MAGA's Munich outing
ANALYSIS
Munich: Earlier this month, I questioned whether the Trump Administration’s increasingly America Only style of foreign policy might be a gift to China.
After JD Vance’s speech to the Munich Security Conference on the weekend, the answer is taking shape.
The US Vice President lashed out at Europeans saying that the greatest threat they faced was not from China and Russia but ‘from within,’ citing Europe’s migration levels and EU regulation of tech platforms and online speech.
In some instances, he gave misleading examples to justify his attack.
And in the case of the cancelled Romanian Presidential elections, he conflated evidence of a Russian campaign using the Chinese-owned TikTok platform to surge the reach of a far-right candidate who came from nowhere to win, with ‘a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country,’ claiming that democracy ‘wasn’t very strong to begin with’ if it could be destroyed that easily.
‘To many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation, who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion or, God forbid, vote a different way, or even worse, win an election,’ he said.
Taking lessons from a man who refuses to acknowledge that Joe Biden won the 2020 election was galling for Europeans, who also view the political polarisation that has divided America, as something worth trying to prevent in their backyards.
So what was the point of gratuitously insulting allies on an unrelated topic?
The tactic looked all too familiar to Professor Gordon Flake, the American-Australian head of the Perth-based USAsia Centre think tank and close observer of US politics, and the Indo-Pacific.
‘The Vice President’s remarks here should be understood in a broader international context that includes Chinese wolf-warrior diplomats,’ he told me in an interview on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.
‘Which means they’re intended more for an audience at home than for the audience in front of which they are speaking.’
Wolf Warrior diplomacy refers to the CCP’s strategy of diplomats being aggressive and provocative in their communications in order to please domestic audiences and in particular President Xi Jinping.
Proving the point, former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, one of the few in the conference hall to applaud Vance, and give him a standing ovation described the speech as ‘boss.’
Vance went on to meet, not Chancellor Olaf Scholz or the man on course to replace him after this weekend’s elections, Friedrich Merz, but Alice Weidel, the leader of the far-right Alternative for Deutschland party that many Germans view as being the heir to the Nazis.
If the Chinese had done this, all put together it would look like a foreign government using a visit to an allied country to promote and endorse a politically sympathetic party, verging on if not outright foreign influence.
‘It is not the job of the American government to explain to us here in Germany how we should protect democratic institutions,’ Merz told broadcaster Deutsche Welle.
Scholz reminded Vance of his visit to the Dachau concentration camp situated around an hour from Munich, the city where the Nazis founded their party and were headquartered until the end of the war.
‘The overwhelming majority of the people of my country stand up resolutely to those who glorify or justify the criminal National Socialism,’ Scholz said.
‘The AfD is a party from the ranks of which National Socialism and its monstrous crimes, crimes against humanity, like the ones committed in Dachau, were trivialised as just a “speck of bird shit in German history”.’
The AfD is not barred from contesting elections. It is polling at 21 per cent. But mainstream parties in Germany refuse to rely on AfD votes to form government. Vance claimed the brandmauer — or firewall — was more proof of Europeans running scared of their voters. But even France’s Marine Le Pen doesn’t tolerate Weidel. She kicked the AfD out of her far-right ID grouping in the European parliament last year.
This context has been lost on most in the wider reporting of Vance’s speech and the general sentiment by Europe’s many detractors is that they should just get over their hurt feels and cop the justified criticism on the chin about its over-regulation and loss of control of the migration debate, because democratic friends should be able to say such things to one another.
‘What did all of this accomplish other than irritating our allies?’ Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan asked US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on CBS.
‘Why would our allies or anybody be irritated by free speech or by someone giving their opinion?’ Marco Rubio said.
‘The Munich Security Conference is largely a conference of democracies in which one of the things that we cherish and value is the ability to speak freely and provide your opinions.
‘I assure you, the United States has come under withering criticism on many occasions from many leaders in Europe, and we don't go around throwing temper tantrums about it.’
Tellingly Rubio did not answer the question.
But others are beginning to fill in the blanks and those in the United States who really care about countering China should take note.
Take the extraordinary comments by Singapore’s Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen, (66) who told a sideline event: ‘For Asia, the US in the last 60 years since President John F Kennedy's inaugural speech – that one form of tyranny (colonial control) will not be replaced by an iron tyranny, that was the moral legitimacy in which US presence was in our region.’
‘US has now willy-nilly – the image has changed from liberator to great disruptor to a landlord seeking rent.’
Professor Flake predicted America adopting China’s Wolf-Warrior tactics would carry the same cost it did for the Chinese who soon dropped the approach.
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