Last week in Warsaw, a Polish journalist told me, “We conservatives all loved JD Vance’s Munich speech. He spoke for us.”
“When Europeans find out I’m friends with the vice president,” I replied, “they often ask, ‘Does he hate Europe?’ I tell them, of course not, that he loves Europe, but he loves Europe enough to tell European leaders the truth.”
President Donald Trump’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) exemplifies that kind of tough love for Europe. When Vance gave his Munich speech earlier this year, the German in charge of the security conference, a grown man, actually wept in public. Many tears of grief and anger are no doubt being shed in Brussels, and among European elites, in the wake of the NSS. Tough love has a way of doing that to people who have grown soft and dependent.
The Trump NSS articulates a massive shift in US policy, one that has been emerging in the second Trump administration but that finds clarity in this document. The NSS, whose author is not named (but U.S. Director of Policy Planning Michael Anton’s fingerprints are all over it), casts aside the globalist neoliberalism that has defined U.S. foreign policy for the past several decades. No more ‘free trade’ that wrecks the American middle class and industrial base. No more writing endless cheques for European defense. And no more “lash[ing] American policy to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty.”
Is that Mr. Soros in the corner, crying into his caviar? Good. Cry more.
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