  
  
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| **Ravi Agrawal** is the editor in chief of _Foreign Policy_ and host of FP Live.   
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| **Ravi Agrawal** is the editor in chief of _Foreign Policy_ and host of FP Live.   
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| | Dear FP Insiders,We’re entering a new world order—and it is very disorderly. As you open this email, a handful of Europe’s top leaders are convening in Paris for an emergency meeting. The attendees will have one eye on a parallel set of talks this week in Riyadh, where **Marco Rubio** is meeting with **Sergey Lavrov**. It is Europe’s recurring nightmare turned into reality: the top diplomats from Washington and Moscow carving out the future of Ukraine without consulting Brussels or Kyiv. Let me catch you up. I’ve just returned stateside after witnessing high drama at the Munich Security Conference (MSC), an annual summit that brings together spy chiefs, national security officials, and world leaders. The attendees, a majority of whom were European, were already smarting from the news last week that U.S. President **Donald Trump** had spoken with Russian President **Vladimir Putin**. (European Union foreign-policy chief **Kaja Kallas** said she worried the 90-minute phone call represented U.S. “appeasement” of Russia.)  Then came **J.D. Vance**. Speaking to a packed audience inside the stately hotel Bayerischer Hof, the U.S. vice president took things up a notch when he said the biggest threat to the continent wasn’t Russia or China but Europe’s retreat “from some of its own fundamental values.” Vance went on to scold European leaders for canceling elections (Romania’s, because of alleged Russian interference) and censoring free speech (he cited “anti-feminist” comments and an incident involving Quran burning). “We must do more than talk about democratic values,” he said. “We must live them.” You could almost see “Jan. 6, 2021” thought bubbles emerge above the heads of the assembled dignitaries. Or pot, kettle, and black. Stranger yet, there was no criticism aimed at China or Russia, the two usual U.S. bogeymen. Ukraine was mentioned only in passing. It was not so much a foreign-policy address as it was a MAGA stump speech retrofitted for Munich. As one German official remarked to me halfway through the speech: “He’s trolling us!” The audience was stunned. As we shuffled out, a foreign minister from a major European power shrugged and wondered aloud if we had just witnessed “American performance art.” Another told me the speech was “bullshit.” While that second undiplomatic diplomat shall go unnamed here, he walked me to a friend of his who wasn’t constrained by his current role. “If that wasn’t a wake-up call for Europe, I don’t know what is,” said **Gabrielius Landsbergis** , who until last year was Lithuania’s foreign minister. “We have to get our act together and figure out how to manage our problems on our own.” I next ran into **Arancha González Laya** , a former Spanish foreign minister and now the dean of Sciences Po in Paris. “J.D. Vance has done more for European integration than the American founding fathers,” she said. “He wants to destroy the EU from within. We now have to ask ourselves what we want our relationship with the U.S. to be—and how to go it alone.” As various leaders composed their thoughts, some turned to action. **Boris Pistorius** , Germany’s defense minister, rushed to rewrite his speech. An hour later, he emerged on stage. “This democracy was just called into question by the U.S. vice president,” he said. “If I understand him correctly, he compares the condition of Europe with what prevails in some authoritarian regimes. … This is not acceptable.” Likely right around then, Vance was doing something even more unacceptable to many Germans: meeting with **Alice Weidel** , co-leader of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right, anti-migrant political party that has flirted with Nazism. It was only after that meeting became public knowledge that German Chancellor **Olaf Scholz** , speaking the next day, blasted back at Vance. “‘Never again’ is the historical mission that Germany, as a free democracy, must and wants to continue to live up to every day,” he said. “A commitment to ‘never again’ is therefore incompatible with support for the AfD. That is why we will not accept outsiders intervening in our democracy.”  The clear antagonism between the United States and Europe no doubt informed the public remarks of the man who has been the star of the MSC stage in the last couple years: Ukrainian President **Volodymyr Zelensky**. “Decades of the old relationship between Europe and America are ending. From now on, things will be different, and Europe needs to adjust to that,” he said, before going on to call for establishing a dedicated European military force.  Even the usually diplomatic Finnish president, **Alexander Stubb** , was more combative than usual when he spoke to me in an FP Live interview that will air in full on Tuesday. Asked about U.S. calls to increase European defense spending as a percentage of GDP, he responded with the point that actual materials and capabilities are more relevant than GDP-based defense spending targets: “We don’t have a percentage. We have stuff.”  The MSC is one of the most eagerly anticipated conferences on national security issues because it provides participants with enough time to mingle and participate in genuinely useful closed-door, off-record roundtables. (Disclosure: FP is a media partner and hosted several official side events, as well as its Situation Report newsletter, fronted by **Rishi Iyengar** and **Keith Johnson**.) As usual, artificial intelligence and technology were top of mind amid discussions on defense and competition. The conference has in recent years also made strides to bring in more voices from the global south. But almost everything was overshadowed by the increasingly open enmity between Europe and the United States. One business executive who served in the first Trump administration and won’t be going back in confided a fear that Trump’s second term would harm America’s greatest asset: its network of friends and alliances.  As I write this Insider-only dispatch, I’m surprised it has taken me this long to mention tariffs. After all, this is an issue Trump is ideological about, according to people who know him well. And it was just last week that the president announced reciprocal tariffs, meaning that Washington will match other countries’ levies, no matter how high or low—a decision that dramatically widens executive power while also tossing World Trade Organization rules in the trash. European Commission President **Ursula von der Leyen** , who spoke on stage right before Vance, gamely declared, to applause, that “trade wars and punitive tariffs make no sense” and are a “race to the bottom.” She added that Brussels would “use all our tools to protect our interests.” But how effective could those tools be? Could tensions with the United States get Europe to trade more with other countries in Africa and Asia? Perhaps even … China? Speaking of—Beijing was well represented by **Wang Yi**. The foreign minister was no doubt bemused by the trans-Atlantic infighting and stuck to his script as he called for countries to join hands and “work for an equal and orderly multipolar world.” Perhaps you can get a sense now why it was a topsy-turvy weekend: America mocking Europe, Brussels talking about going it alone, and China doing the opposite of wolf-warrior talk. The question, as always, is how these things will play out. If Europe truly feels that its partnership with the United States is endangered, how will it go about becoming self-reliant? One spook told me that from an intelligence-gathering and defense perspective, there’s no way Europe can thrive on its own. Another European defense official admitted that it would take well over a decade for investments in defense infrastructure to take off and allow the continent to feel self-sufficient.  As we begin what is only the fifth week of Trump’s second term, the sheer speed of news developments feels unprecedented. And that brings me back to that emergency meeting in Paris, announced on stage at the MSC as Europeans processed how the world was changing around them. The meeting was called by French President **Emmanuel Macron** , missing in Munich but never shy to rally the continent around himself. This time, Macron knows he won’t win another election and perhaps can finally make decisions without worrying about the polls. Any comeback to the United States’ nose-thumbing will entail a rare degree of continental unity, bravery, and clarity of purpose.  I’ll stop here because words get dated very quickly these days. But I want to remind you to join me, and reporters Rishi Iyengar and **Lili Pike** , for more from Munich and around the world in a special Insider-only call on Wednesday, Feb. 19, at 1 p.m. EST. This is the first of its kind for us, and we promise to open up our notebooks and dish on everything we’ve been hearing on our travels. We welcome your questions! As ever,Ravi Agrawal  
Editor in chief  
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