The EU’s political elite gave a standing ovation and breathed “relief” after a US message of “reassurance” in Munich, even though it was larded with far-right tropes.
“Our home may be in the western hemisphere, but we will always be a child of Europe,” said US secretary of state Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference (MSC) in Germany on Saturday (14 February), prompting applause.
He reeled off the names of historic European figures, such as Dante, Shakespeare, and Columbus.
He also said: “We have bled and died side by side on battlefields, from Kapyong [in Korea] to Kandahar [in Afghanistan]”.
“America is charting the path for a new century of prosperity and we want to do it together with you – our cherished allies and oldest friends,” Rubio added, to more applause.
“Our destiny together awaits,” he ended, before his ovation.
“I’m not sure if you heard the sigh of relief through this hall,” said Wolfgang Ischinger, the German head of the MSC, who also thanked Rubio for his “message of reassurance”, as they sat down for a short Q&A after the speech.
The relief was linked to memories of last year, when US vice president JD Vance shocked Munich by claiming that Europe stifled free speech and democracy.
US president Donald Trump also stoked fears that he was turning his back on Nato and the EU in the past 12 months.
He cozied up to Russian president Vladimir Putin, put out an anti-EU “security strategy”, threatened to invade Greenland, and denigrated European soldiers who fought with the US in Afghanistan.
For his part, Rubio also pledged to put more pressure on Putin and to pursue a “just and sustainable peace” in Ukraine in Saturday’s Q&A.
“It was for me very reassuring to listen to him,” EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen later told media.
But there had been further transatlantic friction on show in Munich in the run-up to his intervention.
Transatlantic friction
The US top diplomat snubbed a meeting of German, Polish, Finnish, and EU Commission leaders, in the ‘Berlin Format’, earlier on Friday, by cancelling his attendance at the last minute.
The EU foreign affairs chief, Kaja Kallas, clashed with the US ambassador to the UN, Mike Waltz, over Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’ for Gaza, in an MSC panel on Friday.
She said it excluded Palestinians and sidelined the UN, while he accused her of pointless “hand-wringing”.
Speaking also on Friday, German chancellor Friedrich Merz and French president Emmanuel Macron voiced fears the EU could no longer depend on America.
“The international order based on rights and rules is currently being destroyed”, Merz said, in a thinly veiled attack on Trump.
“A divide has opened up between Europe and the United States … JD Vance said this very openly here in Munich a year ago. He was right. The culture war of the MAGA movement is not ours,” Merz added.
Macron said Europe needed its own nuclear deterrent, defended Europe’s democratic credentials and geopolitical importance, while promising to crack down on US tech platforms who pushed foreign propaganda and hate speech.
Democratic senators who went to Munich were even more outspoken.
“Trump is turning his back on allies,” said Gavin Newsom, while Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez accused Trump of pushing the world into an era of “authoritarianism”.
And even if Rubio made nice, it might take more than one speech to undo Trump’s damage to relations, according to a poll by the European Council of Foreign relations think-tank in Berlin.
Some 28 percent of people in France, Germany, and Spain now felt the US had become a “rival”, while about 50 percent of those in Poland and Denmark felt they couldn’t trust Trump to come to their defence.
And when asked later on Saturday in Munich if she thought Trump still had plans to take over Greenland, despite a new Nato security mission in the Arctic, Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen said: “I think the desire from the US president is exactly the same [as before].”
“To question the transatlantic relationship, or to threaten allies, or to do anything that undermines the idea of [Nato’s] Article Five [mutual-defence pledge] would be a threat to all of us,” she said.
MAGA culture war
Meanwhile, if Merz rejected MAGA “culture wars”, then Rubio’s speech still contained plenty of music to the ears of the EU far-right.
He referenced “fears of civilisational erasure” in Europe by Arab and Muslim migrants, quoting a phrase from Trump’s controversial security strategy of 4 December.
He eulogised the era of European colonialism, depicted the West as a superior civilisation to others, and lamented its “managed decline … hopelessness and complacency”, which he linked to left-wing European politics.
“We must gain control of our national borders … this is not an expression of xenophobia. It is not hate,” Rubio said.
“We want allies to be proud of our culture and heritage,” he added.
And he planned to honour the EU’s two most right-wing and pro-Russian governments, in Hungary and Slovakia, by visiting them after the MSC.
Trump’s security strategy had said the US would back EU far-right politicians.
The MSC re-invited delegates from the far-right AfD party for the first time in two years after JD Vance’s 2025 tirade.
And Rubio’s trip to Budapest, shortly before elections in April, might well be designed to give the incumbent prime minister, Viktor Orbán, who trails in polls, a badly needed bump.
