Good Cop Rubio Challenges Europeans to Reject Decline

While some worry about the nation once President Donald Trump moves out of the White House in 2029, America is blessed by an embarrassment of political talent – at least on one side of the aisle. This weekend, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose ability to step in to almost any role in our government has launched a thousand jokes and memes, reminded Americans and the world why he is America’s chief diplomat.

At the annual Munich Security Conference, he challenged Europeans to remember their own glorious spiritual, cultural, and political heritage, reject the option of simply managing an inevitable decline, and partner with the United States in forging a future of peace and prosperity.

The comparisons with Rubio’s colleague and friend, Vice President J.D. Vance, have already begun. Vance created a stir at last year’s Munich Conference with a powerful speech challenging Europe to remedy the democracy and free speech deficits that have plagued that continent of late. Even as many everyday Europeans cheered, European politicians and elites were outraged at Vance’s criticisms.

The reactions to Rubio’s speech have been very different. The assembled crowd in Munich gave Rubio a standing ovation. When Rubio sat down for the question period, Munich Security Conference Chair Wolfgang Ischinger was exuberant. “Mr. Secretary,” he began, “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.” The reference to a sigh of relief was clearly a reference to the Vance speech of a year ago.

No doubt, Rubio’s was a different speech, but the reality is that it was entirely consistent with and echoed many of the themes spoken of by the vice president only a year before. If Vance’s speech, which referred to the “new sheriff in town,” was blunter and more direct, Rubio played good cop, delivering much of the same material but in honeyed words. If Ischinger and the assembled elites were reassured, they were also reminded of what they had heard before.

What made Rubio’s speech so much easier to take for Europeans—and fun to listen to for Americans—was its heavy emphasis on America’s own connection to and cultural debt to the European nations. It’s not just that we have a “transatlantic bond,” but that we are indeed “a child of Europe.”  

“It was this continent,” Rubio said, “that produced the genius of Mozart and Beethoven, of Dante and Shakespeare, of Michelangelo and da Vinci, of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.” Rubio’s speech catalogued the gifts of the Italians, English, Scots-Irish, French, and Germans—not neglecting to praise the vast improvements in beer brought by the last group.

Unlike many Europeans themselves, Rubio did not hesitate to specifically recall the Christian faith that is an essential part of Europe’s glorious history and its current heritage. After lulling the secular crowd with the Rolling Stones reference, Rubio continued, “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.”

These monuments to Christian faith, he continued, “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.”

It is in laying out the requirements for that future that Rubio’s speech intersected with Vance’s from the year before. Using Reagan’s famous phrase, Rubio exulted in Europeans and Americans having worked together very recently to defeat “an evil empire.” He then noted that that victory was followed by “a dangerous delusion” that we had come to “the end of history.”

This delusion had led many Europeans (and Americans) to believe that the age of politics was over: “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.”

Rubio objected to the idea of “free and unfettered trade” that didn’t take into account “nations” that “protected their economies and subsidized their companies to systematically undercut ours.” The loss of middle- and working-class jobs, added to the loss of control of “critical supply chains” demonstrates a new approach is needed.

The loss of sovereignty has been seen most in modern energy policy. “To appease a climate cult,” Rubio lamented, “we have imposed energy policies on ourselves that are impoverishing our people, even as our competitors exploit oil and coal and natural gas,” all in the service of those competitors gaining leverage over us.

Finally, echoing Vance directly, Rubio took on the threat of “an unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people.” Rubio was clear that it was Western leaders who had “opened our doors” to this wave.

Vance didn’t deny that cooperation through institutions was possible. He even spoke of the “tremendous potential to be a tool for good in the world” possessed by the United Nations. But, like so many other institutions, it needs to be rebuilt since, “on the most pressing matters before us, it has no answers and has played virtually no role.”

Rather than the U.N., it has been nations themselves that have been doing the work—the United States in particular. Progress in Gaza, Iran, and Ukraine (even if the last has been slow) has been accomplished by American power and diplomacy. Rubio’s was a call for the European nations to stand up and partner with the U.S. in facing down the decline that has beset them and us.

If Vance’s bad cop words faced a harsher reception, it is clear that they prepared the European elites to listen to the good cop par excellence this time around. Let us pray that they will cooperate for the sake of their own people and for ours.

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.