The groans and the anxious side glances gave way to silence as US Vice-President J.D. Vance took centre stage in Munich to pour contempt on long-standing US allies and cut Europe down to size.
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It was an attack of unbridled ferocity in the name of free speech that laid bare the long-stewing hostility that Donald Trump and his most senior aides feel for the European Union – they see the bloc as a symbol of big government that constrains US companies.
But as European diplomats from Berlin to London pick through the rubble of the transatlantic relationship, the reality is that the continent has had eight years since Trump’s last election victory to get its house in order and three since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The wake-up call was a long time coming.
“This is existential,” Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna said in an interview on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, where Vance had been speaking.
French President Emmanuel Macron is looking to convene an emergency meeting of European leaders in an attempt to come up with a response.
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Europe’s fate has turned on events in the Bavarian capital before, and not only in 1938 when the UK acquiesced to Adolf Hitler’s claims to part of Czechoslovakia in a doomed attempt to avoid war.