Posted on 02/19/2019 4:20:20 PM PST by Ennis85
Even inside a hotel so secure that it has body scanners at the entrance and snipers on the roof, US Vice President Mike Pence travels with a vast security detail. Its main function, it seems, is to elbow people out of the way so that the vice president and his unsmiling wife can walk through a lobby, crowded with European officials and military brass, and speak to no one. Which is perhaps unsurprising, for Pence was heading to the main forum of the Munich Security Conference - an annual event whose origins lie deep in the Cold War - to make statements so tone-deaf and, frankly, peculiar that their intended audience could not have been the one in the room.
Part of his problem is the new context. Two years ago, when Pence spoke at the same forum, many in Europe were still hoping to work with the Trump administration. His speech was banal and uninspiring - it was "an entirely conventional restatement of American commitment to Europe", I wrote at the time - but Europeans were so relieved to hear it that they decided, on balance, to believe him. Now they don't. At a side event honouring the late senator John McCain, who had been the moving spirit of the Munich conference for decades, Pence announced that "I bring greetings from the 45th president of the United States of America, President Donald Trump". He then waited for applause. None came.
But Pence's keynote speech was more than merely embarrassing. It was awkwardly worded and stiffly delivered. It was sycophantic: over and over again, he repeated the words "under President Trump's leadership", referring to the president as "a champion of freedom" and the "leader of the free world". It was hypocritical: Pence's voice seemed to crack when he spoke of the suffering of Venezuelan refugees - "We hugged their children. We heard of their hardship and their plight" - as if his administration hadn't inflicted plenty of hardship on migrant children wrenched from their parents at the US border with Mexico.
Pence's speech was also ahistoric, even nonsensical. In one hard-to-follow chain of connections, he bundled together Auschwitz and Iran, somehow implying that Europeans who still back a deal designed to deprive Iran of nuclear weapons were supporting anti-Semitism. In a room full of people working for the European Union and Nato, institutions that were explicitly created, decades ago, to prevent another Auschwitz, this would have been offensive if anybody had actually understood what Pence was trying to say. That, plus the undertone of maudlin religiosity - "I also have that faith, in those ancient words, that where the spirit of the Lord is, there's liberty" - made it clear that this speech was not, as I say, directed at the Europeans in the room. It was made for the benefit of Trump, or maybe Pence's evangelical friends and supporters back home.
That isn't surprising, for this administration's foreign policy has long ceased to have much to do with people who are actually in the room. Just before Pence visited Munich, he and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo attended a surreal Middle East conference in Warsaw whose main purpose, as far as anyone could tell, was to boost Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's re-election campaign ahead of an April 9 vote. White House senior adviser Jared Kushner is allegedly hard at work on an equally surreal Middle East "peace plan", which the president's son-in-law is devising in secret and apparently without Palestinian input.
These peculiar efforts by Kushner, Pompeo and Pence keep them inside the president's inner circle, and perhaps they cheer up a few donors and boosters. Meanwhile, the US embassy appeared set on preventing the congressional delegation from encountering too many Germans in Munich, cancelling members' attendance at annual meetings and dinners that they have traditionally attended. Conference attendees didn't know whether to feel insulted or to just laugh.
Certainly they have stopped paying lip service to an administration that has showed it prefers its authoritarian friends to its oldest allies.
There is no point in nice state visits or in trying to cultivate Ivanka Trump. It's better to speak bluntly, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel certainly did.
She mocked the idea that German cars made in South Carolina could be a "security threat" to the United States, as the tariff-minded Trump administration has suggested. She said the removal of US troops from Syria will not spread freedom, but will "strengthen Russia and Iran's hand".
And, like other Europeans, she refused to heed Pence's call to reimpose sanctions on Iran. European leaders have learned that there is no point in seeking agreement with Trump, for he doesn't respect those who do. And this, in the end, is why Pence's pseudo-patriotic speech sounded so off: America cannot be the champion of "liberty" or the "leader of the free world" if the free world - insulted by the US president, snubbed by his surrogates - refuses to follow.
Yeah, we are undermining the alliance because THEY want to sell out to Russia and Iran. Makes zero sense.
Carry it, Mr VP. Be American. I’m with you!
Now we know what the left and the clueless EUrocrats think.
If you can call it thinking. I call it tantrums.
What we are reading here is the propaganda of the international socialist marxist Islamic alliance. Pure vitriol and pro Iran.
Essentially the article is criticizing Pence for existing. The left are pure hatred. Pence is the latest Covington kid.
Remember when we actually thought journalists had at least normal intelligence?
For all of their venom against Trump, they would simply pivot and double their efforts against Pence if Trump were to step down or be removed from office.
Stalinists lie. Always
Applebaum has jumped the shark. She’s an idiot who thinks it is -America’s- job to make sure the EU knows WE are committed to THEM!
Screw this neocon psycho who admires Merkel more than the Trump administration. Also, in what universe is security provided by the EU trusted enough that the Secret Service can defer to them for protection and stand down.
The hell with this never Trumper idiot.
The libs have ratcheted up the rhetoric aginst Pence in the past few weeks. Remember, the third in line to the presidency is the speaker of the house...
What an awful URL.
Being a Marxist is the goal here. They use whatever intelligence they have to realize that goal. Don’t assume they are all stupid (some are dumber than a box of rocks those are the useful idiots the smart ones make up a crop of caca to fool stupid people and there are plenty of those)
keep in mind - THIS IS A WaPo piece. what else would you expect, especially coming from Applebaum?
FUUN, FUEU, FUBO, FUHRC.
The last two were very instrumental in shaping word events to their favour, using American might, all leading into this problem. AND this is just the beginning!
I didn’t know maintaining our relationship with the EU was part of Pence’s oath of office.
CFR member, endorsed Hillary... claims to be able to explain to the world how rotten Soviet communism is. Thinks Palestinians should have a right of return to Israel.
Terribly worried that someday NATO might fall apart.
She’s a Euro flake, stuck in the cold war. Her husband is a member of the pro-EU party that was blown out when Poland voted in the nationalist Law and Justice party after Merkel flooded Europe with Africans and Moslems and demanded Poland take them in as she dictated.
Screw Applebaum. Just another Ivy neocon globalist.
Should go to Italy and pose with #God Emperor Trump parade image
Heads will explode. (A convoluted warhammer back story no liberal could follow)
Yeah it really matters that this person says Pence’s wife doesn’t smile. Hate much?
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