vance
© AFP/Thomas Kienzle
Yesterday a car was deliberately driven into a crowd of bystanders, injuring 30. Attacks of this nature - violent, random, nihilistic - have become commonplace, even mundane, in Europe; the identity of the alleged perpetrator (reported as a Afghan failed asylum seeker) grimly predictable even as the motive remains obscure.

That this particular attack received so much coverage reflected less the scale of the violence and more the location and timing: in the centre of Munich, a day before the Security Conference.

Perhaps it may have given some pause to the delegates of the liberal Western order, travelling to the city to discuss Europe's external security threats, to be reminded in such a brutal fashion that the greatest danger to our civilisation operates within our borders. Or perhaps not: much easier to offer thoughts and prayers, and turn our eyes to the undoubtedly urgent questions of the future of Ukraine and Nato.

But one attendant - arguably the most important, and certainly the most closely-watched - did pay attention to the chaos on the intersection of Seidlstrasse.

As attendants waited for clarity on America's new position on Russia, JD Vance railed against European complacency of a different kind: "why did this [attack] happen in the first place?" How much more blood must be spilt before "we change course, and take our shared civilisation in a new direction?"

It is hard to overstate the significance of a US Vice President attacking the suicidal immigration policy favoured by his country's European allies. But Vance would go further: EU commissioners were rebuked as "commissars" unable or unwilling to recognise the importance of "democratic mandate".

What little strained applause Vance had so far garnered from the audience retreated into a stunned silence. He went on. "The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia. It's not China, it's not any other external actor. And what I worry about is the threat from within".

In a phrase, Vance flipped the attention from abroad to home, laying the blame for our increasingly unstable and fractious world solely at the feet of our governing class.

European leaders responded to America's populist turn with revulsion, accusing Trump of a form of democratic backsliding. What this meant, however, was always uncertain. Europe is no stranger to attempts to subvert or outright overrule democratic decision making: the success of the AfD in Thuringia provoked the co-chief of a rival political party to push to ban it, while a constitutional court in Romania recently cancelled a presidential election to prevent the expected victory of the hard-Right Calin Georgescu.

Our own country is no better. We shared a populist moment with the US in 2016 with the success of the Brexit referendum. Our political class, like their Atlantic counterparts, responded not with introspection but in the spirit of shameless reaction, demanding a second referendum in order to obtain a better result.

Each social ill - and the subsequent reaction from voters - can be dismissed by invoking the magic word of "disinformation". Feverish conspiracism over foreign intervention, be that Kremlin-controlled "bots" or Elon Musk's dastardly algorithms, can be engaged with in polite company with hardly a raised eyebrow. We have wilfully blinded ourselves to our own insanity.

JD Vance is perfectly clear on what America really thinks about us. We are no longer the continent of Shakespeare or Goethe, Churchill or Metternich - not even of JK Rowling. What interest international observers still take in our affairs revolves not around our constitutional or cultural strengths but our imminent collapse.

We are a continent that jails protestors for praying outside of abortion clinics, systemically downplays the mass rape of women and children for the sake of upholding "community relations", and terrorises our own citizens for daring to insult politicians on the internet. Europe is the birthplace of liberalism; it seems only right that it dies here, too.

Our reactionary order does not understand that nations that have betrayed their own people are not worth defending. Expecting Europeans to fight against Putin's tyrannical regime as our own civil liberties are wantonly cut away is as delusional as demanding that America continue to play the role of global policeman against the wishes of its voters. JD Vance has given our leaders a brutal wake-up call: change now, or be replaced.