Rubio softens the tone but makes same demands of Europe

When US Secretary of State Marco Rubio took the stage at the Munich Security Conference on February 14, the hall was braced for turbulence. They got something quite different.

A standing ovation followed a speech that was notably, and deliberately, conciliatory in tone, a marked contrast to the jolt that US Vice President JD Vance delivered from the same podium a year earlier.

But a softer delivery does not necessarily mean a softer position. Reading Rubio’s remarks carefully reveals an administration that has not changed its fundamental expectations of Europe; it has simply found a more eloquent messenger to convey them.

Rubio’s address was, at its core, a love letter to Western civilization, and European leaders were happy to receive it. He described the United States as “a child of Europe,” stressed that the two continents are bound by shared history, shared values and a shared strategic destiny.

“We are part of one civilization — Western civilization,” he told delegates. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called the speech “reassuring.” British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said it was a call not to fall into “the warm bath of complacency.”

The relief in the hall was palpable. After more than a year of President Donald Trump referring to some European nations as “weak” and “decaying,” and after Vance’s controversial 2025 address that accused European governments of suppressing free speech, the bar for what counted as a positive signal had been lowered considerably.

By that standard, Rubio cleared it comfortably. But the standing ovation also reflected something Europe genuinely appreciated: an acknowledgment that the alliance still matters and that Washington is not simply walking away. That is not nothing. In a period of deep strategic uncertainty, reassurance has real value.

The conditions that came with it

Look past the rhetoric, however, and the demands embedded in Rubio’s speech were as firm as any the Trump administration has made.

He pressed European allies to spend more on their own defense, to reduce their reliance on the US, and to take greater sovereign responsibility for their security. This has been a consistent American ask, across administrations, in fact, but the urgency with which the Trump team frames it is new.

Rubio also reinforced the administration’s position on immigration, describing border control as a matter of civilizational survival rather than xenophobia, a framing that many European governments quietly resist, even if they are too diplomatic to say so publicly.

His dismissal of what he called the “climate cult”, criticizing unilateral climate commitments while geopolitical rivals exploit fossil fuels freely, landed poorly with delegations from countries where climate policy is a cornerstone of domestic governance.

EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas welcomed Rubio’s unity message while explicitly rejecting the administration’s talk of Europe’s “civilizational erasure.” French Foreign Minister Jean-Nool Barrot was diplomatically deft: he applauded the appeal to common heritage while making clear that Europe intended to chart its own course — “independent, of course, irrespective of the speeches that we hear at the Munich Security Conference, however right they may be.”

These are polite but firm pushbacks. They suggest that European leaders heard two different speeches simultaneously: one about partnership, and one about conditionality.

A relationship in genuine transition

What makes the current transatlantic moment genuinely complex is that both narratives are true. The alliance is under real strain, from trade disputes, NATO burden-sharing rows, divergent approaches to Ukraine and deep ideological differences over migration and climate.

Yet it also retains an institutional depth, an intelligence-sharing architecture and a cultural affinity that is not easily dismantled, whatever the rhetoric from either side.

Rubio’s Munich appearance can be read as an attempt to stabilize that relationship without fundamentally renegotiating the Trump administration’s terms. The message, stripped down, is this: America still sees Europe as a partner, but partnership now requires Europe to carry more of its own weight and to shed what Washington views as strategic naivety, about Russia, about economic dependency on China, about the sustainability of a security model that leans on American power.

Whether Europe is willing and able to do that, quickly enough to satisfy Washington, and on its own terms rather than Washington’s, is the central question the Munich conference left unanswered.

What comes next

The standing ovation Rubio received was real, but it may be premature. Warm words at a security conference are not a foreign policy reset.

The structural tensions in the transatlantic relationship, over tariffs, defense spending, the war in Ukraine and competing visions of global governance, did not dissolve in Munich. They were papered over, gracefully, for a weekend.

The more durable test will come in the months ahead: in trade negotiations, in NATO summits, in the handling of the Ukraine conflict and in whether European nations can accelerate their defense buildups fast enough to meet American expectations.

If they can, Rubio’s Munich speech may be remembered as the moment the alliance found a new equilibrium. If they cannot, the warmth of February will fade quickly.

For now, Europe can take genuine comfort in the fact that the secretary of state flew to Munich with a message of partnership rather than confrontation. That matters. But the terms of that partnership — and who sets them — remain very much in play.

This article was originally published on Leon Hadar’s Global Zeitgeist and is republished with kind permission. Become a subscriberhere.