JD Vance’s wake-up call to Europe shows US embracing China’s Wolf Warrior diplomacy

J.D. Vance’s speech accusing European leaders of Soviet-era censorship is being likened to China’s “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy.

And Friedrich Merz, the man poised to become Germany’s next Chancellor, accused the Americans of “interfering quite openly” in an election after the US Vice President declined to meet the current Chancellor Olaf Scholz but met with the far-right Alternative for Deutschland leader Alice Weidel instead.

Gordon Flake, CEO of the Perth-based USAsia Centre at the University of Western Australia and Governor of the American Chamber of Commerce in Australia, said the Vice-President’s speech was aimed at his MAGA base at home, rather than at Europe.

He told The Nightly that it was the same as China’s aborted Wolf Warrior diplomacy style that involved insulting other countries, including friendly and trade partners like Australia to look good at home.

“The Vice President’s remarks here should be understood in a broader international context that includes Chinese wolf-warrior diplomats,” he said in an interview on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.

“Which means they’re intended more for an audience at home than for the audience in front of which they are speaking.”

He predicted the United States would pay a price as China had done.

“It’s going to be the same as the cost was to China for its Wolf Warrior diplomacy,” he said.

“Undermining national interests in pursuit of short-term domestic political interests.

“America has always been great because it was good.

“The worry is that today, America may still be great but it may not be good.

“And we see that evidenced in the behaviour of America’s closest friends and allies who now treat America just as another power, rather than a friend.”

Singapore’s Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen attended Mr Vance’s speech and said the US had turned into a predator.

“For Asia, the US in the last 60 years since President John F Kennedy’s inaugural speech – that one form of tyranny (colonialism) will not be replaced by an iron tyranny, that was the moral legitimacy in which US presence was in our region,” he said.

“The US has now willy-nilly – the image has changed from liberator to great disruptor to a landlord seeking rent.”

Former Trump Adviser Kellyanne Conway was one of the few in the room to give Mr Vance a standing ovation and applaud.

She described his speech as “boss.”

But the speech soured relations, particularly with Europe’s largest economy Germany, which the US views as one of NATO’s biggest shirkers when it comes to defence spending.

Germany is going to the polls this weekend and X boss and Trump backer Elon Musk has already riled domestic anger by interviewing AfD leader Alice Wiedel on his social media platform, which has amplified far-right and pro-Trump accounts since his $US44 billion ($70b) takeover of Twitter.

After his speech to the conference, Mr Vance, who refuses to accept the result of Joe Biden’s 2020 election win, met Ms Wiedel, whose anti-migration party – which many Germans view as the heir to the Nazis – is polling at 21 per cent.

Mr Vance, in his speech, had also criticised the German firewall - whereby Germany’s mainstream parties refuse to work with the AfD in government - and accused European leaders of running scared of their voters and betraying democracy.

Germany’s beleaguered Chancellor Mr Scholz and leader of the left-wing Social Democratic Party is expected to be defeated this weekend, after leading a three-party coalition that lost political authority after failing to agree on key issues, including how to arm Ukraine.

Munich is where the Nazis founded their party and was headquartered until the end of the war. On the outskirts of the city is the Dachau concentration camp which Mr Vance visited ahead of his speech.

Mr Scholz sought to remind Mr Vance of Germany’s fascist past as he hit back.

“The overwhelming majority of the people of my country stand up resolutely to those who glorify or justify the criminal National Socialism,” Mr Scholz said.

“The AfD is a party from the ranks of which National Socialism and its monstrous crimes, crimes against humanity, like the ones committed in Dachau, were trivialised as just a ‘speck of bird shit in German history’.”

The Christian Democratic Union party leader Friedrich Merz, who is poised to replace Mr Scholz, said the Americans were “interfering quite openly in an election.”

“It is not the job of the American government to explain to us here in Germany how we should protect democratic institutions,” he told German broadcaster Deutsche Welle.

And in a pointed barb at the decision to expel the Associated Press from the White House press ranks over the news agency’s decision to refuse to follow Mr Trump’s executive order and name the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, he said: “We would never kick out a press agency from the office of our chancellor.”

The Munich Security Conference is Europe’s premier security gathering and focuses heavily on the transatlantic alliance.

It was already shaping up to be one of the most consequential in its 61-year history, following Mr Trump’s phone call with Mr Putin ahead of the gathering, to start negotiations on ending the war in Ukraine that alarmed Kyiv and European leaders that they’d be cut out of any talks.

US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth had earlier in the week told European counterparts at NATO headquarters in Brussels that Europe could no longer rely on the United States to protect it.

But it was Mr Vance’s speech that shocked, stunned and angered many, that truly brought home how the new US government plans to deal with the continent.

In choosing to ignore discussing how to resolve the Ukraine conflict and attacking European culture instead, he left Europe in no doubt about how the White House views it.

Mr Vance told leaders that he feared the greatest threat to the continent came from within and not from China, Russia or any other actor.

Germany’s Defence Minister Boris Pistorius was heard making an audible gasp at one point, briefly causing Mr Vance to pause speaking.

Mr Vance said Europe was eroding the democratic values that the trans-Atlantic alliance vows to defend with its regulations on hate speech.

“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,” Vance said.

“What I worry about is the threat from within.

“When I look at Europe today, it’s sometimes not so clear what happened to some of the Cold War’s winners.

“I look to Brussels, where EU Commission commissars warned citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest: the moment they spot what they’ve judged to be ‘hateful content’”.

In December, Romania’s presidential elections were overturned when a far-right candidate Calin Georgescu came from nowhere to claim victory after achieving sudden popularity on the Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok.

Declassified intelligence documents showed a surge in newly created or reactivated TikTok accounts that backed Mr Georgescu, including 800 created by a “foreign state” in 2016 and another 25,000 activated in the fortnight before the poll.

President Donald Trump has defied a Congressional ban on TikTok relating to TikTok’s Chinese ownership saying it contributed to his landslide win and in particular delivering younger voters who the Republicans had previously struggled to attract. He wants to find an American owner for the video-sharing app so that it can continue running.

The EU has long been locked in a battle with giant US tech companies as it has sought to regulate the content and use of data allowed on their platforms.

The former commissioner with responsibility for enforcing newly introduced regulations such as the Digital Services Act, Thierry Bretton engaged in an online battle with X owner and Trump-backer Mr Musk after the billionaire hosted a pre-election interview with Donald Trump.

Mr Bretton, a Frenchman, publicly fought with President Ursula von der Leyen and was dumped from the Commission after the election.

He has since been vocal about the role of tech in Europe’s democracies and warned that this weekend’s German elections might also be annulled if a Romanian-style situation was replicated.

Mr Vance brushed aside the information warfare concerns and told the Europeans that while he agreed it was wrong for Russia to buy social media advertisements to influence elections: “If your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.”