Pence Arrives at Munich Conference With Allies Questioning U.S. Leadership

Vice President Mike Pence arrived at Europe’s big annual security conference on Friday, determined to push back against a common perception that the U.S. has vacated its role as leader of the free world.

Pence was met with a lengthy silence rather than applause when he said he brought “greetings from 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump,’’ in remarks to participants on Friday evening. Pence was addressing an award ceremony for the first recipients of a scholarship to honor the late U.S. senator and war veteran John McCain, a regular attendee and favorite of the conference for decades.

The event has in recent years become a sounding board for concerns in Europe over issues such as President Donald Trump’s commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and to multilateral approaches to issues such as trade, arms control and climate change. The idea that the U.S. has abandoned leadership of the West has become commonplace.

This weekend’s conference is the first at which administration figures trusted in Europe, such as former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, who spoke last year, and former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who spoke in 2017, will be absent. A pre-conference report set the tone, worrying that the U.S. approach to allies risked “squandering its competitive advantages’’ as U.S. policies come to match the president’s tweets.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-15/pence-arrives-at-meeting-with-allies-questioning-u-s-leadership