EU-US Alliance Faces Uncertainty: Tensions Over Trade, Security, and Democracy at Munich

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

They are very used to us talking to them about the need to spend more on defense to develop their defense industrial capability, to spend 2% of GDP on their defense and to take more responsibility. They're not used to hearing a discussion of our shared values and of difficulties we see in that. This is what made the Munich Security Conference different this year. And this is the takeaway that most Europeans leave with their questioning what the nature of the transatlantic relationship will be in the future. On both the defense and the value side. 

When the vice president came onto the stage, he looked at issues that they hadn't expected him to look at, specifically at some actions that he felt indicate weaknesses in European democracy. He cited the case of the Romanian elections having been annulled and postponed. He also cited specific cases in which he felt the rights of individuals to free speech had been abrogated, and he criticized the Europeans for this approach. 

He also criticized them for not sometimes talking to populist parties. And this was particularly difficult for Germans to accept. And of course, the conference took place in Munich. So the reason that Germans were wound up about this is that they have their elections coming up on this Sunday. And so they felt that by stating that Europeans should be more inclusive in talking to populist parties on the right, that instead this was an indicator of where the vice president was looking for the election results. 

It's fair to say that Europeans are concerned about what this indicates for the US European relationship. moving forward. And they are expressing it in different ways. Some, as you saw, met in Paris to try and see what they could feed into a possible US-Russia negotiation here in Germany. They are wondering whether they can any longer count on the US nuclear deterrent, whether they can count on the continued presence of US troops in Germany and what this means for the relationship between the two countries overall. Again, with the elections here on Sunday, this has come to be an electoral issue. And, that's part of the, of the electoral campaign.