Blame the US for its growing fractures with Europe
“To all of you, I bring greetings from a great champion of freedom and of strong national defence ... I bring greetings from the 45th President of the United States of America, President Donald Trump,” declared Mike Pence as he waited for the applause, his head slightly bowed as if in homage to the wonderful leader.
But applause there was none, a deafening silence instead. After a painfully embarrassing pause, the US vice president continued with his speech at the annual international Munich Security Conference, a gathering
considered to be particularly important this year with the Middle East, Isis and terrorism, conventional and trade wars, cyber attacks and climate change on the agenda.
We know that the vice president was expecting evocation of Trump to be greeted with enthusiastic clapping – a copy of his prepared address provided by the White House marks the pause for “applause” after the opening lines.
It also showed that senior figures in the US delegation, Lindsey Graham and Nancy Pelosi, would too be named in the introduction. Pence named Graham, the Republican and supporter of Trump, but not Pelosi, the Democrat House speaker and a critic of Trump whose popularity at the polls have shot up after the recent stand-off with the president over the government shutdown.
Pence was speaking at the John McCain Dissertation Award Ceremony. By contrast, mention of the late Republican Senator, a veteran of Munich and other defence meetings, brought warm ovation there and at subsequent sessions.
The military present were particularly respectful in their applause of McCain, who had been highly critical of the US president. Trump, a Vietnam draft-dodger, had responded by seeking to belittle the Republican senator for getting shot down and captured by the North Vietnamese.
An American defence official pointed out that Trump’s response to criticism by General Stan McChrystal, a distinguished special forces commander who led US forces in Afghanistan, was to tweet that the general has “a big, dumb mouth” and “got fired like a dog”.
What did he make of that? I asked the official, himself a military veteran who I had first met in Iraq. The answer was a resigned shrug and “What can you do?”
But the real conflict in the conference was not an American internecine one, but one between the Trump administration and European states. It is a crisis being recognised on both sides of the Atlantic. The US delegation in Munich was the largest ever to the conference. Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat senator from New Hampshire, said: “We have to come to show Europeans that there is another branch of government which strongly supports Nato and the transatlantic alliance.”
We are proud of our cars and so we should be. If that is viewed as a security threat to the United States, then we are shocked
Pence had come to Munich from another conference in Warsaw to organise an anti-Iranian campaign. It had ended on an unhappy note with the Gulf states annoyed about Benjamin Netanyahu, who is facing an election, publicising private meetings, and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, supposedly feeding the Israeli prime minister lines about his Middle East peace plan.
The hosts, the Polish government, meanwhile, had threatened to boycott a meeting between Israel and eastern European states because of comments made by the Israeli leader about their country’s role in the Holocaust.
In Munich, Pence went on to criticise European states who had signed the nuclear deal with Iran for not following the Trump administration in pulling out of it. Not only have Britain, Germany, France, along with the other two signatories, Russia and China, stressed that the agreement is working towards preventing Tehran acquiring a nuclear arsenal, they have organised a payment mechanism under which businesses and banks would be able to trade with Iran without incurring American sanctions.
The vice president began his speech praising Trump for being “remarkable” and “extraordinary”, bearing qualities which have made “America stronger than ever before” enabling it to “lead on the world stage again”.
This time, he knew better than to wait for applause, but launched into an attack on Nato allies: “The time has come for our European partners to withdraw from the disastrous Iran nuclear deal and join with us as we bring the economic and diplomatic pressure. The time has come for our European partners to stop undermining US sanctions against this murderous revolutionary regime.”
Some of the vice president’s remarks were met with whispered mockery. When Pence stated that Iran was the chief state sponsor of terrorism there were sotto voce comments about Gulf state clients of the US supporting Islamist extremists: the name of the murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi came up.
“It’s very odd to talk of American leadership of the alliance when it’s Trump who has caused the crisis”, observed Marietje Schaake, a Dutch MEP. “The Trump administration is seen by many Europeans as chiefly responsible for the tensions and the weakening of the west.”
Angela Merkel, the woman who had been described by the veteran senior former American diplomat Nicholas Burns as the first non-American “leader of the west” since the time of Franklin Roosevelt, was in a combative mood.
She put forward the main case for Europe, defending the Iran deal and questioning why, if Iran was so dangerous, Trump was prepared to pull troops out of Syria and Afghanistan, giving Tehran the scope to spread influence in both the states.
Merkel rebuffed US demands that her government scrap a gas deal with Russia. She disparaged Trump’s “frightening” move to declare European car imports a “threat to national security”.
The chancellor pointed out: “These cars are built in the US. BMW has its largest factory in South Carolina. We are proud of our cars and so we should be. If that is viewed as a security threat to the United States, then we are shocked.”
She also warned of the dangers in American isolationism and staunchly defended multilateral institutions under threat from US policy. “We cannot just smash it, we need to cooperate,” she said. “Now that we see pressure on the classic order we are used to, the question now is: do we fall apart into pieces of puzzle and think everyone can solve the question best for himself alone?” It would be wiser, she continued, “to put yourself in the other’s shoes ... and see whether we can get win-win solutions together”.
Merkel spoke before 30 heads of government and 90 ministers. Her speech was greeted with a prolonged standing ovation in the packed auditorium. Ivanka Trump, however, remained seated.