By Wayne Allensworth
Vice President J. D. Vance spoke directly and bluntly to his European colleagues in a watershed speech at the Munich Security Conference last week: The most dangerous threat to Europe, he said, was not chiefly external, but internal. The threat within, said the vice president, far outweighs threats from without. When national security was the subject of discussion, Vance noted, “we normally mean threats to our external security.” Yet today, Vance continued, the main threats to European states were not coming from external actors. Europe, Vance noted, is in “retreat,” not in the face of an external foe, but from its own professed values, such as free speech and fair elections. Social media is being censored, Christians are being harassed — even arrested for posts on social media. European courts cancel elections they don’t like, while European officials threaten to cancel future elections — if their populist opponents win, that is. During the Cold War it was the Communist opponent that had censored and suppressed opponents, Vance reminded his audience. What, he wondered, had happened to the winners of that struggle? Vance further noted that the Biden Administration had been no slouch at censorship, either, suppressing stories for political reasons. Sometimes, the loudest voices in favor of censorship came from the United States.
At the same time, Vance observed that illegal immigration was destabilizing European states. Nothing is more urgent than the question of “mass migration,” he said. “No voter,” said Vance, went to the ballot box and cast a ballot “to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants.” Ordinary people care about their homes, their children, and their safety. “Contrary to what you might hear” from Davos, ordinary people are smart enough to govern themselves. They are not “interchangeable cogs in a global economy.” European elites, he said, were “running in fear” of their own people. Between the lines, he implied that European elites were bent on replacing their own people with foreigners. Vance ended by noting that the electoral systems of Western states could not survive if the concerns of ordinary people are deemed invalid and unworthy of consideration.
So Vance directly rebuked the globalism and Cultural Marxism that the globalist Blob and its minions have used to erode Western societies from within. It was long overdue. Vance is the most articulate anti-globalist in our political system. Last summer, when then-candidate Donald Trump picked him as his running mate, Vance spoke eloquently and forthrightly about what it meant to be an American. He stated forthrightly that America is not an abstraction. We shouldn’t be asked to fight and strive and die for abstractions, but instead for a place and a people. A people with a shared history. America isn’t an idea. It is our home. Vance is one of us, a man from the American heartland. He represents people he cares deeply about. Vance had previously slammed elites who wanted to ship Americans’ jobs overseas while sending their children to fight the globalists’ wars in obscure corners of the globe far from them and their everyday concerns. He correctly noted that such elites don’t care about the people and don’t like them much.
As I wrote last summer,
“Vance spoke eloquently about his roots in a way American politicians seldom do and in language that seemed to have been lost. He and his family would one day be buried, he said, in the same Kentucky soil as his ancestors, seven generations who had fought and worked for and built this country. Vance said the right things about immigration, and about bringing jobs back to our embattled heartland.”
Vance’s unfashionable comments about not wishing to be ruled by “childless cat ladies,” and his heartfelt and succinct statement of the ordo amoris — the hierarchy of love and obligation — flesh out his profoundly patriotic worldview. Do I need to explain why people in power with no personal stake in the lives of future generations — who even disdain children and family — are dangerous? That such people are far more likely to view America as an idea, and not as our homeland? To see actual Americans as expendable pawns in their global Great Game? What Vance explained in an interview with Sean Hannity should be self-evident to any normal human being: “You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love fellow citizens and then, after that, you can focus on and prioritize the rest of the world.” As Vance accurately put it, the “far left has completely inverted that. They seem to hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside their own borders.” That, as the vice president put it, is no way to run a society.
What can “national security” mean in an age of globalism? The end of the Cold War prompted an emergent global elite to use our country, as the last standing superpower, as a platform for ideological expansion. American military might, American “soft power,” and our economy and people were used as instruments in a Tower of Babel plan to expand a globalist empire. The Blob’s agents wielded the familiar language of “national security” to convince us, after being conditioned by decades of Cold War internationalism, that its chosen enemies, as distant as they were, somehow threatened us. They waved the flag and invoked the “bloody shirt” of the “Good War” to induce us to fight their battles for them, to waste our lives and treasure and the future for our progeny on abstractions.
J.D. Vance understands what national security really is. Preserving, protecting, and defending the nation itself, the lives, wealth, and jobs of our people, and our proud history as the core duty of our government, is its primary task and sacred obligation. “National security” in the age of globalism means preserving the nation. That is a self-evident, axiomatic proposition.
We have no time to waste trying to explain that to people whose minds have been consumed by an anti-human ideology. It’s time to get on with it.
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood. For thirty-two years, he worked as an analyst and Russia area expert in the US intelligence community.
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