If JD Vance sent Europeans to their fainting couches at last year’s Munich Security Conference, this year Marco Rubio will be on hand to supply the smelling salts. While Vance seems happy to play the role of cartoon villain in the Trump administration’s extended assault on the delicate sensibilities of NATO allies, Rubio has been filling the part of the old friend who tells you uncomfortable truths in the soothing tones of a country doctor. So, as Vance was spending his latest European vacation last week getting roundly booed by spectators at the Winter Olympics in Milan, Rubio was preparing for a trip in which he can expect to elicit a less hostile response from a mostly European audience in the Bavarian capital.
But no one should be fooled by any tonal differences between these two probable contenders for the MAGA mantle in a post-Donald Trump Republican party. What Trump himself inconsistently conveys in his undiplomatic forays; what Vance blasts from a double-barrelled verbal shotgun; and what Rubio delivers in the form of friendly advice from a committed ally is the same central message. The old assumptions on which Europeans built their comfortable post-historical security are no more. The world in which NATO allies could free-ride on American strategic support, even as they frequently denounced America’s pursuit of its strategic objectives, is gone. Above all, the fundamental hypocrisy — by which Europe lived in peace and prosperity thanks primarily to the security provided by the expedient of raw American power, while they insisted that only a “rules-based liberal order” could produce peace and prosperity — has finally been exposed.
Rubio’s Atlanticist credentials are impeccable. He’s a veteran of the European conference circuit from his days in the US Senate; an inveterate supporter of NATO, and a fierce critic of Vladimir Putin, whom he once called a “war criminal “, (though he now studiously avoids the term). It’s unlikely when he speaks at Munich that Rubio will talk up the nationalist populist parties in Europe that Vance and the Trump administration’s official National Security Strategy have supported. He will probably avoid making threatening noises about Greenland and surely won’t denigrate the contribution of European NATO service members to the US-led war in Afghanistan.
But Rubio’s diplomatic straddle: reminding Europeans once again that their dependence on American security must end, while re-emphasising his commitment to NATO and the treaty obligations it imposes on the US, won’t disguise the fact that something fundamental has changed in transatlantic relations that goes way beyond Trump.
The storm and stress of the first year of the second Trump administration finally seems to have woken Europeans to the plight in which they find themselves in the changed world of the 2020s. Time and again they have been warned by more diplomatic and softly-spoken American leaders than Trump that, while America valued the alliance it had established with them, it could not tolerate for ever a situation in which it bore the vast bulk of the burden of transatlantic security. And yet, despite repeated warnings, Europeans failed to get the message. They never really believed the implication of the warnings: that the day would come when the US would not or could not continue to fund their defence while they pursued their continental nirvana of a bountiful welfare state, the replacement of their historic civilisation with a deracinated multicultural, and the quasi-religious objective of a net-zero energy policy. Trump’s sharp message, unnecessarily coarsened by silly rhetorical sabre-rattling over Greenland, was nonetheless timely and necessary.
There remain some – on both sides of the Atlantic – who continue to want to believe that the rift in the transatlantic alliance is all the work of what Wolfgang Ischinger, chairman of the Munich Security Conference, called this week in his introduction to the annual report of the organisation, “demolition men”, tearing down the institutions of the world order. People like Trump, Ischinger said, were motivated by “Zerstörungslust, a lust for destruction”, a term coined by sociologists Carolin Amlinger and Oliver Nachtwey .
But the cry of angst from one of the more prominent of the European Atlanticist elite misses the vital point that the institutions now undergoing demolition were creaking and crumbling in any case. Trump may have supplied the “wrecking ball” to the alliance, but it would be a serious error to think that the destruction is all his handiwork, and an even greater mistake to think that, post-Trump, a new wave of Atlanticist Americans will ride again to Europe’s rescue. The new geopolitical challenge of a rising China, the economic constraints of America’s declining relative global power, the new implications of a deglobalising world in which defining and pursuing the national interest is a prerequisite for national security, these are all realities that will confront whomever leads America.
European leaders have been content for too long to celebrate the paradox that their weakness is their strength; that it was the international system, a chimerical network of rules and treaties and conventions that kept them safe and prosperous. World powers like Russia and China have demonstrated in the last twenty years how hollow that system was; now that the US has dropped the pretence too, Europe’s leaders need to abandon the old pretence and urgently adjust to the new geopolitical realities.
Whether it’s in the form of a diplomatic serenade from Marco Rubio or a contemptuous blast from JD Vance, the message for Europe is ominously the same.
Gerard Baker is Editor at Large of The Wall Street Journal
History tells us: Ukraine into the EU will be Europe’s self-destruction