An offer of friendship – but on white, Christian, Maga terms | World news
Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th-century French diplomat, political philosopher and historian, wrote: “The greatness of America lies not in her being more enlightened than other nations, but in her ability to repair her mistakes.”
For a brief moment at last weekend’s Munich Security Conference (MSC), European leaders thought their dearest wish – the return of the old US, which believed in the EU ideal and supported a rules-based world order – had been fulfilled.
At the same stage last year, US vice president JD Vance delivered a gut punch: a brutal ideological attack that accused Europe of abandoning “core values” and questioned whether the US and the EU still had a common agenda.
This year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave a speech so markedly different in tone that the audience felt a deep sense of relief at hearing nothing but abuse: Led by Germany’s defense and foreign ministersand more than 40 US officials gave him a standing ovation.
Rubio played a soothing tune. He said that the United States and Europe “belong together”: If Americans seem direct and urgent, it is because they know that the fates of Europe and the United States are forever intertwined. The United States “will always be Europe’s child.”
MSC President Wolfgang Ischinger let out a “breath of relief”. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said she was “very relieved”. The EU’s chief diplomat, Kaja Kallas, said the bloc could work with this kind of US.
However, it did not take long for Europeans’ reactions to change; Actually, it’s about as long as re-reading Rubio’s speech. Many noted that the US secretary of state may have phrased this in conciliatory language, but his message was no different from Vance’s.
Maga’s familiar blood-and-soil obsessions were all there: mass migration; the erasure of civilization; the death of Christian culture; unlimited trading; oversized welfare states; weak armies; “a climate cult”; Worthless international organizations.
To avoid any doubt, White House summary A list of Trump’s buzzwords was clearer: “sovereign nations,” “common heritage,” “Christian foundations,” “outdated globalist structures,” and “In defense of Western civilization”.
In short, as Claudia Major of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs puts it, it was “an offer of friendship – but on white, Christian and Maga terms”. Rubio declared that the United States wants allies who are “proud of their culture and heritage.” Friends who see themselves as “heirs of the same great and noble civilization” and “able and willing to defend it.” Müjtaba Rahman from the Eurasia Group stated that this was a chilling sentence that reflected the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) word for word.
As if to reinforce Washington’s hostile stance, Rubio continued to make bilateral visits after the MSC to, in Rahman’s words, “the two most pro-Putin, anti-Brussels and Trump-loving leaders in the EU”: Slovakia’s Robert Fico and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.
In Budapest on Monday, Rubio hinted at financial aid and said Trump was “deeply committed to the success” of the illiberal Hungarian prime minister, the EU’s chief disruptor, who faces a serious challenge to his rule in elections in April.
This was also a huge “bon appetit” for the EU, an analyst told the Guardian’s global affairs correspondent Andrew Roth, who said the visit was “guaranteed to reinforce fears that the US is trying to sow chaos and division among its allies”.
The battle for the meaning of ‘Western civilization’
So Rubio’s speech wasn’t an olive branch; In fact, it was not an attempt by the United States to “repair its mistakes”. Historian Phillips O’Brien spoke succinctly: Rubio had called for “the end of a tolerant, democratic Europe and its fragmentation into a disparate group of smaller, Trumpist states.”
O’Brien said the speech “announced the death of the liberal, democratic system that had governed the European continent and the US-led world since 1945” and a “return to a world based on the primacy of national interests, not values”.
Some leaders showed little illusion. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Maga’s culture war was not Europe’s. In the EU, he said, “freedom of expression ends when it is directed against human dignity and fundamental law.” “We believe in free trade, not tariffs and protectionism. We stand for climate agreements and the WHO.”
French president Emmanuel Macron told the audience: “Europe must become a geopolitical power. We must step up and deliver all the components of geopolitical power: defence, technology and de-risking from all major powers.”
Although Kallas initially welcomed Rubio’s sweetening of the pill, he continued to harshly criticize the “trendy” US “attack on Europe.” Contrary to what some say, “a woke, collapsing Europe is not facing the extinction of civilizations,” he insisted.
There was even evidence of what Patrick Wintour, the Guardian’s diplomatic editor, called Europe’s newfound “steelness”. Macron’s speech was overshadowed by Rubio’s speech, but it touched on an extremely critical and sensitive issue.
The French president spoke of a “convergence” between French and German strategic defense positions and the possibility of “embedding nuclear deterrence in a holistic approach to defense and security” within Europe.
While Merz briefly but deliberately touched upon his first talks with Macron on the subject, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer spoke of “There is no security in Britain without Europe, and there is no security in Europe without Britain.”
Whether and how France and the UK can make their nuclear deterrents available to Europe, reducing the need for the US’s nuclear umbrella, will be the subject of long and fraught discussions in the coming months, but the issue has been raised. These and other contentious issues (e.g. Europe’s digital sovereignty) will further strain transatlantic ties.
EU member states will argue as usual: Germany told France this week that it should open its mouth about defense spending. But there are signs that Europe is at least starting to step back. If Vance’s speech last year marked the moment when “the transatlantic divide began,” Wintour wrote, this MSC was “where the debate over the terms of the divorce settlement began.”
aspect Le Monde put this in a powerful editorialIf the US portrays the EU as a “cemetery of ambition, identity and freedom”, the bloc could “point to Washington’s climate denialism, abandonment of science, plutocratic drift and authoritarian tendencies”.
The French newspaper of record said it had become clear that the term “western civilization” no longer “had the same definition on both sides of the Atlantic, and Europeans had absolutely no reason to give up theirs.”
Until next week.
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