Rubio to Europe: America Will Not Be Caretaker of a Dying West

“America has no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline.”

Our Secretary of State was bullish on America, but he also made a plea for the West:

We are part of one civilization, Western civilization. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen air. And so this is why we Americans may sometimes come off as a little direct and urgent in our council. This is why President Trump demands, seriousness and reciprocity from our friends here in Europe. The reason why, my friends, is because we care deeply. We care deeply about your future and ours. And if at times we disagree, our disagreements come from our profound sense of concern about a Europe with which we are connected. Not just economically, not just militarily. We are connected spiritually and we are connected culturally. We want Europe to be strong. We believe that Europe must survive because the two great wars of the last century serve for us as history’s constant reminder that ultimately our destiny is and will always be intertwined with yours because we know, know that the fate of Europe will never be irrelevant to our own national security, which this conference is largely about, is not merely a series of technical questions, how much we spend on defense or where, how we deploy it. Later, on America: America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline. We do not seek to separate but to revitalize an old friendship and renew the greatest civilization in human history. What we want is a reinvigorated alliance that recognizes that what has ailed our societies is not just a set of bad policies, but a malaise of hopelessness and complacency and alliance (YouTube).

Take a moment to listen/watch/read. You won’t regret it (Full Text: State).

He managed to win over a room full of senior European leaders on their own territory while slaying many of the continent’s most sacred cows. On Saturday, he received a standing ovation while giving a speech at the Munich Security Conference, the annual confab of senior European defense officials. It was a striking feat, given that the speech sounded like an intervention where Rubio was the frustrated patriarch who had just learned his family fortune was being frittered away by his dilettante children…. What, then, explains the warm response to Rubio’s speech? One way to look at Rubio’s warning for Europe is that, instead of simply criticizing the continent, he offered a road map for strengthening an alliance that seemed a month ago—amid Trump’s loose talk about Greenland and his trigger-happy approach to tariffs—to be unraveling before our eyes. After all, Rubio’s speech was not just tough talk; there was also tough love. At several points, he acknowledged that America, under previous presidents, made the same mistakes as Europe. And he pledged that while Trump was prepared to rebuild America’s alliances and military on its own, “it is our preference and it is our hope to do this together with you, our friends here in Europe” (Free Press).

Marco Rubio delivers tough love to Europe — and the overgrown teenage brats know ‘dad’ is right

By Miranda Devine, NY Post, Feb. 15, 2026:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks at the annual Munich Security Conference
An American statesman was born on a German stage over the weekend.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s impressive performance at the Munich Security Conference gives us an alluring glimpse of the president he could be one day.

Rubio drew a standing ovation from the assembled European heads of state, intelligence chiefs, and military leaders for a speech that was no less forceful or frank than VP JD Vance’s address that jarred the same forum last year, but was delivered with a mellifluous voice and calm humility that disarmed even the most arch Euro-socialist.

Rubio was warm and reassuring rather than sneering and contemptuous.

But that was no accident. He was playing “Good Cop” to Vance’s “Bad Cop,” a strategy that paid off with the collective “sigh of relief” that conference chairman Wolfgang Ischinger expressed afterwards, as he motioned to the audience to sit and praised Rubio’s “message of reassurance.”

Except, as Rubio later told a Bloomberg journalist who was trying to find a wedge between him and his friend Vance: “I think it’s the same message.”

‘Our destiny’
The beauty of the speech, large parts of which were written by Rubio, was its broad-brush clarity.

He mapped out precisely how and why the West had lost our way. In the euphoria of our Cold War triumph we fell for the “dangerous delusion that we had entered the end of history,” that every nation would now be a liberal democracy and we would “live in a world without borders.”

This “foolish idea ignored both human nature [and] the lessons of over 5,000 years of recorded human history,” he said.

In our hubris and naivete, we embraced a “dogmatic vision” of unfettered trade and mass migration, “even as some nations [hello, China] protected their economies and subsidized their companies to systematically undercut ours — shuttering our plants, resulting in large parts of our societies being deindustrialized, shipping millions of working and middle class jobs overseas and handing control of our critical supply chains to both adversaries and rivals.”

His criticism of unchecked mass migration was slammed afterwards by Democrats, Eurocrats and their media handmaidens as racist, but it is a crisis they ignore at their peril.

“In a pursuit of a world without borders, we opened our doors to an unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture and the future of our people,” he said.

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From this undeniable diagnosis of the problem, he quickly moved on to what Politico described as “Rubio’s love letter” to Europe.

It was a heartfelt, almost poetic, tribute to the history and ideas that formed America. But he sprinkled in some kryptonite for the liberal mind when he pointed out the Christian roots of our shared culture and warned that we must be “unapologetic in our heritage and proud of this common inheritance.”

“We are part of one civilization — Western civilization. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of 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,” he said.

In a critique that spectacularly missed the point, The New York Times snarked that Rubio’s Europe no longer exists, citing “halal counters” in Munich and a nearby Afghan grocery store as counterpoint.

Rubio described America as “a child of Europe.”

But, really, he was describing a relationship that, since the Cold War, has grown into an unhealthy dependency of Europe on America, akin to the resentful 30-year-old son still living in his parents’ basement.

Rubio was like the father who offers warm encouragement along with a strong dose of tough love. In his heart, the overgrown teenage brat knows dad is right that he has to stand on his own two feet, although he’d rather die than admit it.

“We in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline,” Rubio continued. “We do not seek to separate, but to revitalize an old friendship and renew the greatest civilization in human history.”

He also cleverly reframed past pungent criticism of Europe expressed by Vance and President Trump as a sign of that love and regard.

“We Americans may sometimes come off as a little direct and urgent in our counsel,” he said, but that is only because “we care deeply . . . We want Europe to be strong . . . Our destiny is and will always be intertwined with yours.”

That last line, which came about a third of the way into the 18-minute speech, was greeted with uncharacteristically rapturous applause from the audience.