The speech - symbolic in its very name - in Munich by the youngest vice president since a much less torn and scorned Richard Milhous Nixon was certainly not received as a love letter by European colleagues less enamoured (dare I say it?) by the power of elections. In the most stunning, or even deserved, springs unloaded into the collective eye of the beholders the 40-year old tetragrammaton, VPJD, ripped into the independent (?) judiciary of Romania's decision to quash its recent presidential election, lambasting that such an action would not only undercut democracy - a fair assessment - but the credibility of European institutions and the legacy of liberty, ostensibly shared with the younger, nastier, sock-dologising American cousin, to the predictable reaction of support (if quiet) for this judicial coup itself, and scorn for the critique.
Amongst other critiques, and the near-absence of the Ukrainian question - where Vance's views can be summed up by very wilful, if respectably mournful, passivity - but matters that can be summed up by the infamous First Amendment and its infamous (from the viewpoint of Munich, even in the present tense) scope. The notion of British man - the land of Locke, Milton and even the Human Rights Act ostensibly placing such rights over the arbitrariness of statutes - going to prison, or at any rate being led (or more metaphorically, "thrown" and "dragged") to the courts to face some stiff rebuke for public prayer - or, more tastefully put, a protest against the practice of abortion - under the rubrique of justice makes me, in an oft-used cliche, unable to keep silent, and so it should in your case. One may well voice whether it is the right place to speak of such things, or indeed to speak at all for an American vice president, but surely - under the weight of history -
The implications of this speech of his on those negotiations of ours will put, sorely, the mark of "failure" - or success, viewed from some other voter's keyboard, or basement, across the pond - over the main topic of the conference. What if Ukraine is sold out, betrayed, rift of its territory, incapable of defence further on - from Munich, no less? But to those heralding the Munich analogy, predictable even with the current state of education and even without the auspicious location, one would have to ask where the might of the Führer, equally raised to a stature forbidden by the Versailles order to indifference, and indeed support, and his Wehrmacht had after three years of actual invasion failed to capture Prague would be in relation to concluding such a Czech War and continue into Poland, Scandinavia, the Benelux and France, for its bad reputation and sordid 1940 regiment of beards and failures the strongest on the continent, west of the common enemy in the East, that is.
The sordid state, not only of the Ukrainian polity - whatever its past, and former subjugation to (or indeed topping of a much younger) Russia, decidedly an independent one, which should be afforded the integrity of its borders - but of the Russian effort to conquer and add it to its empire - if that is, or were, Mr. Putin's goals (as Ayn Rand said, this character deserves not the honourable implications of "President", but let's leave language policing and secret police-work at that) when he assaulted an already slighted, already amputated Ukraine with less than 170,000 men (Hitler and von Rundstedt would have had ten times the numbers and, yes, the sympathy of some Slavic boots and shoes amongst the population) to add to his desire to compare himself to the Tsars. A Czar, in one of the more lurid turns of American vocabulary, to Trump's Caesar (or is it Marius, or rather Sulla, but surely not Catiline?). If these are Putin's goals, they have not been well vindicated by his actions, not merely in the field of combat - where he keeps himself well scarce and absent -
As you may guess, or indeed already know, my doubts as to these imperial, outdated designs of Mr. Putin have never quite been well and truly trashed, as hard as they may be to vindicate (although many, or a few good men in the West have tried) but the desire for a common security, indeed a political, common apparatus within a desired quasi-polity may make it a useful notion (if not quite a fiction). Against this stands the verdict of this brat from the outskirts of Ohio, the age of Emmanuel when he took up the mantle that was once (Louis) Napoleon, the new order not merely dominating but lecturing the old. More so, the generosity of offering these values as our shared European-American legacy, rather than an Anglo-Saxon invention (as far as parliamentary government and Bills of Rights are concerned) later exported, and representing more generally the common heritage of humanity. This conservative estimate of liberal democracy as European, or even Anglo-American, surely deserves scolding (although I claim it can be vindicated in large, and in Keir's kingdom by the virtue of near-340 years of parliamentarianism, a double since the days of Palmerston and still kept) just as much as the practice of liberal liberties within the "European-democratic" sphere (let alone Ukraine, if we're going to banish generosity to the back of the dictionary) now claiming, under the guise of protecting democracy, draconian and overtly authoritarian measures, jointly with denouncing the American populist surge for these very sins.
I know not of any case currently of a journalist imprisoned in the United States; surely, there must have been a case recent, but I know for a fact that none of the examples made from Swedish (yet to be tried on appeal), English, Scottish and German cases in their very state of sordida would not be accepted within the liberal democratic framework Trump so evocatively (or am I being ironic?) praised and promised to defend, and occasionally - if not very consequentially, as of yet - scorning, lately with the battle waged by the unitary executive against the bureaucracy, with (parts of) the judiciary rushing to the latter's aid, posing again "democracy against liberal democracy" in a war where popular will may yet win but still crumble. What ought to be asked is whether it may lose, and thus crumble anyway, whatever the critics of undemocratic measures may hold...? These questions of the future itself does not, however, rip from the vice president's lapel the critique justly made, principally (or even bravely) spoken, and met not with negation, not with a better argument, but with the sheer contempt of the old man facing the wroth of the loathsome, but evocatively correct, prodigal son. As in Vinterberg's famous film and its anti-eponymous climactic scene, the accusation, to the accused, rebounds in itself, because it is true and not because it is, or has even been implied to be, fabricated. Here,
I know not of any case currently of a journalist imprisoned in the United States; surely, there must have been a case recent, but I know for a fact that none of the examples made from Swedish (yet to be tried on appeal), English, Scottish and German cases in their very state of sordida would not be accepted within the liberal democratic framework Trump so evocatively (or am I being ironic?) praised and promised to defend, and occasionally - if not very consequentially, as of yet - scorning, lately with the battle waged by the unitary executive against the bureaucracy, with (parts of) the judiciary rushing to the latter's aid, posing again "democracy against liberal democracy" in a war where popular will may yet win but still crumble. What ought to be asked is whether it may lose, and thus crumble anyway, whatever the critics of undemocratic measures may hold...? These questions of the future itself does not, however, rip from the vice president's lapel the critique justly made, principally (or even bravely) spoken, and met not with negation, not with a better argument, but with the sheer contempt of the old man facing the wroth of the loathsome, but evocatively correct, prodigal son. As in Vinterberg's famous film and its anti-eponymous climactic scene, the accusation, to the accused, rebounds in itself, because it is true and not because it is, or has even been implied to be, fabricated. Here,
What then of Ukraine, and this seeming, seething change of subject? Well, if these institutions are important, we should
"The threat to our revolution does not come from France, but from within." The words may not have been spoken by Thomas Jefferson, but ring nonetheless strong, no less if the aged, once brilliant but now largely decrepit figure of Adams was correspondingly equated to the Europe now crying out for more American aid (in some sense vindicating the absurd, masochistic comparison to a babe, by some less than sober voices).
