JD Vance delivers his speech during the Munich Security Conference.

It was a brutal thing to watch. As JD Vance lectured Europe’s elites on their shortcomings, it began to resemble the clubbing of a seal cub. Splat, splat, splat, went the Vice-President’s spiked stick. Cancelled elections! Online censorship! Uncontrolled immigration! By the time he finished, to a smattering of strained and desultory applause, the snow was crimson.

What made it so uncomfortable was that he was right. Europe, including the UK, does indeed have a problem with free speech. We have become habituated to censorship. We are no longer as shocked about it as we ought to be. To hear the examples that Vance trotted out was to see quite how far we have strayed from the ideals that we once prided ourselves on defending.

An Iraqi Christian is murdered in Stockholm after burning a Koran, and the response of the authorities is to announce that they will find ways to prevent Koran-burning. The German government declares that it will close down social media platforms over “hateful content”. A senior Eurocrat glories in having cancelled the election in Romania, and muses about whether Brussels might do the same in Germany to stop the AfD. Splat, splat, spat goes that Ohioan hakapik.

Vance attended last year’s Munich Security Conference as a newly elected senator, and was treated like a bad smell. Worse than his opposition to the Ukraine war, in the eyes of the assembled grandees, was his Euro-scepticism. The one thing these corporatists dislike even more than a populist is a Brexiteer.

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Vance’s opinions have not altered. But this year, he was attending as Vice-President of the country that supplies a chunk of Europe’s defence, and could not be ignored. He took the opportunity to tell Europe’s politicians, generals and spies how they looked to the outside world.

Why, he asked, had the US invested so heavily in the security of Europe in the first place? The answer was a shared commitment to freedom and democracy. But in what sense could the EU, or its constituent states, be said to stand for those things when they were repressing views of which they disapproved and redefining morality as whatever happened to suit their rulers?

“If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you. Nor for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump.”

The delegates gawped in horror. Those in uniforms managed to look professional – some even allowed themselves discreet smiles – but those in suits goggled like goldfish. When, after Vance had finished, the German defence minister, Boris Pistorius, took to the stage and declared that his words had been unacceptable, the room burst into thunderous applause.

I hold no brief for Vance. His hostility to Zelensky goes well beyond concerns about the costs of the war, and taps into the MAGA movement’s resentment of the cameo role that Ukraine played in Trump’s impeachment. In walking away now, the US is letting down a country which, in 1994, surrendered its nuclear stocks on the basis of a promise that its independence would be protected within its existing borders – a promise guaranteed by the US, Britain and (never forget) Russia.

More widely, Vance might fairly be criticised as an opportunist. In 2016, he refused to back Trump on grounds that “he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.” Now, he is plus royaliste que le roi – or, rather, plus impérialiste que l’empereur – as he fulminates against Zelensky and free trade.

If it were only about Ukraine, perhaps the trans-Atlantic alliance might be salvaged. After all, it is reasonable to ask why the EU, with a combined GDP only one fifth smaller than that of the US, is unable to defend its own region without American backup. The European allies have had plenty of warning. At the 2018 Nato summit, Trump threatened to walk away unless the other members stepped up. Europe assured him that it would, and then didn’t.

But Vance’s criticism went deeper than foreign policy. His real target was what he called “the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States”. If Europe no longer stands for free speech, free assembly, free contract and the rest, he asks, what is it defending?

Now it is easy to throw all this back at him. Vance went along with some absurd lies about the 2020 election. No European leader has mass-pardoned a group of violent protesters after they sought to overturn a vote. But attacking Vance is a form of deflection, a way to avoid asking whether he has a point.

The truth is that European countries have imported millions of people with values very different from their own. Instead of demanding that those people adopt the mores of the settled population, they made everyone else adapt to the newcomers – by, for example, criminalising Koran-burning, an ugly and stupid practice, but not until now an illegal one.

Many European politicians can be moralistic about other countries. When criticising Israel over Gaza, say, or Afghanistan over women’s rights, they speak in the name of what they regard as universal values. It is evidently a shock to a lot of them that many Americans, especially in the new administration, feel the same way about liberty of expression in Europe.

O wad some Power the giftie gie us 
To see oursels as ithers see us!

Where does all this leave what Vance called “our very dear friends the United Kingdom”? Again, if it were only a spat about foreign policy, it would be nothing new. But it is hard to avoid feeling that an altogether greater divergence is underway. As the Cold War recedes into memory, the Western alliance is struggling with obsolescence.

The US, on whose military strength the old order always rested, is turning its back on the whole shebang. Not only is the Trump administration withdrawing from international structures such as the Paris accords and the World Health Organisation; it is openly making territorial claims against Denmark, a Nato member.

The Danes, like the Canadians, the Panamanians and everyone else, are being brutally reminded that, hidden behind the protocols and niceties of alliance, they were a client state all along. Even if Nato manages to survive all this as a Brussels-based bureaucracy, it is hard to see it remaining in business as a meaningful force.

The US and Europe are going their different ways. Britain may finally have to make the choice it has sought to avoid since 1956.

That choice might seem obvious. Neither London nor Brussels is seeking to reverse Brexit, and the EU continues to treat us as a renegade province rather than a friend. More immediately, the US economy is outperforming Europe’s on every metric. American freedom and innovation is plainly working better than EU regulation and censorship. And, indeed, Brexit Britain has taken some tentative steps to align with the US on issues such as AI, as well as seeking a comprehensive trade deal.

Under a different government, we might have sought to build an Anglosphere network as a high-growth alternative to the EU. After all, those shared values that Vance was talking about – free speech, habeas corpus, open elections and so on – are more Anglo-American than European. The reason they were adopted across the Continent was, bluntly, that the English-speaking allies won a series of wars. Most British people still believe in those values, sharing Vance’s views on free speech and mass immigration.

But do their leaders? Keir Starmer, Richard Hermer and the rest are attached in their bones to precisely the supranational order that everyone else is abandoning. No other country would be rushing to hand away territory at the behest of Chinese and Russian judges.

Labour may not be able to take us back into the EU. But I suspect it will do all it can to hold us, culturally, in the Eurosphere. What a wasted opportunity.

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