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What a difference a year makes.
Last year at the Munch Security Conference Vice President Vance delivered a feisty feast of words very much in the political style of the Vice President: Democratic Demons and Family Drama, A Valentine's Day Text From the United States for their European Soulmates--Vice President JD Vance's Remarks Delivered at the 2025 Munich Security Conference. For his European hosts, however, the textual delights he proffered might have left a bad taste.
This year Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered a brief, honest, but much better received statement that raised the same issues, but perhaps in a considerably different way. In the Secretary's Remarks Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference.
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Time is up. Back to the iterative matter at hand.
In the usual half a week given to these event data blips Secretary Rubio's remarks have been consumed. And, and like most consumable, it has provided a certain amount of "nutrient" or positive value, leaving the rest for emptying the nocturnal fragrance (倒夜香) of what remains to be carting away . The popular legacy press reported it this way:
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered a reassuring message to America’s allies on Saturday, striking a less aggressive but still firm tone about the administration’s intent to reshape the trans-Atlantic alliance and push its priorities after more than a year of President Donald Trump’s often-hostile rhetoric toward traditional allies. * * * Rubio addressed the conference a year after Vice President JD Vance stunned the same audience with a harsh critique of European values. (here)
The focus was clear enough--it is not clear that anyone in the popular press is particularly interested in what the Secretary has to say or parsing through its structures and assumptions. No. One had the impression that the greatest value of the secretary's remarks is as an artifact the extracted essence of which might make the contest for the succession of President Trump for more interesting (for them at least). And there is nothing more delectably consumable than the appearance or reality; of a concept that Jacques Derrida, in his usual act of showmanship, made famous in the term "différance" (Jacques Derrida, Différance Alan Bass (trans), in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp 3-27)), and what semiotics now perhaps better understands in the shadow of tech, that Jan Broekman and I call the "flow" or the "signal" within which input exists (here).
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It is to a more considered understanding of those remarks that is the focus of the remainder of this essay. It is divided into seven parts: (1) temporal starting points; (2) the foundational binary; (3) the betrayal; (4) the price of folly in a city of fools; (5) America First and the great reboot; (6) pitching revolution; (7) the rebooted world order; (8) putting the State back in the state system; and (9) its all about self-actualization
1. Temporal Starting Points. Secretary Rubio emphasizes starting points throughput the address. And, indeed, if one read the remarks carefully, it becomes clear that analytically, starting points are not historical markers but markers that frame structure, values, goals. He could have chosen 1945, the starting date of the new global ordering led by the Americans at the vanguard of leading States victorious in war against (1) the extra-moral forces of an amoral ethno-racial-religious managerial eugenics and human value hierarchy and (2) unconstrained militarism as the principal language of international relations. Their task was to reboot a global order, the manifestations of which emerged in the decade or so following, at least as to form and values.
But the Secretary did not. One cannot get in his head, of course, but it is plausible to consider that context dictated a starting point connected to the origins and context of the Munich Security Conference. And so the Secretary's speech is framed around 1963 as a starting point. 1963 was a momentous year in some respects. It started in the shadow of the so called Cuban Missile crisis of October 1962. The American adventure in Vietnam intensified, intensified by the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, as did its sanctions regimes against the revolutionary government in Cuba. George Wallace was inaugurated as Alabama's governor promising segregation forever, the federal government sent troops in to enforce desegregation, while the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King wrote his letter from the Birmingham Jail and the march on Washington where his "I Have a Dream Remarks" were delivered, and the Civil Rights Act was enacted. France and Germany continued a process of alignment, while France vetoed the UK's admission into what was to become the EU. Patsy Kine is killed in a plane cash and Beatlemania starts with the release of their new album. John XXIII dies and with the event the shaping of Vatican II, and the US and Soviets established the now famous "hotline" and sign a Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Computer programming language standardization draws institutional attention and the synthesizer received its first public demonstration. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Texas, as was the person who was facing charges in that murder. There was more of note as well.
That is a lot of data and a reminder of the complexities of contextualization and essentialization multiple data streams parallel, intermeshing, and multi-directional. But data can be "activated" by acquiring signification (or being vested with it--that is what people chose to consider as the data "set" from out of which analysis is to be undertaken). And with that signification one can develop a framework for rationalizing the world as a function of an issue, objective, or state of being that is central to an analysis.
All of these events o doubt started out in the mix that was 1963. But its essence, for Secretary Rubio, was shaped by a view of the context in which 1963 presented itself as the relationship between Europe and the U.S. The parsing and data selection, then, might be thought more direct, and perhaps brutal--that by 1963 it was apparent that there was unfinished business from what had started in the 1930s. Having defeated the forces of the radical and immoral political right--it was by then clear that that those efforts would have to be redirected toward achieving the same ends against the radical left. But now those efforts would be constrained by the normative architecture of human rights and the anti-militarism that served as the core templates of the post-1945 order. That, for Secretary Rubio is both the temporal starting point, and the touchstone for the essence of world ordering that he now seeks to apply in the resent, but with contemporary characteristics. The spirit of 1963 is invoked to move forward the project that is America First: "It will restore to us a clearer sense of ourselves. It will restore a place in the world, and in so doing, it will rebuke and deter the forces of civilizational erasure that today menace both America and Europe alike." (Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference). That, at any rate, appears to be the plan.
2. The Foundational Binary. Leibnitz reminded us centuries ago that binary code may be a useful way of reducing complexity to its simplest forms. Cognition and its representation might be usefully organized as binaries--zeros and ones, black and while, Western democracies and Soviet Marxist Leninist totalitarianism. Secretary Rubio organizes the world of 1963 along what for the post-1945 world was its principal binary, or in the language of Marxist Leninism, as its general contradiction and the essence of its dialectics:
When this conference began in 1963, it was in a nation – actually, it was on a continent – that was divided against itself. The line between communism and freedom ran through the heart of Germany. The first barbed fences of the Berlin Wall had gone up just two years prior. And just months before that first conference, before our predecessors first met here, here in Munich, the Cuban Missile Crisis had brought the world to the brink of nuclear destruction. Even as World War II still burned fresh in the memory of Americans and Europeans alike, we found ourselves staring down the barrel of a new global catastrophe – one with the potential for a new kind of destruction, more apocalyptic and final than anything before in the history of mankind. (Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference)
Thus, it seems, 1945 might have provided the setting for the rebooting of the global order in the wake of victory against great manifestations of two distinctive forms of internal and external state organization, conduct, and with that, their value systems. Yet all that did was clear away the debris from the great underlying contradiction on the basis of which the old world order was engaged in sometimes violent "dialectic" and oftentimes engagement at odds with the values either side purported to advance. It solved the problem of the 19th century well into the 20th; but it now made it possible to see that this was only half the equation--ridding the planet of 19th century apex state values made confronting its 20th century incarnation unavoidable. And that moves the dial from 1945 to 1963. Or to put it in the language of Deng Xiaoping (On Opposing Wrong Ideological Tendencies (1981))--while the 2nd World War effectively rectified "right error", it left a potentially equally disturbing "left error" not just infect but able to corrupt the center in the absence of its old countervailing force.
This dialectic then, served as the basis for continued alliance. Gratitude, as many know, is a great burden, and tends to build resentment almost as much as it builds positive connection. And in 1963, certainly for critical elements of the elites, one might surmise, the world and world ordering of 1863 might have been far closer to their sensibilities intellectually than was that of 1917 or 1945, much less 1963. Threat, on the other hand, especially fresh off of the disasters of 1914-1945, can be a great motivator. It is here that the fundamental binary takes on its normative character.
At the time of that first gathering, Soviet communism was on the march. Thousands of years of Western civilization hung in the balance. At that time, victory was far from certain. But we were 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. And together, Europe and America prevailed and a continent was rebuilt. Our people prospered. In time, the East and West blocs were reunited. A civilization was once again made whole.(Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference)
And there it is, nicely packaged. For Secretary Rubio 1963 is decisive because it marked not the transformation of the global rebooting conceived in 1945. Rather it was decisive because it marked the first, and fundamental, shift in the conflict binary, the resolution of which produced the mid-20th century international framework. That shift moved the center of conflict from its 19th century moorings , from the defeated 19th century visions of internal and external imperium, in the form of the German Reich and the Japanese Empire, to an equally critical binary oppositional conflict with 20th century moorings between the liberal democratic West and its allies and the Soviet world order. What was a stake was the normative (human rights centered) and anti-militarist foundations of the post-1945 international ordering. Where those structures in 1945 were directed at defeating what came to be called the fascist right, after 1963 it became clear that the fight continued, this time against the totalitarian left. Standing between them was allied states bound by a roughly unified sense of the meaning and values of the post-1945 order, now deployed against what in the 21st century would be called the radical left, but which in the 20th century would be incarnated with and into the Soviet Empire.
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But what happens after the great dialectic is resolved? What happens when Soviet totalitarian "left" error is defeated, at least in its 20th century forms? Secretary Rubio offers a distillation in the form of betrayal:
But the euphoria of this triumph 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; that the rules-based global order – an overused term – would now replace the national interest; and that we would now live in a world without borders where everyone became a citizen of the world. (Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference)
Secretary Rubio contextualizes the betrayal within the psychology of delusion; perhaps arrogance and disconnection might also have worked in context, but both would have been less polite; Secretary Rubio prefers the suggestion of naivete. And indeed, betrayal might be better understood not as delusion but as efforts at mitigation by those elements within the western liberal democracies that had been, since the 1920s, sympathetic to the other side of the binary and now appeared to have been working not on the resolution of the binary but in its convergence. In effect, what Secretary Rubio suggests as the fundamental delusion was the idea that with the defeat of radical right error in 1945 and of radical left error (in Europe) in 1989ish, the only thing left for the victors to do was to disappear into the world they made possible. From the perspective of those globalists, the "betrayal" was on the other foot as they watched their belief and operational orthodoxy shattered visibly after 2015 in both Asia and the U.S., a perspective nicely developed in the Davos Remarks of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. For Secretary Rubio, on the other hand, it was the very mind set that the Canadian Prime Minister defended that was itself the fundamental betrayal of the spirit of 1945 and of 1963.
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The first touches on what the Secretary describes as a detached and rigid ideology of trade.
In this delusion, we embraced a dogmatic vision of free and unfettered trade, even as some nations protected their economies and subsidized their companies to systematically undercut ours – shuttering our plants, resulting in large parts of our societies being deindustrialized, shipping millions of working and middle-class jobs overseas, and handing control of our critical supply chains to both adversaries and rivals.(Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference).
While at first blush this appears to be a reprise of variations of the Global South's New International Economic order, it lacks the ideological rigidity of that now ancient effort. The issue, for the Secretary, is the protection of efficiency capacity and the protection of markets.
The second touches on the system of public international institutions. It is not just the system of public international institutions that appears to be the target, but the emergence of a global internationally centered web of public and private techno-bureaucratic functionaries with what of the Secretary might be4 understood as a slim and indirect connection to the structures of democratic accountability (though in fairness democratic accountability of their own administrative apparatus remains a bit of a work in progress).
We increasingly outsourced our sovereignty to international institutions while many nations invested in massive welfare states at the cost of maintaining the ability to defend themselves. This, even as other countries have invested in the most rapid military buildup in all of human history and have not hesitated to use hard power to pursue their own interests. (Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference).
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The third touches on migration. If trade policy hollowed out states, and if the project of constructing a system of international organizations transposed sovereignty from state to international actors, then migration, if undertaken fully and properly, would sweep away the state itself. That, anyway, is the view: "And in a pursuit of a world without borders, we opened our doors to an unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people." (Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference).
These three then shape not only the Munich remarks of the Secretary but provide a nice summary of the three core values of America First: the rejection of the idea of trade as another form of politics, the rejection of supra national governance institutions, and the rejection of open borders. These "three rejections" then have a positive side--the three modernizations: efficient re-industrialization; inter-governmentality as the basic structure of international governance; and robust national control of migration.
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6. Pitching Revolution. If, indeed, the U.S. is to undertake this re-framing, in the company of its sovereign peers, then it needs to pitch them. That is, the United States must suggest why it may make sense for a Europe that had invested heavily in the post-1989 framework and is deeply and ideologically committed to a much deeper techno-bureaucratic institutional ordering of politics, may find it more in its interests to scrape away at least enough of the barnacles of post-1989 internationalism to make partnership satisfying, viability, and positive (however one s inclined to measure that).
To that end, Secretary Rubio starts with an argument grounded in socio-cultural solidarity.
For the United States and Europe, we belong together. America was founded 250 years ago, but the roots began here on this continent long before. The man who settled and built the nation of my birth arrived on our shores carrying the memories and the traditions and the Christian faith of their ancestors as a sacred inheritance, an unbreakable link between the old world and the new. We are part of one civilization – Western civilization. (Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference).
What is interesting here is the alignment of faith and civilization. At a time when that view has been fractured and reconstructed in an infinitely varied way by politicians, ideologues, social scientists, religious divines, and others, Secretary Rubio pulls on an ancient trope, and in this way picking up a thread of argument that had been advanced, with decreasing success by John Paul II (Ecclesia in Europa 2003, ¶ 120).
Secretary Rubio then makes the argument from shared history, and with it blood sacrifice for mostly common ends. "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." (Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference). This is wrapped in as close to a self reflection of the political psychology that separates the Americans from their European cousins.
And so this is why we Americans may sometimes come off as a little direct and urgent in our counsel. This is why President Trump demands seriousness and reciprocity from our friends here in Europe. The reason why, my friends, is because we care deeply. 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. (Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference).
And he offers the consolation of family, of peoples who may quarrel but cannot become estranged. "We have fought against each other, then reconciled, then fought, then reconciled again. And we have bled and died side by side on battlefields from Kapyong to Kandahar." (Ibid.) But he offers no apologies; context makes that impossible from his way of thinking. But beyond that it is meant as a challenge to generations of culture makers and intelligentsia that have, from his pint of view, made it their business to bring something up by tearing other things down. It is not critique that annoys the Secretary is is the cognitive cages within which critique is undertaken.
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The fundamental question we must answer at the outset is what exactly are we defending, because armies do not fight for abstractions. Armies fight for a people; armies fight for a nation. Armies fight for a way of life. And that is what we are defending: 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. (Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference).
And then the connection to trade (de-industrialization) and migration. None of these policies were inevitable--except perhaps as inevitable from the premises and goals embraced by elites after the 1980s. And that returns the Secretary to the theme of the fool. De-industrialization was a long term foolish choice. "It was a foolish but voluntary transformation of our economy that left us dependent on others for our needs and dangerously vulnerable to crisis." (Ibid.). Of course some might think that what was foolish was the unwillingness of those who embraced this orthodoxy to ruthlessly undertake all measures necessary to attain their goals. Secretary Rubio then seeks to recenter migration--not around individuals but about the internal stability of states. "Controlling who and how many people enter our countries, this is not an expression of xenophobia. It is not hate. It is a fundamental act of national sovereignty. And the failure to do so is not just an abdication of one of our most basic duties owed to our people. It is an urgent threat to the fabric of our societies and the survival of our civilization itself." (Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference).
At its root, of course, are the ordering premises through which the world can be rationalized, values constructed and actions judged against them. There is a lot to chew there:
An alliance ready to defend our people, to safeguard our interests, and to preserve the freedom of action that allows us to shape our own destiny – not one that exists to operate a global welfare state and atone for the purported sins of past generations. An alliance that does not allow its power to be outsourced, constrained, or subordinated to systems beyond its control; one that does not depend on others for the critical necessities of its national life; and one that does not maintain the polite pretense that our way of life is just one among many and that asks for permission before it acts. And above all, an alliance based on the recognition that we, the West, have inherited together – what we have inherited together is something that is unique and distinctive and irreplaceable, because this, after all, is the very foundation of the transatlantic bond.(Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference).
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And finally, we can no longer place the so-called global order above the vital interests of our people and our nations. We do not need to abandon the system of international cooperation we authored, and we don’t need to dismantle the global institutions of the old order that together we built. But these must be reformed. These must be rebuilt.(Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference).
Secretary of State Rubio then offers the evidence--all well known: Gaza, Ukraine, Iranian (and North Korean for that matter) nuclear ambitions. Also proffered was the effective indifference f the international institutional apparatus to critical non-state actors--for the Americans now most pressing the Hemispheric narco trafficking enterprises. And behind all of this is a barely concealed indictment of international law and lawyering, one that, to the Secretary appears to take pride in its self suffocation on its own internal affectations, histories, practices and conceits; "we cannot continue to allow those who blatantly and openly threaten our citizens and endanger our global stability to shield themselves behind abstractions of international law which they themselves routinely violate." (Ibid.). International lawyers would strongly object of course.
Secretary Rubio then ends with a full throated defense, a robust panegyric of, the West. That might, at first blush, be understood as directed to outsiders. Perhaps it makes more sense when understood as internal critique. One might then reasonably consider that this defense, this praise statement, was directed as a challenge and warning to the elites, so comfortably ensconced within the systems of privilege and control within the post-1980s order, that, as far as the Secretary was concerned, and with him the President, their time was, if not up, then facing what Secretary Rubio would hope to be a fatal challenge.
Secretary Rubio looks at the spectrum of criticism of America First and sees something quite different: weakness is a choice; self-denial is a choice, suicide is a choice, dissipation is a choice; decline is a choice.
And this is why we do not want our allies to be weak, because that makes us weaker. We want allies who can defend themselves so that no adversary will ever be tempted to test our collective strength. This is why we do not want our allies to be shackled by guilt and shame. We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization, and who, together with us, are willing and able to defend it.(Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference).
And what Secretary Rubio sees, specifically, when he encounters those who dismiss him and America First is this--an intense disdain for managed decline.
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And that is how Secretary Rubio ends his remarks: "We should be proud of what we achieved together in the last century, but now we must confront and embrace the opportunities of a new one – because yesterday is over, the future is inevitable, and our destiny together awaits." (Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference). It is all about the self-actualization of states--functioning optimally in one's environment to fulfill one's potential, "to become more and more of what one is"! (here)
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For those who came of age during the Presidencies of Messrs. Bush (Sr), Clinton, Bush (Jr), Obama, and to some extent Biden, Secretary Rubio offers nothing but disdain and rebuke. There is little here that could possibly resonate with the generation that came of age under the tutelage of an intelligentsia, and their progeny larded into the highest levels of public and private power, whose orienting premises, world views, values and objectives were trashed by Secretary Rubio. Not just trashed but characterized as a fundamental betrayal that requires substantial rectification. That rectification might be structural, but also personal. One might think the temptation to engage and criticize would be difficult to overcome. But that sort of critique is unlikely to happen--other than to dismiss the entire enterprise as unworthy of serious engagement. To criticize Secretary Rubio's assertions might be viewed as acknowledging that they are weighty enough to merit criticism. The harshest punishment is to trivialize them (eg Secretary Rubio was nice to the Europeans and made them happy; we can work around that), or to pretend they were just never uttered. Still, one has at last a much clearer picture of America's new era ideology, a long step forward from the relative incoherence of the first Trump Presidency on that score. More fundamentally, of course, it is difficult to critique in the absence of a common language. The two camps each rejects the formative premises of the other; without a common conceptual base, what is there to argue about?
But talk is cheaper and transactional approaches tend to value them less than action. We will see what comes of all of this.
The full text of Sectary Rubio's remarks follows.
SECRETARY RUBIO: Thank you very much. We gather here today as members of a historic alliance, an alliance that saved and changed the world. When this conference began in 1963, it was in a nation – actually, it was on a continent – that was divided against itself. The line between communism and freedom ran through the heart of Germany. The first barbed fences of the Berlin Wall had gone up just two years prior.
And just months before that first conference, before our predecessors first met here, here in Munich, the Cuban Missile Crisis had brought the world to the brink of nuclear destruction. Even as World War II still burned fresh in the memory of Americans and Europeans alike, we found ourselves staring down the barrel of a new global catastrophe – one with the potential for a new kind of destruction, more apocalyptic and final than anything before in the history of mankind.
At the time of that first gathering, Soviet communism was on the march. Thousands of years of Western civilization hung in the balance. At that time, victory was far from certain. But we were 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. And together, Europe and America prevailed and a continent was rebuilt. Our people prospered. In time, the East and West blocs were reunited. A civilization was once again made whole.
That infamous wall that had cleaved this nation into two came down, and with it an evil empire, and the East and West became one again. But the euphoria of this triumph 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; that the rules-based global order – an overused term – would now replace the national interest; and that we would now live in a world without borders where everyone became a citizen of the world.
This was a foolish idea that ignored both human nature and it ignored the lessons of over 5,000 years of recorded human history. And it has cost us dearly. In this delusion, we embraced a dogmatic vision of free and unfettered trade, even as some nations protected their economies and subsidized their companies to systematically undercut ours – shuttering our plants, resulting in large parts of our societies being deindustrialized, shipping millions of working and middle-class jobs overseas, and handing control of our critical supply chains to both adversaries and rivals.
We increasingly outsourced our sovereignty to international institutions while many nations invested in massive welfare states at the cost of maintaining the ability to defend themselves. This, even as other countries have invested in the most rapid military buildup in all of human history and have not hesitated to use hard power to pursue their own interests. To appease a climate cult, we have imposed energy policies on ourselves that are impoverishing our people, even as our competitors exploit oil and coal and natural gas and anything else – not just to power their economies, but to use as leverage against our own.
And in a pursuit of a world without borders, we opened our doors to an unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people. We made these mistakes together, and now, together, we owe it to our people to face those facts and to move forward, to rebuild.
Under President Trump, the United States of America will once again take on the task of renewal and restoration, driven by a vision of a future as proud, as sovereign, and as vital as our civilization’s past. And while we are prepared, if necessary, to do this alone, it is our preference and it is our hope to do this together with you, our friends here in Europe.
For the United States and Europe, we belong together. America was founded 250 years ago, but the roots began here on this continent long before. The man who settled and built the nation of my birth arrived on our shores carrying the memories and the traditions and the Christian faith of their ancestors as a sacred inheritance, an unbreakable link between the old world and the new.
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.
And so this is why we Americans may sometimes come off as a little direct and urgent in our counsel. This is why President Trump demands seriousness and reciprocity from our friends here in Europe. The reason why, my friends, is because we care deeply. 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. We want Europe to be strong. We believe that Europe must survive, because the two great wars of the last century serve for us as history’s constant reminder that ultimately, our destiny is and will always be intertwined with yours, because we know – (applause) – because we know that the fate of Europe will never be irrelevant to our own.
National security, which this conference is largely about, is not merely series of technical questions – how much we spend on defense or where, how we deploy it, these are important questions. They are. But they are not the fundamental one. The fundamental question we must answer at the outset is what exactly are we defending, because armies do not fight for abstractions. Armies fight for a people; armies fight for a nation. Armies fight for a way of life. And that is what we are defending: 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.
It was here in Europe where the ideas that planted the seeds of liberty that changed the world were born. It was here in Europe where the world – which gave the world the rule of law, the universities, and the scientific revolution. It was this continent that produced the genius of Mozart and Beethoven, of Dante and Shakespeare, of Michelangelo and Da Vinci, of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. And this is the place where the vaulted ceilings of the Sistine Chapel and the towering spires of the great cathedral in Cologne, they testify not just to the greatness of our past or to a faith in God that inspired these marvels. They foreshadow the wonders that await us in our future. But only if we are unapologetic in our heritage and proud of this common inheritance can we together begin the work of envisioning and shaping our economic and our political future.
Deindustrialization was not inevitable. It was a conscious policy choice, a decades-long economic undertaking that stripped our nations of their wealth, of their productive capacity, and of their independence. And the loss of our supply chain sovereignty was not a function of a prosperous and healthy system of global trade. It was foolish. It was a foolish but voluntary transformation of our economy that left us dependent on others for our needs and dangerously vulnerable to crisis.
Mass migration is not, was not, isn’t some fringe concern of little consequence. It was and continues to be a crisis which is transforming and destabilizing societies all across the West. Together we can reindustrialize our economies and rebuild our capacity to defend our people. But the work of this new alliance should not be focused just on military cooperation and reclaiming the industries of the past. It should also be focused on, together, advancing our mutual interests and new frontiers, unshackling our ingenuity, our creativity, and the dynamic spirit to build a new Western century. Commercial space travel and cutting-edge artificial intelligence; industrial automation and flex manufacturing; creating a Western supply chain for critical minerals not vulnerable to extortion from other powers; and a unified effort to compete for market share in the economies of the Global South. Together we can not only take back control of our own industries and supply chains – we can prosper in the areas that will define the 21st century.
But we must also gain control of our national borders. Controlling who and how many people enter our countries, this is not an expression of xenophobia. It is not hate. It is a fundamental act of national sovereignty. And the failure to do so is not just an abdication of one of our most basic duties owed to our people. It is an urgent threat to the fabric of our societies and the survival of our civilization itself.
And finally, we can no longer place the so-called global order above the vital interests of our people and our nations. We do not need to abandon the system of international cooperation we authored, and we don’t need to dismantle the global institutions of the old order that together we built. But these must be reformed. These must be rebuilt.
For example, the United Nations still has tremendous potential to be a tool for good in the world. But we cannot ignore that today, on the most pressing matters before us, it has no answers and has played virtually no role. It could not solve the war in Gaza. Instead, it was American leadership that freed captives from barbarians and brought about a fragile truce. It had not solved the war in Ukraine. It took American leadership and partnership with many of the countries here today just to bring the two sides to the table in search of a still-elusive peace.
It was powerless to constrain the nuclear program of radical Shia clerics in Tehran. That required 14 bombs dropped with precision from American B-2 bombers. And it was unable to address the threat to our security from a narcoterrorist dictator in Venezuela. Instead, it took American Special Forces to bring this fugitive to justice.
In a perfect world, all of these problems and more would be solved by diplomats and strongly worded resolutions. But we do not live in a perfect world, and we cannot continue to allow those who blatantly and openly threaten our citizens and endanger our global stability to shield themselves behind abstractions of international law which they themselves routinely violate.
This is the path that President Trump and the United States has embarked upon. It is the path we ask you here in Europe to join us on. It is a path we have walked together before and hope to walk together again. For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding – its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe.
But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, it was contracting. Europe was in ruins. Half of it lived behind an Iron Curtain and the rest looked like it would soon follow. The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come.
Against that backdrop, then, as now, many came to believe that the West’s age of dominance had come to an end and that our future was destined to be a faint and feeble echo of our past. But together, our predecessors recognized that decline was a choice, and it was a choice they refused to make. This is what we did together once before, and this is what President Trump and the United States want to do again now, together with you.
And this is why we do not want our allies to be weak, because that makes us weaker. We want allies who can defend themselves so that no adversary will ever be tempted to test our collective strength. This is why we do not want our allies to be shackled by guilt and shame. We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization, and who, together with us, are willing and able to defend it.
And this is why we do not want allies to rationalize the broken status quo rather than reckon with what is necessary to fix it, for we in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline. We do not seek to separate, but to revitalize an old friendship and renew the greatest civilization in human history. What we want is a reinvigorated alliance that recognizes that what has ailed our societies is not just a set of bad policies but a malaise of hopelessness and complacency. An alliance – the alliance that we want is one that is not paralyzed into inaction by fear – fear of climate change, fear of war, fear of technology. Instead, we want an alliance that boldly races into the future. And the only fear we have is the fear of the shame of not leaving our nations prouder, stronger, and wealthier for our children.
An alliance ready to defend our people, to safeguard our interests, and to preserve the freedom of action that allows us to shape our own destiny – not one that exists to operate a global welfare state and atone for the purported sins of past generations. An alliance that does not allow its power to be outsourced, constrained, or subordinated to systems beyond its control; one that does not depend on others for the critical necessities of its national life; and one that does not maintain the polite pretense that our way of life is just one among many and that asks for permission before it acts. And above all, an alliance based on the recognition that we, the West, have inherited together – what we have inherited together is something that is unique and distinctive and irreplaceable, because this, after all, is the very foundation of the transatlantic bond.
Acting together in this way, we will not just help recover a sane foreign policy. It will restore to us a clearer sense of ourselves. It will restore a place in the world, and in so doing, it will rebuke and deter the forces of civilizational erasure that today menace both America and Europe alike.
So in a time of headlines heralding the end of the transatlantic era, let it be known and clear to all that this is neither our goal nor our wish – because for us Americans, our home may be in the Western Hemisphere, but we will always be a child of Europe. (Applause.)
Our story began with an Italian explorer whose adventure into the great unknown to discover a new world brought Christianity to the Americas – and became the legend that defined the imagination of a our pioneer nation.
Our first colonies were built by English settlers, to whom we owe not just the language we speak but the whole of our political and legal system. Our frontiers were shaped by Scots-Irish – that proud, hearty clan from the hills of Ulster that gave us Davy Crockett and Mark Twain and Teddy Roosevelt and Neil Armstrong.
Our great midwestern heartland was built by German farmers and craftsmen who transformed empty plains into a global agricultural powerhouse – and by the way, dramatically upgraded the quality of American beer. (Laughter.)
Our expansion into the interior followed the footsteps of French fur traders and explorers whose names, by the way, still adorn the street signs and towns’ names all across the Mississippi Valley. Our horses, our ranches, our rodeos – the entire romance of the cowboy archetype that became synonymous with the American West – these were born in Spain. And our largest and most iconic city was named New Amsterdam before it was named New York.
And do you know that in the year that my country was founded, Lorenzo and Catalina Geroldi lived in Casale Monferrato in the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. And Jose and Manuela Reina lived in Sevilla, Spain. I don’t know what, if anything, they knew about the 13 colonies which had gained their independence from the British empire, but here’s what I am certain of: They could have never imagined that 250 years later, one of their direct descendants would be back here today on this continent as the chief diplomat of that infant nation. And yet here I am, reminded by my own story that both our histories and our fates will always be linked.
Together we rebuilt a shattered continent in the wake of two devastating world wars. When we found ourselves divided once again by the Iron Curtain, the free West linked arms with the courageous dissidents struggling against tyranny in the East to defeat Soviet communism. We have fought against each other, then reconciled, then fought, then reconciled again. And we have bled and died side by side on battlefields from Kapyong to Kandahar.
And I am here today to leave it clear that America is charting the path for a new century of prosperity, and that once again we want to do it together with you, our cherished allies and our oldest friends. (Applause.)
We want to do it together with you, with a Europe that is proud of its heritage and of its history; with a Europe that has the spirit of creation of liberty that sent ships out into uncharted seas and birthed our civilization; with a Europe that has the means to defend itself and the will to survive. We should be proud of what we achieved together in the last century, but now we must confront and embrace the opportunities of a new one – because yesterday is over, the future is inevitable, and our destiny together awaits. Thank you. (Applause.)
QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, I’m not sure you heard the sigh of relief through this hall when we were just listening to what I would interpret as a message of reassurance, of partnership. You spoke of intertwined relations between the United States and Europe – reminds me of statements made decades ago by your predecessors when the discussion was: is actually America a European power? Is America a power in Europe? Thank you for offering this message of reassurance about our partnership.
This is actually not the first time that Marco Rubio is here at the Munich Security Conference – been here before a couple of times, but it’s the first time he has been and he is the speaker as Secretary of State. So thank you again. We have only a couple of minutes now for just a few questions, and if I may, we collected questions from the audience.
One of the key issues here yesterday, today, is, of course – continues to be the question of how to deal with the war in Ukraine. Many of us in the discussions over the last day, the last 24 hours, have voiced their impression that the Russians – let me put it colloquially – the Russians are playing for time, they’re not really interested in a meaningful settlement. There is no indication that they’re willing to compromise on any of their maximalist objectives. Offer to us, if you could, your assessment of where we are and where you think we can go.
SECRETARY RUBIO: Well, I think where we are at this point is that the issues at play that have to be – here’s the good news. The good news is that the issues that need to be confronted to end this war have been narrowed. That’s the good news. The bad news is they’ve been narrowed to the hardest questions to answer, and work remains to be done in that front. I hear your point about – the answer is we don’t know. We don’t know the Russians are serious about ending the war; they say they are – and under what terms they were willing to do it and whether we can find terms that are acceptable to Ukraine that Russia will always agree to. But we’re going to continue to test it.
In the meantime, everything else continues to happen. The United States has imposed additional sanctions on Russia’s oil. In our conversations with India, we’ve gotten their commitment to stop buying additional Russian oil. Europe has taken its set of steps moving forward. The Pearl Program continues in which American weaponry is being sold for the Ukrainian war effort. So all these things continue. Nothing has stopped in the interim. So there’s no buying of time here in that regard.
What we can’t answer – but we’re going to continue to test – is whether there is an outcome that Ukraine can live with and that Russia will accept. And I would say it’s been elusive up to this point. We’ve made progress in the sense that for the first time, I think in years, at least at the technical level, there were military officials from both sides that met together last week, and there’ll be – and there’ll be meetings again on Tuesday, although it may not be the same group of people.
Look, we’re going to continue to do everything we can to play this role of bringing this war to an end. I don’t think anybody in this room would be against a negotiated settlement to this war so long as the conditions are just and sustainable. And that’s what we aim to achieve, and we’re going to continue to try to achieve it, even as all these other things continue to happen on the sanctions front and so forth.
QUESTION: Thank you very much. I’m sure if we had more time there were many questions on Ukraine. But let me conclude by asking a question about something entirely different. The next speaker here in just a couple of minutes will be the foreign minister of China. When you served in the Senate, sir, people considered you a kind of a China hawk.
SECRETARY RUBIO: So did they.
QUESTION: So did they?
SECRETARY RUBIO: Yeah.
QUESTION: The – we know that there will be, in about two months’ time, a summit meeting between President Trump and President Xi Jinping. Give us your expectation. Are you optimistic? Can there be a, quote/unquote, “deal” with China? What do you expect?
SECRETARY RUBIO: Well, I would say this. The two largest economies in the world, two of the big powers on the planet, we have an obligation to communicate with them and talk, and so do many of you on a bilateral basis as well. I mean, it would be geopolitical malpractice to not be in conversations with China. I would say this: because we’re two large countries with huge global interests, our national interests will often not align. Their national interests and ours will not align, and we owe it to the world to try to manage those as best we can, obviously avoiding conflict, both economic and worse. And that – so it’s important for us to have communications with them in that regard.
On areas in which our interests are aligned, I think we can work together to make positive impact on the world, and we seek opportunities to do that with them. So – but we have to have a relationship with China. And any of the countries represented here today are going to have to have a relationship with China, always understanding that nothing that we agree to could come at the expense of our national interest. And frankly, we expect China to act in their national interest, as we expect every nation-state to act in their national interest. And the goal of diplomacy is to try to navigate those times in which our national interests come into conflict with one another, always hoping to do it peacefully.
I think we also have a special obligation because whatever happens between the U.S. and China on trade has a global implication. So there are long-term challenges that we face that we’re going to have to confront that are going to be irritants in our relationship with China. That’s not just true for the United States; that’s true for the broader West. But I do think we need to try to manage those the best we can to avoid unnecessary friction if it’s possible. But no one is under any illusions. There are some fundamental challenges between our countries and between the West and China that will continue for the foreseeable future for a variety of reasons, and it’s some of the things we hope to work together with you on.
QUESTION: Thank you very much, Mr. Secretary. We’ve run out of time. I’m sorry that I can’t take questions from all those who wanted to ask questions. Mr. Secretary of State, thank you for this message of reassurance. I think this is much appreciated here in the hall. Let’s offer a round of applause. (Applause.)
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