The Secretary of State goes to Munich
By Bruce Bawer
It was a year ago that Vice President J .D. Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference sent European elites into paroxysms of rage. Europe, he complained, was in retreat from “some of its most fundamental values – values shared with the United States of America.” He offered examples: the EU planned “to shut down social media” that refused to pull “hateful content”; Germany was raiding the homes of “antifeminists”; Britain was trying people for praying near abortion clinics; and the continued influx into Europe of “millions of unvetted immigrants” threatened to transform Europe forever.
It was a powerful volley of truth bombs. And the audience in that Munich auditorium, as well as in the Western European corridors of power and legacy newsrooms, hated it. How dare America lecture Europe? Was Trump out to shatter the postwar Western order? Some of Vance’s lines seemed tailor-made to wound fragile European sensibilities. “In Washington,” Vance announced, “there is a new sheriff in town.” Ouch: this cowboy stuff, whether served up by Reagan or George W. Bush, never went over well in the effete halls of Westminster or the Quai d’Orsay. The left’s new buzzwords, “misinformation” and “disinformation,” observed Vance, were right out of the Soviet lexicon: this, too, put more than a few noses out of joint.
Then there was this line: “Contrary to what you might hear a couple mountains over in Davos, the citizens of all of our nations don’t generally think of themselves as educated animals or as interchangeable cogs of a global economy, and it’s hardly surprising that they don’t want to be shuffled about or relentlessly ignored by their leaders.” In that single sentence, Vance managed to scoff at globalism, to imply that he knew the minds of Western European voters better than their own leaders did, and to accuse those leaders of ignoring or condescending to them. He was right on all counts, of course – indeed, as I wrote at the time, it was “a speech for the ages.” But it was also a speech delivered de haut en bas – a lecture delivered by a boss (or an underboss) to his underlings.
On Saturday it was Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s turn to address the same crowd. His message was identical – but his approach was remarkably different. It was classic bad cop, good cop. While Vance engaged in finger-pointing, Rubio stressed solidarity; while Vance cast himself as a voice of authority, Rubio opted for humility: “We gather here today,” he said, “as members of a historic alliance, an alliance that saved and changed the world.” After World War II, the West’s victory over Soviet communism “was far from certain”; but, strengthened by their “common purpose,” Europe and America won: the Wall fell, and “East and West became one again.” Rubio could, with justice, have described America as the savior and protector of Western Europe’s freedom; instead, deploying a polite fiction, he depicted the wartime Atlantic alliance and the history of NATO as joint efforts.
When Rubio came to the ticklish part, he handled it gently, blaming both America and Europe for the post-Cold War 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.” But it all proved disastrous: in the U.S., a prosperous manufacturing region became the Rust Belt; in Europe, defense budgets were slashed while welfare outlays surged; a “climate cult” led to suicidal energy policies; and the lust for “a world without borders” precipitated “an unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people.”
It was a splendid précis of an era of folly. But Rubio, again, didn’t point fingers. “We made these mistakes together, and now, together, we owe it to our people to face those facts and to move forward, to rebuild.” For, he said, “we belong together….We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share.” Rubio could’ve echoed Vance’s rhetoric about Davos, about Trump being the new sheriff, and about the EU’s policing of social media. But instead he came very close to apologizing for Trump’s bluntness: if “we Americans…sometimes come off as a little direct and urgent in our counsel,” he averred, it’s only “because we care deeply” about a continent and people to which we “are connected spiritually and…culturally.”
And so it went. Where Vance had catalogued some of our allies’ current offenses against democracy, Rubio celebrated ways in which settlers from those same countries had shaped America. Where Vance had talked to Europe as if to an errant child, Rubio turned the relationship around: America “will always be a child of Europe.” Vance sought to shock Western European leaders out of their collective stupor; Rubio, seeking to sell exactly the same goods, went with an almost antithetical sales pitch, rich in flattery and humility and Lincolnesque appeals to the mystic chords of memory. He was tossing olive branches all over the place. Did it make a difference? Well, he got more applause than Vance did. And at least some European commentators appreciated the shift in style even as they recognized the continuity in message. (The Times of London, for example, summed Rubio’s performance up as follows: “After J.D. Vance’s tirade last year, Trump’s secretary of state gave a warm speech at the Munich security conference, but the subtext remained America First.”)
Yet Rubio, like Vance, couldn’t bridge the ideological gulf that divides the Trump administration and the Western European political establishment. All that Trump and his team want, really, is to see European leaders standing up for their countries, their people, their freedom. But European leaders and legacy media can only see Trump as a bully. They’re like spoiled kids who got accustomed to being showered with lavish gifts but whose parents now expect them to do household chores. (In Norway’s Aftenposten, Christina Pletten compared Rubio to a violent husband who, after beating up his wife, turns up with flowers and chocolate, insisting that he doesn’t want a divorce.) In his own speech at the conference on the day before Rubio’s, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz distanced himself from what he called Trump’s “culture war,” asserting that in Germany, “freedom of expression ends when it violates human dignity and the Constitution” – in other words, when it starts to make the ruling class uncomfortable.
Meanwhile French President Emmanuel Macron, in his own Munich speech, mocked the MAGA view of Europe as having an “over-regulated, listless economy,” as being threatened by “barbaric migrations that would corrupt its precious traditions,” and as – here we go again – crushing free speech. European governments crushing free speech? C’est absurde! As Macron explained, silencing dissident views isn’t about crushing free speech: it’s about not allowing “alternative facts” to “claim the same right of place as truth itself.” And who, you ask, will decide where the truth lies? Why, people like Merz and Macron, naturellement.
For MAGA voters, as for America’s Founders and for Abraham Lincoln, democracy means government of, by, and for the people. But for the likes of Merz and Macron, as for all of the EU eminences, it means marching in lockstep to their globalist tune. Their refusal to end their own war on freedom, to address the reality of Europe’s economic decline, and to reverse the continent’s relentless Islamization suggests that no speech by any American is going to change their tune.
For heaven’s sake, if they could silence Rubio, they would.
First published in Front Page Magazine
