Beached Arguments: Pete Hegseth, JD Vance and European Immigration

Waxworks have nothing to say, but when incarnated in the form of former Fox News anchor and, at a pinch, “personality”, Pete Hegseth proves to be a marvel of sheer stupidity. It’s not that one cannot be provocative on matters of discomfort, teasing the political consciousness and prodding the sensitive. Immigration, and what makes it up, is a point of energetic disquiet in Europe, and a figure insisting on raising it is bound to add a spoke to the news cycle. But to do so in the fashion of the US Secretary of War, as he likes to be known as, was something else.

The speech, given at the Normandy American cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer, was to commemorate the Normandy landings of June 6, 1944 to liberate Western Europe from Nazi German occupation. “Eighty-two years ago today, the survival of Western civilization hung in the balance. Dark forces had swept across Europe. Hitler boasted that his [coastal defensive] Atlantic Wall was impenetrable. But our enemy made a fatal miscalculation: they underestimated the unbreakable will of the American fighting man”.

He was not to confine himself to the heavily accented theme of American greatness. A contrast was in the offing. Western nations had become comfortably and dangerously complacent. “We forgot that freedom is not free. We forgot that peace is not wished into being. It is bought with purpose, with honor and with strength. The men who landed on these beaches knew this; the question we ask ourselves is, do we?” Examples of such complacency and wilful amnesia were offered. “Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies,” he declared darkly. “Beaches in Spain, in Italy, in Greece and Bulgaria. Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion?”

Only the previous day, US Vice President JD Vance had thought it appropriate to make a few choice remarks on British domestic politics and last year’s fatal stabbing of 18-year-old British student Henry Nowak, the victim of an attack in Southampton by Vickrum Digwa. Digwa, found guilty of murder and jailed for life with a minimum jail term of 21 years, had falsely claimed to have been the target of racial abuse, acting in self-defence. Nowak, on the subsequent release of police bodycam footage, was shown handcuffed and pleading before expiring.

In a social media post, Vance expansively observed that “Henry Nowak died the same way a civilization dies: abandoned, handcuffed by authorities who neither trusted nor cared for him, and accused of hate crimes he did not commit.” He would have lived had “the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despite the West and the people who love it.” It would have taken a mere skimming exercise on the lengthy history and tradition of Sikhs and Sikhism in Britain (Digwa is British born) to have made a nonsense of Vance’s lashing remarks about European elites, but details are rarely sought on the rough and ready terrain of demagogy.

The remarks by Hegseth and Vance are consistent with the meddling approach of the second Trump administration towards its allies. Not only are they being repeatedly told to increase their military budgets, ostensibly to reduce their reliance on the teat of US security, they are chastised for their own policies in such areas as immigration. The 2025 National Security Strategy may have outlined proposals for “a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine” namely “a Hemisphere whose governments cooperate with us against narco-terrorists, cartels, and other transnational criminal organizations”, one “free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets, and that supports critical supply chains” and ensured “continued access to key strategic locations.” But the document also noted the administration’s desire for “a world in which migration is not merely ‘orderly’ but one in which sovereign countries work together to stop rather than facilitate destabilizing population flows, and have full control over whom they do and do not admit.”

The NSS has various sour notes about “mass migration”, with a less than subtle stab at European states. Countries had seen the straining of domestic resources, “increased violence and other crime, weakened social cohesion, distorted labor markets” and the subversion of national security. Then comes a nasty sigh on civilisational decline, somewhat in keeping with the pessimistic though less detailed tone of Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang Des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West). Not only did European countries risk being reliable allies, economically or militarily; here lay the prospect of morphological twilight, an eventual “civilizational erasure” steered by “the activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies” that served to, among other things, undermine political freedoms, suppress political opposition and impose incoherent migration policies. “We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation.” A big boo to those swarthy types seeking admission to the exclusive club – certainly via the beaches.

Interestingly enough, Hegseth and his colleagues remain blithely ignorant of the onerous restrictions many states within the European Union have imposed on irregular arrivals, with the promise of a more consistently harsh approach. The two-year transition phase of the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, which concludes on June 12, is intended to standardise the framework for migration, the seeking of asylum, the control of borders and integration. The European Commission hopes that the more uniform system will serve to deter irregular migrants, distribute the processing burden between the states with greater equity, and stave off such crises as took place in 2015-2016. Whether this resolves the issue of wealthier member states actually accepting more asylum seekers remains a thorny issue. Taking Denmark’s crude example, little can be expected on that score.

The Pact has certainly done nothing to impress human rights groups. In April 2024, Eve Geddie, Amnesty International’s Head of European Institutions Office and Director of Advocacy gave it a less than glowing assessment. The “package of proposals shamefully risks subjecting more people, including families with children, to de facto detention at EU borders; denying them a fair and full assessment of their protection needs.” The proposals would also encourage “new emergency measures that will put countless people at risk of pushbacks, arbitrary detention, and destitution at European borders.”

These measures, overwhelmingly slanted towards framing the management of migration in terms of collective European security hardly, suggest a soft, permissive approach to those arrivals apparently intent on upending the apple cart of European civilisation. But when it comes to scrutinising the minutiae of detail on policies, Hegseth, Vance and their goons can never be accused of being too thorough.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

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