Why the European establishment stood up and cheered Rubio after he insulted them
The US Secretary of State's speech in Munich has served as a litmus test to determine who has their eyes open and who still desperately wants to be fooled.
It was an incredible scene. Following a speech at the Munich Security Conference in which he insulted Europeans, essentially saying the US should dictate how they run their internal affairs in order to save them from themselves, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio received a tentative but eventually full-throated standing ovation. In now-famous video footage, the European politicians and thought leaders sitting in the room (including EU commissioners, the former NATO secretary general, the German defence minister and the EU foreign policy chief), can be seen hesitating at first when they see the Americans in the front row dutifully leap to their feet after Rubio’s speech. They had to make a split-second decision. And they chose to join in the standing ovation and beat their hands together so thunderously it looked like old footage from the Soviet Union in 1950.
That spectacle has caused a huge amount of debate online over the past two days over why they did it. Was it merely a gesture to try to strengthen Rubio’s position against JD Vance because they prefer the secretary’s softer (yet still harsh) approach? Was it an unthinking reflex by European politicians used to giving such gestures for diplomacy purposes? Was it genuine ideological agreement with Rubio’s message trashing the rules-based order and decrying Europe allowing in immigrants? Or were the leaders so desperate for a return to ‘normal’ that they chose to focus on Rubio’s evocation of a shared American-European culture rather than on the threatening and troubling messages in the rest of his speech? There were many different answers floating around social media.
As I wrote last week, the most convincing answer is the latter. Most of the people in power in Europe today, and certainly the establishment Atlanticists who dominate and run the MSC, are falling into the temptation to swallow the MAGA narrative and get on board the Trump train, because it is the easiest path of least resistance. The MAGA regime is telling Europeans to “sit back, take a deep breath” (as the US Treasury Secretary put it in Davos two weeks ago) and ride the wave because it will be the least painful choice for them. And so many of our leaders, from Meloni to Orban to von der Leyen to Starmer to Merz have been willing to at least pay lip service to hopping on that train over the past year to varying degrees.
To fully understand why the Europeans in the room cheered, and why their public reaction doesn’t seem to match what they were apparently telling people privately, let’s first look at what Rubio actually said. Much of the American and European media bizarrely covered this speech as a peace offering to Europe. They must have been watching a different speech than I was. The speech was a reiteration of JD Vance’s threatening and offensive MSC speech a year earlier - just delivered in a slightly more familiar diplomatic tone with a few niceties thrown in between the insults.
“We in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline,” he told the conference, promising to restore the dominant “place in the world” of European culture and to “rebuke and deter the forces of civilisational erasure that today menace both America and Europe alike.”
“Rubio’s offer was not one of partnership among equals,” noted Eddy Wax in his Rapporteur newsletter this morning. “His recounting of the story of European ‘civilisation’ only sounded positive when he turned the clock back decades, or even centuries. A Christian nationalist sermon mixed with an imperialist conscription advert, he focused on the ills of migration, the ‘climate cult’, the pointlessness of international institutions, and his glorification of raw military power. That should spook European governments. The only time he mentioned Ukraine was to bash the United Nations. But he was preaching to the converted: the Europeans in the room were desperate to hear that the Americans have not forsaken them, and that’s essentially what he gave them. After a baffling standing ovation, the nonsensical reactions rolled in.” MSC head Wolfgang Ischinger immediately thanked Rubio for his “message of reassurance.” Ursula von der Leyen said on stage she was “very much reassured” by the speech.
“Marco Rubio called for the end of a tolerant, democratic Europe and its break-up into a disparate group of smaller, Trumpist states, and the Europeans in the room gave him a standing ovation,” noted Philips O’Brien in an excellent summary on Substack immediately after the speech on Saturday. “So, it seems that threats to invade Greenland do not matter, the unilateral imposition of uneven tariffs on Europe never happened. Indeed, even the abandonment of Ukraine and the cozying up to Vladimir Putin was not really dividing the US and Europe…Rubio’s speech, in reality, pronounced the death of the liberal, democratic system that has governed the European continent (and the US-led world) since 1945.” That’s what the European establishment cheered. That’s what our EU president found so “reassuring”. Words coming from the same man who took the unprecedented step of not showing up to December’s NATO foreign ministers summit without any reason, a step repeated this month by Pete Hegseth in clear signalling that the US now considers itself a partner of, rather than a member in, NATO.
Even more disturbingly, Rubio called for a return to the previous era of Western colonialism before World War II, completely reversing the US foreign policy of the last 80 years (or at least, the stated policy). But he’s not interested in Europe being the colonisers this time. He’s interested in Europe being the assistants to American empire. “What Rubio was calling for was a return to a world based on the primacy of national interest (goodbye EU),” wrote O’Brien. “He called for the end of the attempt to contend with climate change and presented ‘mass migration’ in the typically MAGA scare-tactic way.” Trump is the hero who will lead Europe in this new era (really a return to the old pre-WW2 colonial era but with the US leading) of “renewal and restoration”. “And what does Rubio want? Europe to be good little boys and come along on the Trumpist ride. It was basically the 2025 National Security Strategy rehashed and restated,” wrote O’Brien. “His vision of the future was all based on a rejection of the last 50 years. It was all about how President Trump and the United States want Europe to follow them down the MAGA road.”
But most of our European leaders, who are terrified right now and in a state of inertia because they cannot conceive of any alternative to the American dominance they have lived with for 80 years, are quietly accepting this new narrative. Despite the Greenland threats of the past month, it seems our leaders are still in the same mode of desperately wanting to be fooled that they have been in for the past year. How else can we explain the standing ovation and the statements of “reassurance” that followed?
But not every European spent their time in Munich taking the MAGA blue pill. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez was the most vocally anti-MAGA European leader in Munich, saying in the most explicit terms yet that the 5% military spending target that every other NATO country agreed to in June is an arbitrary offering that will only make Europe more dependent on the United States militarily. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas seems to be back in form with a few zingers during the conference, notably hitting back at the US regime change efforts in Europe (unlike our EU president who has been silent) by saying, “contrary to what some may say, ‘Woke, decadent Europe’ is not facing civilizational erasure.” Still, her feistiness was offset by the fact that she was one of the people who rose for the standing ovation after Rubio’s speech - though she seemed to do so unthinkingly while engaged in conversation with the person next to her.
There was a lot of excitement on social media around German Chancellor Friedrich Merz saying at MSC that US leadership on the world stage is “being challenged, perhaps already lost,” and that, “the international order based on rights and rules…no longer exists in the way it once did.” But just like his comments in the past, the German chancellor is all talk and no action. Because while he says these things that seem to acknowledge the reality, he then turns around and rejects efforts to do something about it. He is currently shooting down French efforts to free Europe from American dependence like eurobonds, EU defence union and ‘buy European’. He is instead pursuing an alliance with the Atlanticist right wing Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni who is a core Trump ally, even announcing over the weekend she will take Italy into Trump’s Board of Peace as an observer.
Meanwhile EU president von der Leyen and British Prime Minister Starmer were their usual Trump-appeasing selves this weekend in Munich - acting like the Greenland threats never happened. It’s easy to blame the European establishment for acting against the wishes of their citizens, but the uncomfortable truth is that they are reflecting the general public mood on a continent which is awakening but not yet awake (and certainly not ready to get out of bed). Yes, the percentage of Europeans who think the US is an ally at the moment is falling precipitously. But there is not yet a widespread realisation among the European public that “this is a rupture, not a transition” as Canada’s Mark Carney put it in Davos. According to surveys, a majority of Europeans still think Trump is a fluke and the US will return to ‘normal’ shortly. Because citizens too are having trouble conceiving of a future without America’s encompassing presence on this continent. So they only strategy they have is to hope for the best.
Citizens too want to swallow the blue pill Rubio is offering. They will read the headlines of Rubio saying the day after the MSC, “We don't want you to be dependent on us, we are not asking you to be a vassal of the United States, we want to be your partner,” and think ‘hey that sounds great, they’re going to leave us alone’. But it’s bullshit. Because Rubio’s speech, the National Security Strategy and Vice President Vance’s speech a year ago all made clear that the US isn’t going sit idly by and watch Europe ‘destroy itself’ by diluting its racial purity through immigration. The US is supporting far-right opposition parties in Europe financially and logistically with the objective of regime change, because they want to put in place MAGA-friendly puppet regimes that will preserve the celebrated ancestral homelands of American white nationalists as it exists in those ethnonationalists’ minds. Even if they weren’t supporting far-right opposition parties, what kind of “partner” extorts you in order to seize your territory and force you into tributary trade capitulations? If the US doesn't want European vassals, one wonders why they've been so blatantly treating them as such lately.
And for those in the ‘sigh of relief’ camp on Rubio’s speech, they should pay attention to where he said these words about not wanting vassal states: Slovakia, standing beside Putin’s second best friend in the EU Prime Minsiter Robert Fico. Putin’s first best friend, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, got a visit from Rubio the following day. They were the only two countries Rubio visited after this Munich speech. “After his oily flattery and rude criticism of the Europeans en masse at the MSC, Rubio has chosen to make bilateral visits to the two most pro-Putin, anti-Brussels and Trump-loving leaders in the EU,” noted pundit Eurasia Group Managing Director Mujtaba Rahman. Rubio did not mention Russia once in his speech, nor did he mention China. Just like in December’s National Security Strategy, the ‘decadent civilisation-erasing’ Europeans were the main threat he wanted to focus on.
I’ve also heard people defending the standing ovation by saying that it was a European effort to strengthen Rubio vis-a-vis Vance who seems to viscerally hate Europe. They are reading the same US media reports obsessed with a supposed rivalry between the two. But take away the more diplomatic language and this was the same speech Vance delivered last year. Some Europeans are fooling themselves into thinking that Rubio is going to save them.
More than anything else, what was on display in Munich, yet again, was just how dire our current leadership vacuum is in Europe. “Many of us present at Munich, meaning many of us not holding European governments positions (and some who do) have reached a similar conclusion: European political leadership is weak and mediocre, at best,” lamented Amnesty International Secretary General Agnes Callamard. “German state representatives may be the worse reflection of this, Spanish ones stand out as the exception. In between, we can find different shades of weakness. But the key message from MSC is: no backbone, no vision, no resistance to a US project predicated on the subservience of Europe and white Christian supremacy.”
This was also the bleak assessment from US Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen, who lamented, “Rubio’s standing ovation in Munich after he declared the end of the ‘rules based order’ shows how weak many European ‘leaders’ have become. Instead of defending universal human rights they folded to his siren song of blood and soil.”
It is, overall, a very depressing situation. The European establishment is still refusing to take the signs out of the window as Carney is urging them. At best, they are wasting all of our time - time which could be spent urgently building European independence from America. “The worst thing we Europeans could do…is push the snooze button,” warned France’s Europe Minsiter Benjamin Haddad at the MSC. And yet the snooze button is the only strategy on offer from most of our elected leaders here in Europe. At worst, our leaders are turning us all into MAGA vassals. The only way for citizens to stop that is to change their leaders’ minds, or change their leaders.
Thanks for this. Depressing indeed. I attended a panel discussion that included Sarah Rogers at Amerika Haus on Friday. She should have been run out of there on a rail. It's laughable that her title includes the word 'diplomacy'.
Agreeing that this is very depressing indeed. Clearly, now there is a vacuum being created by the lack of leadership from European leaders and the population as it stands with relations with the USA. Is this enough to overcome domestic issues to sway national elections, we'll see. Can those running for the European Parliament, leverage this? Can the political parties on the left and their corresponding groups in the Parliament move to a more robust position? A lot of questions, not much time to find answers. I certainly hope more leaders in Europe either come to this realilzation or are replaced with those who do.