The End of an Affair: JD Vance’s Speech and the Long Kiss Goodbye to NATO and Europe.

The End of an Affair: JD Vance’s Valentine’s Day speech

Some breakups are long overdue.

When JD Vance rose to speak at the Munich Security Conference this Valentine’s Day, the gathered Western elite expected the usual diplomatic niceties. What they got instead was a divorce notice served in public – one that stripped bare the pretence of American-led “democracy” and revealed the naked power politics beneath.

The irony was exquisite. For decades, we on the British left have watched as our sovereignty was carved up between Brussels bureaucrats and Washington warmongers while an army of liberals ran interference weaponising a culture war. Now, in a moment of startling clarity, Vance has pulled back the curtain on the entire charade. The speech reveals what we’ve long known: the post-war order was never about democracy – it was about American imperial control, dressed up in liberal niceties.

Here was Trump’s messenger, meant to reassure Europe’s ruling class, instead he told uncomfortable truths about their shared sham of “democratic values.” He sat at the Valentine’s dinner and accused Europe of being a cheating spouse. Vance’s speech exposed the rot at the heart of the post-war alliance. He didn’t defend Western democracy he revealed their arrangement for what it truly is: a protection racket masquerading as a marriage of equals.

Vance’s assault on EU “democratic values” reveals more than he intended. Though he attacks from the right, he inadvertently exposes the fundamental fraud of the European project: a neoliberal straitjacket designed to strangle genuine democratic movements that dare challenge market fundamentalism. The evidence is written in tear gas and broken dreams – from Greek workers watching their democracy crumble under Brussels’ austerity boot, or the French yellow vests facing tear gas for daring to protest Macron’s policies.

Take the EU’s cynical approach to migration – a perfect case study in liberal hypocrisy. The same organisation that preaches human rights happily lets refugees drown in the Mediterranean while importing cheap labour to undermine workers’ wages. Both right-wing nationalism and liberal open borders serve capital’s interests – they just do it differently.

Yet Vance’s outrage over migration rings hollow, conveniently ignoring America’s role in creating these refugee flows. Who destabilized Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya? Who funded the very extremists they now warn us about? Two decades of American military adventurism have created the very crises Vance now uses to frighten Europeans.

His vision of NATO “burden-sharing” drops all pretense – strip away the diplomatic language and you’re left with a protection racket: pay up, or America walks. But perhaps that’s not the threat they think it is. Why should British workers fund American military adventures while our NHS crumbles and pensioners freeze? Why should we bankrupt ourselves to maintain American military dominance?

The hypocrisy deepens with every example. Vance’s handwringing over Romania’s cancelled election conveniently forgets it was Biden’s State Department that first cried wolf about Russian interference – claims later proven false. His attacks on European content moderation ignore its American origins, particularly the censorship of inconvenient truths about the Biden family’s Ukrainian connections before the war. It’s a pattern as old as empire: create a crisis, condemn the response, and use both to justify further control.

Now Vance’s offhand suggestion of a “reasonable settlement” in Ukraine has sent NATO hawks into a performative rage. Yet strip away the righteous indignation, and what do we find? A nine-year bloodbath that began with Western interference in 2014, transforming a complex civil conflict into a proxy war that fills the coffers of arms manufacturers while filling the graves of working-class families. The same establishment voices that championed the Maidan coup – and conveniently forgot Victoria Nuland’s infamous hot-mic moment exposing US manipulation – now condemn any whisper of peace talks as “appeasement.” you might ask why diplomatic solutions become heresy when Raytheon’s quarterly profits are at stake.

The arithmetic of this war is simple: dead soldiers mean living dividends, and peace is bad for business. The military-industrial complex has found its perfect forever war, fought to the last Ukrainian, funded by the Western working class, and profitable for everyone except those doing the dying.

And yet, for all its contradictions, it must sting that it’s a Trump government—not some great leftist uprising—that is tearing down the globalist order and shattering the liberal consensus. The very forces that spent years calling Trump a fascist are now the ones desperately trying to prop up an outdated imperial system. It was never meant to be like this. The left should have been the ones dismantling NATO, questioning endless war, and exposing the hollow hypocrisy of “rules-based” international order. Instead, that work is now being done—however chaotically—by nationalist conservatives in Washington, leaving liberals scrambling to defend institutions they once pretended to criticise.

The coming rupture in the Atlantic Alliance reveals the bankruptcy of both the American empire and European neoliberalism. The traditional left has long argued that genuine democracy and social justice require breaking free from both. Now, ironically, Trump’s administration may force exactly that kind of reorganisation – though certainly not for the reasons we’d choose.

For Britain, trapped between an increasingly hostile America and an undemocratic EU, the only path forward is true independence—not the hollow sovereignty of Brexit’s disaster capitalists, but real democratic socialism that puts working people first. We need neither Washington’s wars nor Brussels’ austerity—nor the managed decline offered by Starmer’s Labour Party a frontman for the globalists, eager to sell us out for BlackRock gold.

The end of NATO’s love affair might just create space for something better: a Europe of peoples, not bankers. A world where peace isn’t equated with American hegemony. A Britain where democracy means more than choosing which flavour of neoliberalism we prefer.

Vance’s speech marks the end of an era – it’s a Valentine break up but not necessarily a tragedy. Sometimes, divorce is better than a loveless marriage. The question now is whether we’ll have the courage to build something better from the ruins of this failed relationship.

For too long, we’ve been told there’s no alternative to the American-led order. Now that order is crumbling under its own contradictions. Our task is to ensure what replaces it serves the interests of working people, not billionaires – whether they’re in Washington, Brussels, or the City of London.

The NATO consensus is dead. Good riddance to it should have ended with the fall of the Soviet Union, not marched on to Russian borders. The real work of building genuine democracy can finally begin, if they let us…

Paul Knaggs