The political elites of Europe appeared shocked by J.D. Vance’s blunt speech in Munich last month outlining Washington’s top security concern to be “the threat from within” the NATO alliance and castigating leaders for their brazen assaults on “democratic values”, including censoring speech, suppressing popular opposition parties and cancelling elections. Washington’s message to its allies is straightforward, says N.S. Lyons on Substack: end the information war and get the hell out. Here’s an excerpt.
The transatlantic alliance has for years been waging a hybrid information war on the American public (among other nations). Above all, the objective of this politics by other means was to stop the rise of Donald Trump and the populism he represents. But that war failed; now Trump is back and, as Vance warned the political and military leaders assembled in Munich, “there is a new sheriff in town” in Washington. Much as they risk being abandoned and left standing alone holding the bag in Ukraine, the allies of former President Joe Biden across the pond have been left stranded in the digital trenches of America’s cold civil war, still combatants on what’s now distinctly the losing side. Vance was politely informing them that their cyber-soldiers had better pack up and leave the conflict zone immediately.
Vance reiterated this message directly to UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer in the White House last week, saying: “Look, I said what I said, which is that we do have, of course, a special relationship with our friends in the UK and also with some of our European allies, but we also know that there have been infringements on free speech that actually affect not just the British but also affect American technology companies and by extension American citizens.” He was not just talking here about American discomfort with British and European disregard for the abstract value of free speech; he was pointing to their active information warfare against the United States, its new government, its companies and its citizens. So when Starmer stammered in reply that “certainly we wouldn’t want to reach across US citizens, and we don’t…” that excuse was both transparently false and unlikely to cut it with the new sheriff.
If the countries of Europe and the Anglosphere don’t want to be treated as enemies of the United States instead of allies, they are going to need to retreat from the war they’ve been waging on behalf of Washington’s old regime and disarm their censorship machines. That means reining in their intelligence services, cutting off support for their non-state armies of transnational censorship organisations like the Centre for Countering Digital Hate and backing off of legal frameworks like the Digital Services Act and the Online Safety Act that are designed to control information and political discourse across borders. Vance has been hammering this point ever since he threatened during the campaign to withdraw US support from NATO if Europe continues trying to regulate American politics through the DSA, noting that it would be “insane that we would support a military alliance [NATO] if that military alliance isn’t going to be pro-free speech”.
Washington’s message to its putative allies is straightforward: end the information war and get the hell out. If they instead ignore these warnings and continue to meddle in America’s domestic political affairs then they may soon find out its new sheriff is willing to impose real diplomatic and economic consequences for their continued aggression.
Worth reading in full.
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