Rubio with JD Vance
Rubio repeated the Trump administration’s regular complaints about neoliberal globalisation, mass migration and ‘a climate cult’ threatening ‘Western civilisation’.
Any doubt that European capitalism prefers to remain the junior partner of the United States was removed by the standing ovation the Munich Security Conference gave to Marco Rubio last Saturday.
The European ruling classes had a collective heart attack when JD Vancedenounced them for decadence and backed the far right at last year’s conference. Rubio, Donald Trump’s secretary of state, adopted a much softer, mollifying tone.
He was full of praise for European civilisation, and declared that the US “will always be a child of Europe”.
Conference chair Wolfgang Ischinger told Rubio there was “a sigh of relief in this hall” after his speech.
But, if anything, the substance of what Rubio said was worse than Vance’s speech. Rubio repeated the Trump administration’s regular complaints about neoliberal globalisation, mass migration and “a climate cult” threatening “Western civilisation” in the US as well as Europe. He underlined his message by leaving Munich to visit two far right European governments in Slovakia and Hungary.
Rubio also sang a paean of praise for Western imperialism. He said, “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 Christopher 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”. These “would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map”.
Various commentators have wondered whether Rubio was implying it would have been better if Adolf Hitler had won the Second World War. After all, it was the Soviet army, under the banner of a “godless communist” ideology, that bore the main burden of smashing the Nazi war machine.
History aside, this is the first time since the rise of the Civil Rights movement during the 1950s that the US government has openly espoused white supremacy.
Rubio was articulating the ideology behind Ice. He spelled out its international implications. “We in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline.”
In reality, the rise of China means US imperialism lacks the power to reinstate the global domination it enjoyed after 1945.
Nevertheless, the second Trump administration has gone on the offensive in the Western Hemisphere—demanding Greenland, kidnapping Venezuela’s president and starving Cuba. Moreover, Trump is getting a taste for using the Pentagon’s vast military capabilities.
Rubio reassured his audience that neither “the West’s age of dominance” nor “the transatlantic era” was over. He underlined that this means higher defence spending from Nato’s European member states.
The tensions within Western imperialism remain.
Rubio skipped a meeting with European leaders about the Ukraine peace talks with Russia. But it’s very unlikely that even Trump will pull out of Nato. The Pentagon’s European bases are key means of US global power protection.
Even so, as the administration’s new National Defense Strategy makes clear, deterring Russia will mainly be a European task.
It was the German defence and foreign ministers who led the standing ovation for Rubio. Nevertheless, chancellor Friedrich Merz said at Munich that Europe “must become a global political power with its own security strategy”. He announced he’s starting discussions about “European nuclear deterrence” with French president Emmanuel Macron.
Unlike Britain, France has nuclear capabilities that don’t depend on US technology. Macron talks about the need for European “strategic autonomy” from Washington. If he and Merz start on the difficult road to achieving this goal, you can be sure Trump and Rubio will suddenly rediscover the traditional US dislike for too much European independence.
