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Vice President JD Vance Delivers Remarks at the Munich Security Conference, Feb. 14, 2025

February 14, 2025 · The White House · 0:19:31

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What happened

Vice President JD Vance delivered his address to the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany, on February 14, 2025 — returning, as he noted, to a conference he had attended the year before as a United States senator, in a different job. The speech became the defining transatlantic moment of the administration’s first month. “What I worry about is the threat from within,” he said — “the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.”

He argued that “in Britain and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat,” and turned the charge partly homeward: “sometimes the loudest voices for censorship have come not from within Europe, but from within my own country,” where, he said, the prior administration “threatened and bullied social media companies to censor so-called misinformation.” He cited the Romanian government’s annulment of an entire election and a former European commissioner’s televised delight at it as “shocking to American ears,” and questioned a settlement in which everything from Ukraine policy to digital censorship is billed as a defense of democracy while democratic mandates are set aside.

Why it matters

Munich was the Vice President’s debut on the world stage, and the administration’s clearest early statement that its alliance politics would be values politics: shared democratic practice — elections respected, speech uncensored — as the condition of the partnership, delivered to the allies’ own flagship security forum.

Sources: The White House, “Vice President JD Vance Delivers Remarks at the Munich Security Conference” (official upload, embedded above; Munich, Germany). Remarks as delivered; transcript reviewed in the site’s private research store.