US Secretary of State Marco Rubio received a standing ovation at last week’s Munich Security Conference in Germany after delivering a speech the conference chair, retired German diplomat Wolfgang Ischinger, effusively described as “reassuring.” Speaking for the entire audience, he drew Rubio’s attention to “the sigh of relief” heard “through this hall.” The timing was perfect. Europe was desperately looking for reassurance from a nation whose image had turned diabolical after a special operation, the abduction of sitting Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in his bedroom, was followed by several weeks of what Europeans will remember as the great Greenland standoff.

Though evoked as early as his January 2025 inauguration, US President Donald Trump began 2026 by making Greenland the scene of his latest geopolitical psychodrama. He confirmed a personal ambition many had written off as simply wacky. The master of the Oval Office threatened to militarily capture a vast piece of European territory, apparently to satisfy his appetite for Lebensraum (living space).  

Or should we call it Wirtschaftsraum (economic space), because most people don’t see Greenland as a space for living? Unlike Gaza or even North Korea, it seems unlikely that the great New York real estate mogul addicted to orange makeup has a plan for building another of his stunning beach resorts on Greenland’s arctic shores. Looking back, it’s relatively easy to understand why Adolf Hitler felt somewhat confined between Germany’s post-World War I borders. But can a credible case be made that the United States lacks either living or economic space?

None of the Europeans in the hall in Munich failed to understand the reason for Ischinger’s feeling of reassurance. At the same conference in 2025, newly installed US Vice President JD Vance delivered a speech that shocked and humiliated the audience. It played out as a frontal assault on Europe’s social, political and economic culture.

The dominant mood in the room was apprehension. After the Greenland episode, many Europeans had decided that the Trump administration had become dominated by what California Congressman Ro Khanna has called “the Epstein class.” The New York Times columnist Ezra Klein glossed this epithet as Khanna’s term for “the rich and powerful people who act and think like they’re above the law and, and perhaps above morality.” In other words, a den of demons singing to the same hymnal as sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

The Europeans were thus in dire need of the very relief and reassurance Ischinger acknowledged. Rubio obliged them by repeatedly reminding his audience that Europe and the US were yoked “together” — a word that appeared 28 times in his speech — by a “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.” (Impertinent question for the Epstein class: Do heirs always fall?)

Rubio’s superficially reassuring clichés

If each of the items in Rubio’s list of factors of togetherness had anything like the force he attributes to them, his argument might sound not just reassuring but even convincing. Alas, no one needed to be convinced, it was enough to be “reassured.” At one point, when the US Secretary of State rhetorically asserted that “we will always be a child of Europe,” the audience broke into applause. For a brief moment, they may have felt comforted by the idea that Rubio had put them in the role of “Daddy,” a term NATO chief Mark Rutte had previously applied to Trump.

But do any of Rubio’s claims about a shared cultural and political identity stand up, even to superficial scrutiny? He invokes a sense of “shared history,” but how much of that history has been truly shared? When you think about it, what does the sharing of history mean? The US shared much of its history with native American tribes and with African slave traders. But has that translated into a sense of mutual purpose among the participants? Much of the history “shared” by the US and Europe — but also among the European nations themselves — has been dominated by war, rivalry, suspicion and competition for empire. Shared conflict creates familiarity, but it rarely produces unbreakable bonds or the sense of being united in a common vision of the future.

Throughout the speech, Rubio stresses the religious bond. But is it logical to claim that the constitutional separation of church and state in the US combined with what everyone recognizes as the radical and practically total secularization of nearly all European nations can signify a sharing of “Christian faith” across the Atlantic ocean? Yes, you can find churches that built over many centuries, but if only a smattering of the faithful visit them for anything other than touristic reasons, and if their faith turns out to manifest itself as little more than a compulsive repetition of inherited habits, can any rational observer take the existence of a transatlantic civilization united by the Christian faith seriously?

Just like Vance a year ago, Rubio berates the practice of welcoming immigrants, suspected of diluting the purity of the “civilization.” What he’s hinting at here and elsewhere in his speech is what he perceives as the racial identity associated with European roots: whiteness. Rubio cites his own case: the man everyone identifies as the scion of a Cuban family, who can prove his legitimacy by tracing his ancestry back to two European sources Piedmont-Sardinia (Italy) and Saville (Spain).

Is Europe a thing?

Then there’s his evocation of “culture, heritage, language, ancestry.” What does that mean in today’s European context? Even after constituting itself initially as a “Common Market” and then as the “European Union,” the concept of Europe remains that of a collection of geographically contiguous nations. It represents a bewildering diversity of elements, so much so that the “Union” is perceived effectively and embarrassingly for its own citizens as little more than a sprawling and generally annoying bureaucracy.

Is the idea of defense the only key to creating a sense of European unity? That seems to reflect the dominant thinking of the current generation of leaders. The Russia–Ukraine conflict has revealed that the only identifiable force preventing the Union from falling into political incoherence is its nations’ historical dependence on the US nuclear umbrella and the dollar. The wizards of Europe created the euro in the hope of rivaling the dollar, but that experiment has failed. To quote former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis: Europe is “a continent united by different languages” and “divided by a common currency.”

Rubio’s mission was to convince his audience that the European relationship with the US is reassuringly solid. Ischinger appears convinced, but are the rest of his colleagues in the room? Trump 2.0’s frankly aggressive policies and unpredictable actions across the globe have more than raised eyebrows. European leaders increasingly allude to what should appear obvious: that the vaunted Union has lost its footing. It is held together by the fragile ropes of its increasingly bloated and undemocratic bureaucracy. From a geopolitical point of view, the 27-state confederation based in Brussels, Belgium, functions primarily as a motley collection of US vassal states. It’s the strings that tie the nations to Washington that keep the idea of Europe alive.

That may explain why the idea of “strategic autonomy,” initially formulated by General Charles de Gaulle, has once again come to the fore. France’s lame duck President Emmanual Macron first evoked the ambition of achieving Europe’s strategic autonomy after only a few months in office back in 2017. He occasionally returns to the concept, though framing it as an aspiration rather than a viable program. But the concept is desperately needed, even if no one seems capable of implementing it. At the same Munich conference, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz warned that Washington’s “claim to leadership is disputed, perhaps squandered.” Who can replace the leader?

Unless we conclude that Europe’s current “leaders” (who don’t even lead their own nations) are as brainless in reality as the rhetoric they feel continually obliged to spout in public, reaffirming their liberal “values” and commitment to noble causes, it’s doubtful that many of them would echo Ischinger’s feeling of being “reassured” by Rubio’s concentrated but slightly disguised assault on their political culture.

Two incompatible systems at the core of a single civilization?

Rubio’s tone was tepid in comparison to Vance’s, but in some ways his speech was more aggressive. On two occasions, he excoriated a bugbear he calls “massive welfare states,” as if to say to the Europeans: “How foolish of you to impose universal healthcare on a population that doesn’t deserve it?”

Personal insecurity is the psychological pillar of the US economy. It explains American greatness just as the welfare state explains Europe’s inconsequentiality. Most Americans take that as common sense, but even the current roster of inept European leaders understand that the price of stability everywhere in Europe is the maintenance of the web of safeguards the European nations have provided for a population otherwise exposed to domination and exploitation by the Epstein class that rules the US.

Europe is currently locked into a lose-lose scenario that was created by US President Joe Biden’s administration and sealed by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s impromptu visit to the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv in the spring of 2022. That was the decisive moment when BoJo gave instructions to a captive Ukrainian regime to cancel an initialed peace agreement and prolong a war it could never win. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy no doubt assumed that with the might of NATO behind him, victory was assured. What he was prevented from understanding is that Washington felt no urgency about their mission. What they wanted was regime change in Russia, even if it required years of combat and millions of casualties. Biden made it clear when he repeatedly insisted that it could last “as long as it takes.”

The nasty surprise for the Europeans came last year when, having wholeheartedly acted as loyal vassals to Washington, their “benign” overlord, Biden, was replaced by the “malignant” Trump, who promised to end the war within 24 hours, essentially by recognizing the reality on the ground: Ukraine’s military defeat. To prove they weren’t the vassals of a diabolical transatlantic leader, they had to demonstrate to one another that they remained faithful to the agenda of their former angelic overlord, Biden. That inevitably aggravated the sentiment not just of having lost their compass, but also of being nobody’s masters, not even of their own populations.

In such circumstances, should we be surprised that the favorability ratings of France’s Macron stand at 16%, Germany’s Merz at 21% and UK’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer at 23%? Should we similarly be surprised that despite a concerted effort to inspire fear of the Russian bear invading Europe — a message enthusiastically endorsed and amplified by Europe’s mainstream media — support for increased defense spending in France has fallen from 40% in 2025 to 28% and in Germany from 37% to 24%?

Ischinger may feel reassured, but that doesn’t change the simple fact that European leaders are in a bind. They have lost all credibility with their own electorates. They have been pushed by interests beyond their national borders to commitments that make little sense. They remain stuck in a viral, often hysterical hatred and fear of an imaginary enemy that obliges them to prolong their commitment to a war that has already undermined their own economies and destroyed Ukraine, the object they were recruited to rescue. At the same time, their populations have come to perceive the US — the commanding presence in NATO — as a dangerous adversary.

Ischinger’s first question to Rubio was about US commitment to Ukraine. Rubio predictably waffled a meaningless, “reassuring” response. Europe now finds itself in the most awkward situation, abandoned by the US while still taking orders from Washington about who they should hate and refuse to do business with: Russia and China. Talk about Scylla and Charybdis or, more colloquially, a rock and a hard place.

And speaking of rocks, now they’re being invited to feel reassured by the comforting fact that Rubio only throws rhetorical rocks and not physical bombs at them.  

*[The Devil’s Advocatepursues the tradition Fair Observer began in 2017 with the launch of our “Devil’s Dictionary.” It does so with a slight change of focus, moving from language itself — political and journalistic rhetoric — to the substantial issues in the news. Read more ofthe Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary. The news we consume deserves to be seen from an outsider’s point of view. And who could be more outside official discourse than Old Nick himself?]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.