Europe and the liberal democracies of the west face a reckoning this week in Munich: will they be willing, or able, to pull away from a hostile America and forge the capacity to see off Russia’s war against Europe?
Last year JD Vance, the US vice president, signalled his contempt for Europe and his disdain for reality when he warned that Europe was vulnerable to an “enemy within”.
He did not mean locally recruited saboteurs who have since attacked targets from the UK to Poland, most recently Warsaw’s rail system. He did not mean the drone pilots spying on European and British airfields and military camps.
And he certainly did not mean Moscow’s useful idiots amplifying lies intended to undermine the concept of truth itself and to shatter western belief in the very systems of democracies they depend on – because he is one of them.
Last year he said: “The threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor.
“What I worry about is the threat from within,” he told the assembled securocrats, heads of government and world media in Munich.
This absurd statement was the kind of rubbish that the Kremlin has worked for years to get fed into the bloodstream of the liberal democracies of the west, because it is their freedoms that represent the greatest threat to Putin’s autocracy.
In Manchester, Munich or Madrid, if you toss political critics out of windows on behalf of your government you risk arrest. In Moscow, you don’t.
Nowhere on earth threatens Putin’s rule more than the existence of a pro-western Ukraine on track to join the EU that enjoyed democratic elections, a burgeoning tech sector and rapid growth while much of Russia remained in Soviet-style dark ages.
Russians peering over the border fence at the good life in Ukraine would have only endured Putin’s kleptocracy a little longer before sweeping him away like a Romanov.
So three years ago this month he invaded. And a year ago America switched from being an ally of Ukraine and Europe to being a threat to its stability.
For evidence, one just has to look at where Marco Rubio is going after Munich. The US secretary of state is heading to Slovakia and Hungary – both ruled by anti-European pro-Moscow quislings – and the Germany where Trump’s Maga movement enjoys close links with the far right AfD party.
According to a report by New York University’s Rule of Law Lab published this week: “Hungary’s media landscape now serves as the most sophisticated example of media capture in the European Union.
“The ruling party, Fidesz, is estimated to directly or indirectly control roughly eighty per cent of the country’s media. Hungarians’ trust in news is amongst the lowest in Europe.
