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The good news from the Munich Security Conference is that there was no dramatic deterioration in the transatlantic relationship. After the shock of last year’s event, when JD Vance stunned the audience with a frontal US attack on Europe’s liberal democracies, the seemingly more conciliatory tone struck by Marco Rubio was greeted by many present, including Wolfgang Ischinger, a veteran German diplomat and the conference chair, as “reassuring”. Indeed, the US secretary of state got a standing ovation in the room – a gesture perhaps more of relief than of adulation. But is the Trump administration’s message to Europe really any different now from that contained in Vance’s assault 12 months ago? What traps are being laid and what lessons should Europeans draw?
A year ago, Vance accused Europe of succumbing to the alleged tyranny and censorship of woke liberals and losing sight of the cultural bonds that link the two shores of the Atlantic. His attack baffled European leaders, who, while often prone to navel-gazing about their internal struggles, do not consider restrictions on free speech a primary concern. The US vice-president shocked Munich by insisting that Europe’s biggest threat was the woke “threat from within”, even as he endorsed far-right nationalists including Germany’s AfD. The insult was so deep that this year the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, used his opening address to issue a blunt warning about American unilateralist values, declaring that “the culture war of the Maga movement is not ours”.
With Europeans desperate for reassurance, they were eager for any signs of transatlantic solidarity in Rubio’s speech. The secretary of state offered warm words, celebrating the shared cultural heritage, history and specifically the Christianity of the west. He claimed that the US, a “child of Europe”, was not interested in managing western decline but instead determined to spearhead a western civilisational renaissance.
But beneath the surface, Rubio’s speech this year and Vance’s in 2025 were two sides of the same coin. Vance’s was crude and outrageous, even silly. At a time when there is democratic backsliding in most regions of the world, to claim that Europe’s biggest problem is a lack of free speech is simply ridiculous.
Rubio’s speech was more subtle and coherent, but he in essence sang from the same hymn sheet: the message from Washington remains that Europe and the US should be defined by ethno-political values of culture, tradition and religion. The fact that such history has also bred nationalism, racism, fascism and colonialism is apparently nothing to be ashamed of.
In Europe, we may have thought that we had turned the page, defining the continent in opposition to its past – embracing civic and Enlightenment values of democracy, human rights, the rule of law, multilateralism, inclusion and integration, and rejecting the scourge of nationalism. But for the standard bearers of the Maga movement, it is nationalism that is to be celebrated. The rules-based order is not just dead, as European leaders themselves recognise; it is, in Rubio’s characterisation, outright “foolish”.
But if western civilisation is to be nurtured while rules are not, the vision Rubio outlined is fundamentally one of empire. In this imagining, the Americas and Europe are bound by ancestry and religion; “connected spiritually”, as Rubio put it. Proud nationalist forces on both sides of the Atlantic must jointly battle globalism, cancel culture and the “civilisational erasure” that mass migration supposedly threatens.
But the “western century” will be marked by raw power, exercised first and foremost within the empire itself by the strong – the US – against the weak: small and medium-sized European countries, Canada and South American states. Within the empire, there can and should be institutions, starting with Nato. But the US intention is crystal clear: you pay up – which is fair – but we still call the shots, which is not. There will be other empires in the world, including Russia and China, and the American empire will compete with them. Yet it is also ready to cooperate, perhaps even collude, especially if the price for collusion is to be paid by its colonial subjects.
Rubio’s message was more sophisticated and strategic than Vance’s. But it was just as dangerous, if not more so, precisely because it lowered the transatlantic temperature and may have lulled Europe into a false sense of calm. As Benjamin Haddad, France’s Europe minister, said in Munich, the European temptation may be to press the snooze button once again.
There are good reasons to believe this will not happen. Merz, along with Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer, Pedro Sánchez and the European Commission chief, Ursula von der Leyen, all spoke of the need for European independence, for giving substance to the EU treaty’s article 42.7, a pledge of mutual assistance in the event of attack and for a Europeanised Nato. As von der Leyen put it, the lines that have been crossed cannot be uncrossed. Russia’s war on Ukraine – which approaches its fourth anniversary – added a sense of urgency. So did the sober reminder from the Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, that the US threat to Greenland has not gone away.
While European resolve and collective action will most likely continue, the bulk of the energy will be devoted to working within existing transatlantic frameworks, especially Nato. This should indeed be a key strand of work. The fact that the UK and Italy are each taking over Nato commands from the US signals an important step toward establishing a European “pillar” within the defence alliance. The US will remain critical, providing command and control, specialised capabilities and, above all, the nuclear umbrella. Diplomats believe that at the end of this journey Nato will look very different, with the US representing an estimated fifth or less of its military capacity, down from just under half today.
However, if the US is driven by an imperial vision in which its strategic interests diverge from Europe’s – if Washington no longer considers Vladimir Putin’s Russia a national security threat – should Europeans pin their security hopes exclusively on a Europeanised Nato?
A European pillar within Nato is the most effective route to a secure Europe as the US scales back responsibility for the continent’s defence. It is certainly far more achievable than turning the EU into a military alliance or even defending Europe through formalised coalitions of the willing and able.
But in practice, it cannot guarantee European security if the US pursues its current imperial trajectory. If Europeans were comforted by a false sense of reassurance as they walked away from the packed Bayerischer Hof hotel in Munich, they risk walking straight into the trap that Maga America has laid for them.
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Nathalie Tocci is a Guardian Europe columnist
