U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speech at this year’s Munich Security Conference provided anxious Europeans with a degree of reassurance that the United States under President Donald Trump was still committed to its security alliance with Europe. After the Trump administration sowed doubt about the validity of NATO’s Article 5 defense guarantee for months, published a National Security Strategy that called for “cultivating resistance” to “Europe’s current trajectory,” and even issued veiled threats of using military force to acquire Greenland, Rubio underscored that partnership with Europe remains a central interest of the United States.
That was the good news. The bad news was that the basis for this proposed partnership is no longer the threat from Russia, a common interest in defending world order, or the values shared by liberal democracies—pillars that have served Americans and Europeans well for decades. Instead, the Trump administration is now calling for an alliance based on an ill-defined “Western civilization” that it claims derives from “centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices [of] our forefathers.” Aside from its vagueness and incoherence as a concept, Western civilization is a terrible foundation on which to base the world’s most long-standing and important alliance.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speech at this year’s Munich Security Conference provided anxious Europeans with a degree of reassurance that the United States under President Donald Trump was still committed to its security alliance with Europe. After the Trump administration sowed doubt about the validity of NATO’s Article 5 defense guarantee for months, published a National Security Strategy that called for “cultivating resistance” to “Europe’s current trajectory,” and even issued veiled threats of using military force to acquire Greenland, Rubio underscored that partnership with Europe remains a central interest of the United States.
That was the good news. The bad news was that the basis for this proposed partnership is no longer the threat from Russia, a common interest in defending world order, or the values shared by liberal democracies—pillars that have served Americans and Europeans well for decades. Instead, the Trump administration is now calling for an alliance based on an ill-defined “Western civilization” that it claims derives from “centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices [of] our forefathers.” Aside from its vagueness and incoherence as a concept, Western civilization is a terrible foundation on which to base the world’s most long-standing and important alliance.
Set aside, if you can, how offensive it is to the millions of Americans and Europeans who don’t share the “Christian faith” or common “culture and heritage” that Rubio is referring to, or how offensive it is to the millions of victims of colonialism around the world, who must bristle when the U.S. State Department’s hails “civilization that stretches over continents, crossed over oceans, and persisted for thousands of years” and declares that “Western Civilization must embrace its noble legacy if it is to reverse its decline.” Under the guise of presenting a basis for trans-Atlantic partnership, “common civilization” sounds more like a dog whistle to supporters of Trump’s MAGA agenda and an appeal to its populist backers in Europe, some of whom are as hostile to the United States as they are sympathetic to Russia.
But the Trump administration is not only seeking to elevate “common civilization” as a new basis for partnership. It is simultaneously abandoning traditional pillars of that partnership that are as relevant as ever today. That should be worrying to Europeans.
For example, as Russia’s horrific aggression against Ukraine enters its fifth year, you would think that defending against the threat from Moscow—NATO’s original mission—would remain the central purpose of the Atlantic alliance. Indeed, the day before Rubio spoke in Munich, the head of the German intelligence service, Martin Jager, painted a harrowing portrait of Russian “hybrid warfare” against Europe that goes well beyond Ukraine or conventional military threats. It includes election interference, disinformation campaigns, sabotage, assassination attempts, espionage, cyberattacks, and drone strikes.
Yet far from raising concerns about that threat or presenting a plan for confronting it, Rubio did not even mention Russia in his speech. Nor did he talk about the American interest in supporting Ukraine against Russia’s unprovoked and ongoing aggression. Meanwhile, Trump, having already cut off all direct U.S. military and financial assistance to Ukraine, absurdly keeps blaming Ukraine for the war and pressing it to “hurry up” and make a deal while saying little or nothing about the Russian threat. In fact, in Trump’s civilizational framing, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Russia could be seen as part of the U.S.-Europe alliance rather than the greatest security threat it faces. If shared history, culture, and ancestry is behind the U.S. commitment to Europe—where, exactly, does that commitment start and stop?
Trump administration officials have also begun downgrading—and even disparaging—support for international rules, norms, and laws. In his Munich speech, Rubio contrasted the “so-called global order” with U.S. national interests, as if one of its core national interests was not global order, while Elbridge Colby, a senior U.S. Defense Department official, dismissed the “rules-based order” as a “cloud-castle abstraction.” Implicit in such remarks was that using the alliance to defend against “abstractions” like the principle of not changing borders through violence, as Russia is trying to do in Ukraine, was of minimal importance.
Such a perspective represents a further step toward endorsement of a world in which might makes right, where aggression by great powers—and not just the United States—would go unopposed. If global order is not worth defending, then why shouldn’t China just take Taiwan or the South China Sea, and why should Russia refrain from taking Ukraine? In his candid remarks to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, earlier this year, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney pointed out that the “rules-based order” that was often the declared basis for U.S. and Western policy decisions was “partially false.” He was right about that, but at the same time it was also “partially true.” A world in which rules, norms, and laws play no role in world affairs is a more dangerous one for Americans and Europeans alike—as both tragically discovered in the decades that preceded the U.S.-led world order set up after 1945.
The Trump administration has been equally dismissive of common trans-Atlantic values—at least the liberal ones like support for democracy and freedom, which used to underpin the alliance—as a basis for partnership. In Munich, Colby dismissed appeals to such values as “hosannas or shibboleths” and even went on to candidly acknowledge that most of Europe’s values might not be shared on “our part of the political spectrum,” meaning Trump-supporting Republicans. That Rubio jetted off after his speech to Budapest to lend his support to Hungary’s authoritarian, pro-Russian, and anti-European Union leader, Viktor Orban, was confirmation that the U.S.-European alliance the Trump administration supports is not the one that most of Europe’s current leaders or publics have in mind.
Even before Munich, most Europeans had come to the reluctant conclusion that the United States, their closest strategic, economic, and moral partner for more than 80 years, was no longer committed to that partnership. The threat of additional tariffs across the continent and potentially taking Greenland by force was the final straw that led many Europeans to start preparing for a world in which they can no longer count on the United States. As a result, trust in the United States has collapsed, with polls showing vast majorities of Europeans now have unfavorable views of the country and no longer see it as an ally. What’s more, tourism to the United States is collapsing, and leaders are talking about de-risking their economies and security not from Beijing but from Washington.
That Europeans remain desperate to preserve a security partnership with the United States is understandable. They do not currently, on their own, have the military resources to defend against Russia, and it will be a long time before they do. The extended U.S. nuclear deterrent for Europe cannot easily be replaced, and even helping Ukraine prevent a Russian takeover without sustained U.S. military, financial, and intelligence support will be difficult. For these reasons, any U.S. recognition of Europe’s importance, and expression of U.S. support for the alliance, is welcome.
But Europeans should have no illusions. As the Trump administration abandons the pillars of the old alliance, it is now proposing to replace them with a vision of a partnership based on a “common heritage” that is as mythical as it is unsustainable. Most Europeans are not buying it, nor should they.
