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Guest Essay

By James Kirchick

Mr. Kirchick is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues and the Coming Dark Age.”

Vice President JD Vance’s address to the Munich Security Conference last week was the most shocking thing to happen at that annual summit since President Vladimir Putin of Russia condemned the American-led liberal international order there nearly two decades ago. And just as that tirade presaged the era of diplomatic tension and violent conflict in which we’re currently embroiled, so too did Mr. Vance’s speech augur a coming dark age.

After a few perfunctory sentences about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the most destructive conflict on European soil since World War II, Mr. Vance explained the real problem facing the West. “The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia” or China, he said, but “the threat from within.” Government censorship, Mr. Vance averred, threatens the very basis of the trans-Atlantic alliance between Europe and the United States. Having portrayed longstanding European allies as adversaries, Mr. Vance then declared that “there is no room for firewalls,” a reference to the informal agreement among mainstream political parties not to form coalitions with the extreme right.

Mr. Vance’s astonishing intervention in European politics was accompanied by an equally striking break with diplomatic protocol. While Mr. Vance declined to meet with the leader of the country hosting him, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, he did make time to confer with Alice Weidel, the co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany, known as the AfD, currently polling second in Sunday’s federal election. By his actions and through his words, Mr. Vance all but endorsed the AfD.

Mr. Vance is not the first high-ranking Trump administration official to back the far-right party. Since December, when Elon Musk endorsed the AfD as the “only” force that can “save Germany,” Mr. Musk has repeatedly expressed his support for the party to his over 200 million followers on X, the social media platform he owns. Last month, addressing AfD supporters via video link, Mr. Musk asserted that in Germany, “there is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.” German children, he said, “should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents.” (In Munich, Mr. Vance joked that “if American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk,” a tacit stamp of approval for Mr. Musk’s endorsement of the AfD.)

Devoid of context, Mr. Musk’s statements might seem unobjectionable. The extent to which a nation’s atonement for past sins should influence present-day policy is a legitimate subject for debate. But Mr. Musk didn’t share his........

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