Vance and the attack on the West: Just a crisis or the end of the US-Europe friendship? In his (and Trump's) head is a "new Yalta"

Trump 's number two  has taken off his mask (and gloves). Is this the beginning of the end of the Atlantic friendship or just a maturity crisis?

By Federico Rampini - Corriere della Sera

Meet “Hillbilly” Vance. “Hillbilly” is a term used to describe Americans who came from mountainous areas and were displaced during the “Great Depression.” “Hillbilly” Vance came from the poor and marginalized Appalachian Mountains of America, but graduated from Yale. The former soldier served in Iraq. The venture capitalist was among the first to build bridges from the populist right to the world of Elon Musk. The 40-year-old represents the future of Trumpism.

In Munich, the vice president “removed his mask” in front of the whole world. Anyone who didn’t yet have a clear idea of ??him already did after the security strategy conference in Germany. “Shock and awe,” the expression that became famous in a war context, best describes the effect of his appearance on the Old Continent. But is this the end of a special relationship, the transatlantic alliance, which has marked our history from 1947 to the present?

How far has Vance, once called "white trash," come, who in his autobiography "American Elegy" recounts the degraded family context, the misery and the collapse of self-esteem of the world into which he was born: the working class destroyed by globalization, the marginalized who do not have the compensation of classification in protected categories. He was given the opportunity to explain to the European establishment how far the revision of the global order promoted by the White House can go.

Vance attacked allied governments and gave legitimacy to the far right. He did it on German soil 10 days before that country’s legislative elections. More than Putin and Xi Jinping, Europeans must guard against an “enemy within,” he said. He spoke out against the politically correct ideology that censors those who think differently, denies the right to speak to anti-abortionists or pro-Nazi parties like Germany’s AfD.

“If you are afraid of your constituents, America can do nothing for you,” he said. After recalling the recent attacks carried out by jihadists in Germany, he charged: “European citizens did not vote to open the borders to millions of immigrants.”

According to him, America is concerned about European security and thinks it can reach an agreement between Russia and Ukraine, but “Europe needs to make greater progress towards the ability to defend itself on its own.” But he added something different from what Donald Trump had said about Putin. He threatened new sanctions on Russia, even an increase in military pressure, if Moscow does not prove to be “reasonable.”

The Munich Security Conference is no stranger to turning points. It was there in 2007 that Putin announced his plans for anti-Western retaliation and the reconstruction of the tsarist or Soviet sphere of influence, which few wanted to take seriously. The war in Georgia in 2008 followed, the invasion of Crimea in 2014, and Ukraine in 2022. Taking Vance seriously today, what might this mean? Aside from trying to export the “anti-woke” cultural revolution taking place in the United States to Europe, what new global order is emerging?

One option could be simplified as “New Yalta.” The allusion here is to the heads of the winners of World War II (Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin) who divided the world into spheres of influence. Trump would be willing to give Putin and Xi Jinping more leeway over Russia’s and China’s neighbors by weakening alliances with Europe and Japan. In return, he would get a more balanced world trade to the advantage of the US and greater American control over the Western Hemisphere (from South America to the Arctic). The political bond between liberal democracies, the idea of ??the West as a civilization bound together by a heritage of values, is quite foreign to Trump. Although Vance in his own way referred to that historical heritage when he accused some European governments of violating freedom of expression.

The dissolution of the Atlantic alliance built by Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, and maintained by all their successors, Democratic or Republican, has strong contraindications. This contrasts with the vast accumulation of material interests that bind both sides of the Atlantic, including those capitalist groups that Europeans today describe as an “oligarchy” linked to the White House. Turning our backs on Europe is not compatible with the ambitions of Vance and Elon Musk to export Trumpism under the slogan “MEGA”, Make Europe Great Again.

Another possibility is that this story is a variation on other family crises, stormy episodes that have shaken transatlantic relations. The precedents are numerous. This ranges from General De Gaulle’s decision to abandon command of NATO during the Vietnam War to the Germany and France split from George W. Bush when he invaded Iraq in 2003. It was then that US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously titled a geopolitical essay: “Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus.” Rumsfeld then made an attempt to distinguish between the New Europe – the pro-American eastern countries – and the old Europe that he saw as clinging to the past. Another divide has always been the Middle East, where today Trumpism could be interpreted by Netanyahu as a green light for an attack on Iran.

Vance created panic in Europe with his intervention in Munich, partly because he had identified real weaknesses. According to polls, Germans who will vote on February 23 will not penalize Christian Democrat leader Merz for accepting far-right votes to close borders to immigration. Tensions over poorly managed migration flows have shifted European public opinion to the right – starting with France in the 1980s – long before Trump entered politics.

The trade war finds the Old Continent in a position of extreme weakness. Its economy is unable to keep up with the American pace and is much more protectionist than one might think, as Mario Draghi has pointed out. The European army that Zelensky is calling for to guarantee his country's future security – 200,000 soldiers to be immediately deployed in Ukraine as a deterrent to Russia – simply does not exist.

If Vance's electric shock were to awaken public opinion from its geopolitical lethargy, it would be one of those crises that would make Europe grow.