But what holds the West together, he says, is not shared institutions, nor a shared commitment to the rule of law, nor the post-war architecture of treaties and multilateral cooperation.
By Stephen HOLMES
Napoleon infamously derided his foreign minister, Prince Talleyrand, as “de la merde dans un bas de soie” (diplomacy in silk stockings). The joke came to mind as I watched Donald Trump’s foreign minister, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speak at the Munich Security Conference this year. Last year, US Vice President JD Vance flew to Munich to take the spotlight before European leaders, attacking the European Union’s immigration policies, hate speech regulations and efforts to keep the far right out of power. Rubio is Vance in silk stockings. He delivered much the same message, this time wrapped in diplomatic gauze.
In 2016, Rubio called Trump “a fraud” who couldn’t be trusted with nuclear codes. Now Rubio serves as Trump’s chief diplomat — and he just presided, without protest, over the expiration of the last remaining treaty limiting Russian and American nuclear weapons. Rubio’s self-betrayal has been so complete that it amounts to a job qualification. In Trump’s Washington, having once had principles and then publicly repudiated them is more reliable evidence of servility than having never had principles. In Munich, Rubio filled his speech with performative assurance. The United States and Europe “belong to each other.” Their destinies are “intertwined.” America wants a “reinvigorated alliance” and a “strong Europe.”
But what holds the West together, he argues, is not shared institutions, nor a shared commitment to the rule of law, nor a postwar architecture of treaties and multilateral cooperation. It is “shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, origins, and the sacrifices our ancestors made together.” The key words here are “Christian faith” and “coming.” Rubio defined the transatlantic bond not as a political alliance but as a civilizational bloodline—a kinship rooted in religion and blood. “We will always be a child of Europe,” he said, a formulation that casts the relationship not as a contract between equal sovereigns but as a family bond—inherited, not chosen, with loyalty derived from biology, not from shared principles and goals.
This is not the language of NATO. It is the language of the late Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” – the idea that the West is defined not by what it believes but by who it is; not by its principles but by its bloodlines and its faith. It is a formula that builds an imaginary wall around Christian Europe and its diaspora and leaves out Europe’s Muslim citizens, the secular traditions of the French Republic and the multi-faith realities of modern European life. Rubio’s promise of a future “as proud, as sovereign and as vital as the past of our civilization” reveals the game. The future he describes is not a vision of something to be built. It is the past projected forward – nostalgia packaged as a goal. So what lay beneath the silk was the same litany that Vance presented last year, now expressed with a little more good manners: Europe has surrendered its sovereignty to multilateral institutions. Europe is gripped by a “climate cult” that impoverishes its citizens. Mass immigration threatens “civilizational erasure.”
Of course, “civilizational extinction” is not a neutral description of demographic change. It is the vocabulary of the European far right, obsessed with the “great replacement” of white people. In Munich, Rubio gave legitimacy to the most powerful government in the world to a narrative that presents immigration not as a political challenge to be managed but as an existential threat to the survival of Western civilization—a framework that places it beyond the possibility of compromise or democratic restraint. Rubio’s charm made the phrase more dangerous, not less: couched in the language of a shared concern for the future of Europe, it sounded almost cautious, as if the Trump administration were simply trying to save its friends from a danger they were too polite to name. But the effect is to narrow the space for pragmatic cooperation on asylum, labor mobility, and integration—the real work that European governments need to do—while giving Europe’s nationalist parties an endorsement they could hardly have imagined before Trump. Rubio’s easy use of the offensive phrase “climate cult” also deserves attention—not for what it says about climate policy, but for what it reveals about the emptiness of Rubio’s references to the glorious future his boss claims to be building.
Climate policy is, by definition, an investment in the future – perhaps more consequential than any other investment any generation can make. To call it a cult, to dismiss climate change mitigation efforts as a religious delusion, is a spectacular way of saying that the future habitability of the planet is not worth investing in. Moreover, Rubio’s program told a different story than his rhetoric. On Friday, the day before his speech, he skipped the “Berlin Format” meeting on Ukraine – a gathering that included Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and the heads of the European Commission, the European Council, and NATO. After the speech, he flew to Bratislava and Budapest to visit Slovakia’s Robert Fico and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán — the two most Russia-friendly leaders in the EU, whom Trump has courted as ideological allies and recently hosted at Mar-a-Lago. So while Rubio told his audience in Munich that America wants a “strong Europe,” he is publicly supporting leaders who have made their careers attacking European institutions from within, vetoing collective action, and cultivating ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
When asked about Ukraine in the interview after the speech, Rubio implied a telling phrase: the US wants a deal that Ukraine can “live with” and that Russia can “accept.” The asymmetry is the point. Ukraine is expected to endure; Russia is expected to be satisfied. Rubio did not fly from Munich to Bratislava and Budapest to strengthen the transatlantic alliance. He went to show which Europe the US prefers: not a Europe of collective defense and shared sovereignty, but a Europe of governments that challenge the EU, please the Kremlin, and call that sovereignty. Russia and China were absent from Rubio’s speech. The enemies he identified were not the authoritarian great powers, but immigration, climate policy, and the multilateralism that has governed the Western alliance since 1945. Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, happily seized on this opening, arguing that “certain countries” that undermine multilateral cooperation and revive the Cold War mentality bear primary responsibility for today’s global dysfunction—a rebuke that would have been harder to deliver if Rubio had not just dismissed the postwar institutional order from the same stage.
Rubio is no Talleyrand. As Talleyrand served France’s interests by reshaping the balance of power in Europe, Rubio serves a president who confuses destruction with strength and nostalgia with renewal. “De la merde dans un bas de soie” softened the tone and appealed to audiences. But underneath it lay the same message that Vance had delivered without gloves last year – that Europe is useful only if it is subservient, that Western civilization is defined by exclusion, and that a shared future is possible only under conditions that guarantee that it will never exist. (DW)
(The author is Professor of Law at New York University School of Law and Richard Holbrooke Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin)