Secretary of State Marco Rubio called on Europe to unshackle itself from “guilt and shame” and forge a new global paradigm built on respect for borders, reindustrialization, and “peace through strength.”
Speaking at the annual Munich Security Conference Saturday, Rubio dismissed “foolish” concepts like a “world without borders” and called out a “broken status quo.”
Europe should join the US in carrying out muscular policies like those that removed Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro and bombed Iranian nuclear facilities, he declared.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio cast the United States as the “child of Europe” in a message of unity on Saturday. Getty Images“We in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline,” Rubio told the audience, which welcomed him with applause.
“President Trump demands seriousness and reciprocity from our friends here in Europe,” Rubio warned at the event, which traces its roots to the 1960s.
Rubio, a child of Spanish-speaking Cuban immigrants, spoke beyond security to confront the shared cultural ties that bind the US and Europe.
“We are part of one civilization – Western civilization. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir,” he said.
He laced his remarks with grave warnings, as European leaders have raised concerns about breaks in the alliance, divergent approaches to Russia, and clashes over trade and tariffs.
Rubio condemned an earlier “dogmatic vision of free and unfettered trade, even as some nations protected their economies and subsidized their companies to systematically undercut ours.”
Europe’s leading powers have tried to project their own independence and strength while straining to keep an alliance with the U.S. Getty Images
The speech delivered a degree of reassurance to European countries who fear being left in the lurch. APHe ripped the “foolish idea” of “societies being deindustrialized, shipping millions of working and middle-class jobs overseas.”
“A great civilization that has every reason to be proud of its history, confident of its future, and aims to always be the master of its own economic and political destiny,” he said.
“We care deeply about your future and ours. And if at times we disagree, our disagreements come from our profound sense of concern about a Europe with which we are connected – not just economically, not just militarily. We are connected spiritually and we are connected culturally.”
At a time when European nations, like the US, are cutting down on asylum and seeking to stem large flows of immigration, Rubio called mass migration a “crisis” which is “transforming and destabilizing societies all across the West.”
“For the United States and Europe, we belong together,” Rubio said in a speech that drew a standing ovation at the end. via REUTERSThe US “increasingly outsourced our sovereignty” and appeased a “climate cult,” he added two days after the Trump administration announced a reversal to the finding that greenhouse gas emissions are a danger to human health.
“In a pursuit of a world without borders, we opened our doors to an unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens our cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture and the future of our people,” Rubio said.
“We do not want allies to rationalize the broken status quo rather than reckon with what is necessary to fix it,” Rubio said.
One particular area of anxiety is Ukraine, where allies have long worried about Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin trying to ram through a deal on Moscow’s terms. Getty ImagesEven while calling for Europe to join the new order, Rubio soothed the crowd of diplomats and policymakers with expressions of transatlantic cooperation.
The US “will always be a child of Europe” and wants Europe to be “strong,” he said in the Valentine’s Day speech, adding the United States and Europe “belong together.”
He spoke of an earlier time, when the Western alliance was confronting Soviet communism and was “driven by a common purpose.
“We were unified not just by what we were fighting against. We were unified by what we were fighting for.”
“The Americans often return to the topic of concessions and too often those concessions are discussed only in the context of Ukraine, not Russia,” Zelenskiy said. Getty Images
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said he could see why Rubio’s appeal to a common legacy had drawn applause. via REUTERSBut the triumph at the end of the Cold War “led us to a dangerous delusion. That we had entered, quote, ‘the end of history;’ that every nation would now be a liberal democracy. That the ties formed by trade and by commerce alone would now replace nationhood.”
He slammed the phrase “rules based global order” as “an overused term” and dismissed the notion of living in a world “without borders.”
“This was a foolish idea,” he said bluntly.Rubio, considered a leading Republican presidential candidate in the fight to succeed Trump, spoke a year after Vice President JD Vance alarmed some European leaders with a speech where he warned of a “threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values – values shared with the United States of America.”
