'A bizarre message': CNN foreign correspondent trashes J.D. Vance's speech in Germany

Vice President J.D. Vance delivered a speech at the Munich Security Conference in which he lobbed culture-war criticisms at European allies but said very little about the core security issues facing the continent, most prominently the United States government's position on the war in Ukraine.

In analyzing the speech on CNN, foreign correspondent Nick Paton Walsh predicted that Vance's speech would mostly fall upon deaf ears among Europeans.

"This is a bizarre message to hear, given everybody wants to really hear the clarification of his interview with the Wall Street Journal, quite what he meant, whether he seemed to suggest that the United States was going to put or could potentially put boots on the ground... when it came to Ukraine," he said. "Ukraine is the only thing people want to hear about, but instead, on the stage, I think we're hearing this very interesting projection of sort of what you might find more common on X.com, Elon Musk's platform, the kind of cultural war that had been so successful, it seems, in getting the Trump administration to power."

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Walsh also said that European officials would be particularly perturbed by the speech given that it did nothing to clear up the mixed signals the Trump administration had been sending on Ukraine.

"I think we'll be wanting to hear more clarity as to exactly what the Trump administration's position is when it comes to Ukraine," he said. "Remember, we've had a bizarre 48 hours in which Secretary of Defense Hegseth basically said that there would be no Ukrainian NATO membership and it wouldn't get its old borders back, and then radically reversing, everything's back on the table. There's whiplash, frankly, in Munich, and he's not addressing that yet."

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