The 19th-century French diplomat, political philosopher, and historian Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “The greatness of America lies not in her greater enlightenment than any other nation, but in her ability to correct her errors.”
For a brief moment at the Munich Security Conference (MSC) last weekend, European leaders half thought their heartiest wish – the return of the old US that believed in the EU ideal and supported a rules-based world order – had been granted.
On the same stage the previous year, US Vice-President JD Vance delivered a gut punch: a brutal ideological attack accusing Europe of abandoning “core values” and questioning whether the US and the EU still have a common agenda.
This year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered a speech that was very different in tone, and saw the audience – led by Germany’s defense and foreign ministers and 40-odd US officials – give him a standing ovation, completely relieved to hear anything other than abuse.
Rubio played a soothing tune. The US and Europe are “together”, he says: if Americans look directly and urgently, they will know that European and US destinies are forever linked. The US will “always be a child of Europe”.
Wolfgang Ischinger, MSC president, breathed “a sigh of relief”. Ursula van der Leyen, president of the European Commission, said she was “very reassured”. Caja Callas, the EU’s chief diplomat, said the alliance could work with such a US.
But it didn’t take long — indeed, it took rereading Rubio’s speech — for European reactions to change. The US Secretary of State, many realized, was conciliatory, but his message was not unlike Vance’s.
There are all the blood-and-soil fads known to man: mass migration; Removal of Civilization; the extinction of Christian culture; Unlimited trade; external welfare states; weak soldiers; “climate worship”; Worthless International Organizations.
Without a doubt, the White House summary is clear, listing a further litany of Trumpian buzzwords: “sovereign nations”, “shared heritage”, “Christian foundations”, “outdated globalist structures” – and “The Defense of Western Civilization”.
In short, as Claudia Major of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs puts it, it is “a proposal of friendship – but on white, Christian, Maga terms”. Rubio explained that the US wants allies who are “proud of their culture and their heritage.” Friends who consider themselves “heirs of the same great and great civilization” and “able and ready to defend it”. It’s a chilling line, says Mujtaba Rahman of the Eurasia Group, which echoes word-for-word the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).
To refute Washington’s hostile stance, Rubio went on bilateral visits after the MSC to, as Rahman put it, “the two most Putin-friendly, anti-Brussels and Trump-loving leaders in the EU”: Robert Fico in Slovakia and Viktor Orbán in Hungary.
In Budapest on Monday, Rubio hinted at economic aid and said Trump is “deeply committed to the success” of the EU’s disruptive chief-in-chief, the apathetic Hungarian prime minister, who faces a serious challenge to his authority in April elections.
That, too, is a massive “‘eff you'” for the EU,” one analyst told the Guardian’s global affairs correspondent Andrew Roth, adding that the visit was “guaranteed to reinforce fears that the US is trying to encourage chaos and disunity among its allies”.
Battle for the Meaning of ‘Western Civilization’
So Rubio’s speech was no olive branch — much less a US effort to “correct its errors.” Historian Phillips O’Brien put it succinctly: Rubio called for “the end of a tolerant, democratic Europe and its disintegration into a disparate group of small, Trumpist states.”
The speech “pronounced the death of the liberal, democratic system that has ruled the European continent — and the US-led world — since 1945,” and “a return to a world based on the primacy of national interests,” O’Brien said, not values.
Some leaders have shown some illusions. The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said Maga’s culture war was not Europe’s. In the EU, “freedom of speech ends … when it is directed against human dignity and fundamental law Then,” he said. “We don’t believe in tariffs and protectionism, but we believe in free trade. We are committed to climate agreements and WHO.”
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, told the crowd: “Europe must become a geopolitical power. We must accelerate and provide all the components of geopolitical power: defence, technologies and the reduction of risk from all the big powers.”
Callas, despite her initial welcome to Rubio’s sweetening of the pill, sharply criticized “civilized” US “Euro-bashing.” Contrary to what some say, she asserts, “Awakened, decadent European civilization did not face annihilation.”
There is also evidence of what the Guardian’s diplomatic editor, Patrick Wintour, calls Europe’s new “steeliness”. Macron’s speech was overshadowed by Rubio’s, but touched on a much more complex and sensitive topic.
The French president spoke of a “convergence” between French and German strategic defense positions and the possibility of “putting nuclear disarmament in a holistic approach to defense and security” in Europe.
Merz also made a brief but pointed reference to early discussions with Macron on the issue, while British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said “there is no British security without Europe and no European security without Britain”.
Whether, and how, France and the UK can make their nuclear deterrents available to Europe by reducing the need for a US nuclear umbrella will be a long and fraught debate in the coming months, but the issue has been broached. That, and other contentious issues — think European digital sovereignty — could further strain transatlantic ties.
As usual, the EU’s member states clash: Germany told France this week it needs to put its money where its mouth is on defense spending. But there are signs that Europe is at least starting to push back. If Vance’s speech last year marked the moment when “the break in the Atlantic began,” Wintour wrote, this MSC “led to a debate about the terms of the divorce settlement.”
As Le Monde noted in a powerful editorial, while the US portrays the EU as a “cemetery of hope, identity and freedom”, the alliance “represents Washington’s climate denial, science abandonment, plutocratic drift and authoritarian tendencies”.
The French paper of record noted that the term “Western civilization” no longer “has a single definition on either side of the Atlantic – and Europeans have no reason to abandon their own.”
Until next week.
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