Europe Does Face a Threat From Within. Vance Just Misidentified It

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21-05-2025

While addressing the Munich Security Conference back in February, U.S. Vice President JD Vance declared that the biggest threat Europe faces is from within, in the form of a retreat from its core values. Though his speech shocked European leaders and the trans-Atlantic foreign policy community, Vance was onto something. But the internal threat is the opposite of what he described in Munich.
Vance claimed that threat comes from dangerous 'woke' liberals who, in targeting disinformation and hate speech, purportedly restrict free speech. In fact, the internal threat is found in the public support for and normalization of the nationalist far-right movements that are back on the rise across Europe. These movements seek not just the erosion of liberal democracy in Europe, but the hollowing out and fragmentation of European integration, which has secured peace on the continent over the past 80 years. The threat they pose from within is compounded by the external threat posed by Russia as well as the risk of American abandonment and possibly even betrayal.
The danger of Russia's imperial ambitions is known. Militarily, it is playing out on the ground in Ukraine. As has been amply demonstrated by the failed attempts by U.S. President Donald Trump to broker a ceasefire there, Russian President Vladimir Putin is in no mood for compromise. He believes that he can still win the war and seems to be preparing a new offensive. The fact that so far Russia has failed to fully conquer the five regions of Ukraine that it illegally annexed does not mean that Putin believes he has lost. Yes, Russia today occupies just over 18 percent of Ukraine, 14 percent of which it had conquered back in 2014. That meager additional 4 percent has been taken over the past three years at a staggering cost in human lives, including around 800,000 Russian soldiers killed and wounded. But Putin still thinks he can push forward, continuing to nibble away at Ukrainian territory over time. There may come a time when Russia will conclude that a ceasefire is in its interest. But that moment does not seem to be close at hand.
Russia's military threat starts in Ukraine, but it doesn't end there. In Putin's attempt to reconstitute the Russian empire, he is pursuing a military and hybrid strategy looking north, especially at the Baltic countries and Poland. But Putin must know that there is no amount of hybrid tactics—from sabotage and cyber warfare to election meddling and disinformation—that will do the trick in these countries. Costly as military endeavors are, force would be necessary to bring them under Moscow's control.
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By contrast, looking west and south from Ukraine, from Moldova through to Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Bulgaria, Putin hopes to secure the allegiance of pliant governments through political interference. And the parties that Russia supports are invariably located on the nationalist and populist extremes. The election in Moldova last year and the presidential election in Romania last week are testimony to this. In both cases, Moscow very nearly succeeded in empowering pro-Russian forces by meddling with the polls. Had the strategy worked to add Moldova and Romania to the list of Russia-friendly governments already in power in Hungary and Slovakia, Putin would have achieved his political goals far more cheaply than through military force.
Russia's political investments through disinformation and election meddling are set to continue, with the second round of the Polish presidential election coming up next, followed by elections in the Czech Republic in the fall.
But just as the threat from Russia doesn't end in Ukraine, the external threats to Europe don't end with Russia. In the U.S., too, the MAGA right that forms the base of Trump's support has no sympathy for Europe. While the die may not be cast yet, in the best of circumstances the U.S. under Trump will likely disengage from European security, including NATO, in a coordinated and gradual way. In the worst-case scenario, the U.S. will abandon Europeans more abruptly—and perhaps even side more explicitly with Russia.
The threat from Russia is clearly bigger and more tangible than that posed by the U.S., which remains hypothetical and will hopefully never materialize. But while Europeans are equipping themselves to deal militarily with Russia, they can't seem to get their heads around the U.S. turning its back on the continent's security. The European 'immune system' when it comes to seeing the U.S. as a potential threat is extremely weakened through disuse, making the hypothetical scenario of a U.S. betrayal, small as it might be, even harder to deal with than the reality of the Russian threat.
It's no coincidence that the European parties backed by the MAGA right are the same ones Russia is bolstering, not just in Eastern Europe, but in Western Europe as well, from the League in Italy and AfD in Germany to Chega in Portugal and Vox in Spain. It is here, in fact, where the external threats posed by Putin and Trump are joined at the hip: through their concerted support for the far right in Europe—the 'threat from within,' as Vance would put it, but in reverse.
The far right's rise in Europe has come in waves. It began well over a decade ago, when the European Union was torn apart by the sovereign debt crisis in the early 2010s. In the South, where poverty and inequality increased to unprecedented levels, its rise was driven and amplified by the austerity policies in vogue in that period. In the 'frugal' North, which saw the ills of the profligate Southern Europeans as being of their own making, it was driven by resentment over the calls for further European integration and solidarity to shore up the suddenly vulnerable union. It rose further in 2015 during the so-called migration crisis, which added a toxic East-West divide to Europe's North-South cleavage.
The double shock of the Brexit referendum and Trump's election in 2016 and the years thereafter took some wind out of the European far right's sails, by demonstrating the downsides of populism and the benefits of European integration. The wave further subsided—or at least appeared to— during the pandemic, as the value of predictability, reliability and competence were once again underscored and appreciated. However, the far right continued to trumpet its traditional themes, first and foremost migration, while also championing new ones, including the anti-climate, anti-science and anti-woke agendas. The backlash against social distancing rules and the anti-vax movement during the pandemic, followed by post-pandemic inflation and the energy crisis sparked by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, fueled a renewed far-right push.
European elections since 2022, including the European Parliament elections in 2024, confirm the far right's rising appeal. While far-right parties come in different shapes and sizes, today they are either in government or provide external support to governments in seven EU member states. Those in opposition represent the second-largest party in many other countries, with their rise to power seemingly just one election away should present trajectories continue.
It was feared that Trump's return to power would further galvanize the far right in Europe. However, subsequent elections in Canada and Australia—in which the populist right ended up being weakened, not strengthened, by the aggressive postures of the Trump administration—instilled new hope: Perhaps the Trump effect would lead to a political backlash against the far right in Europe as well.
Unfortunately, however, the picture in Europe is not clearcut. The elections last weekend in Romania, Portugal and Poland paint a mixed picture. The pro-EU mayor of Bucharest, Nicusor Dan, ended up unexpectedly winning Romania's presidential election, despite the nationalist far-right candidate George Simion having finished with a commanding lead in the first round. The pro-EU liberal mayor of Warsaw, Rafal Trzaskowski, also scraped ahead in the first round of Poland's presidential election, but the second-round vote against far-right rival Karol Nawrocki is set to be a hard-fought contest. And while the center-right Democratic Alliance finished first in Portugal's parliamentary elections, it did not secure an outright majority, even as the far-right Chega party tied with the Socialists for the second-highest number of seats.
In this new climate, other far-right parties across the EU feel increasingly emboldened, including those in government, like Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy, as well as those in opposition, like the National Rally in France and the AfD in Germany. As Europe grapples with the threat from Russia and the risk of abandonment and even betrayal the U.S., it is far from having either tamed or contained, let alone beaten, this very real threat from within.
Nathalie Tocci is director of the Istituto Affari Internazionali, part-time professor at the School of Transnational Governance (European University Institute) and honorary professor at the University of Tubingen. She has been special adviser to the EU high representative. Her WPR column appears monthly.
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