Vance at Munich, Versus Murdoch

The vice president lashes out at the Wall Street Journal

Vice President JD Vance addresses the Munich Security Conference, February 14, 2025.

For a glimpse of both the possibilities and potential pitfalls that characterize the second Trump administration’s approach to foreign policy, take a look at Vice President Vance’s visit to the Munich Security Conference.

Vance’s speech was, in certain respects, perceptive. The White House doesn’t seem yet to have posted a transcript, but there is a video on YouTube and the Spectator has posted the full text. The most insightful passage, I thought, was this:

​​I’ve heard a lot about what you need to defend yourselves from, and of course that’s important. But what has seemed a little bit less clear to me, and certainly I think to many of the citizens of Europe, is what exactly it is that you’re defending yourselves for. What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important?

Vance asked the question with more clarity than he answered it, though he spoke of the importance of democracy and free speech and of elites listening to the people rather than trying to ignore or silence them.

And then, on the sidelines of the conference and on “X,” Vance wound up attacking the Wall Street Journal for its news headline that said, “Vance Wields Threat of Sanctions, Military Action to Push Putin Into Ukraine Deal.” In the interview, Vance had responded to a question about “instruments of pressure” on Putin by saying, “there are economic tools of leverage, there are, of course, military tools of leverage. There’s a whole host of things that we could do.”

Vance posted, “The fact that the WSJ twisted my words in the way they did for this story is absurd, but not surprising considering they have spent years pushing for more American sons and daughters in uniform to be unnecessarily deployed overseas.”

What a spectacle. Rupert Murdoch, according to new reporting from the New York Times, has told his own family, “Fox and our papers are the only faintly conservative voices against the monolithic liberal media. I believe maintaining this is vital to the future of the English-speaking world.”

Yet Vance lashes out against the Journal, sounding like some cheese-eating surrender monkey. Would Vance be happier if the Wall Street Journal sounded even more like the monolithic liberal media? It’s almost as if Vance were deliberately weighing in, siding with reportedly more left-leaning James and Kathryn in the Murdoch family drama.