ice President J.D. Vance went to the Munich Security Conference and flattered the ruling elites of Europe. I don’t mean to badmouth Mr. Vance. Flattery is often an effective way to critique the powerful by holding up to them the standards they should be meeting, and that is precisely what Mr. Vance did. He spoke to the Europeans of “our shared values”: free speech, freedom of religion, fair and free elections, and an accountable and democratically legitimated government. Mr. Vance then gave a list of examples of how European governing elites do not share those values, from social media and prayer persecutions in Britain to the canceled 2024 election in Romania to the cordon sanitaire excluding immigration-skeptic parties such as the AfD from ruling coalitions, even as immigration laws go unenforced and terrorist violence from immigrants and their hostile offspring is a daily headline. What emerged in this speech was the “Vance Doctrine”: a call for America to rethink its role as defender of a Europe that increasingly betrays the shared democratic values it claims to uphold.

European bureaucracies have made a discovery fatal to democracy. When Muslim immigrants fail to integrate, it is easier to repress those calling out that failure than to enforce integration. An attitude honed against immigration critics has been applied in and beyond Europe to abortion protestors and COVID skeptics. The Great Replacement, the COVID-lab leak theory, and the eugenic goals of abortion liberalization have all been described in our state-colonized mainstream media as “conspiracy theories,” their purveyors censored, fired, cancelled, and sometimes jailed. These are indeed all conspiracy theories: they describe how people work together to achieve wicked or at least detrimental ends. Yet each has evidence worth debating—whether official statements at the UN and in Europe, lab records from Wuhan and grant records from the United States, or historical Planned Parenthood rhetoric—much like the documented facts behind the official 9/11 narrative.

To repress them and the correlated political forces these ideas have called into being the European Union, some European states and other supposed “Western allies” such as Canada have adopted the full arsenal of totalitarianism.

In the circumstances of 2025, America should not and cannot help defend totalitarian societies from internal democratic dissent. As Mr. Vance said in Munich, “If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you.” Moreover, America has only secondary security interests in defending them from external threats either. America’s principal security concerns are the flow of deadly drugs and illegal migrants over its own borders and through its airports, and second, the expansion of Chinese influence and hard and soft power in the Americas, from Vancouver BC real estate to the Panama Canal to armed Chinese “fishing fleets” in Argentina’s Exclusive Economic Zone. With regard to old and new Europe, America’s principal security worries are the extent to which European cities are havens for jihadis and whether European governments continue to conspire with Big Tech and the US deep state against Americans’ fundamental rights.