Five Thoughts About Marco Rubio's Munich Security Conference Speech

In the hotel where it happened.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World will publish a more holistic take on the Munich Security Conference (MSC) experience tomorrow. Today, however, I want to focus on U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speech, which was scheduled for the conference’s premier time slot.

In 2025, JD Vance’s vitriolic anti-European diatribe shocked the MSC audience, and it’s safe to say that this year’s attendees were steeled for a similar message from Rubio.

Here’s what they actually got:

So, what to make of Rubio’s address? Here are five thoughts, in order from the least to most important takeaways:

First, big speeches are not Rubio’s best mode of communication. Rubio’s past record of “big speech” moments suggest an erratic track record at best. This speech will feed that reputation further.

Maybe it was jet lag or that he hadn’t rehearsed or previewed the speech, but Rubio’s delivery was a bit rough. He stumbled over a few passages and mispronounced “archetype,” for example. He does much better in mediated conversations. Indeed, right after the MSC speech, he was more relaxed and more crisp during the few minutes he sat down with Wolfgang Ischinger (scroll to the 23-minute mark of the video above) than in the delivery of speech itself.

Yes, he got a standing ovation, but that was partially because his retinue followed the by-now familiar Trump trope of rising immediately after he his speech ended so that it would induce others to stand up.¹ In the overflow room I was in, there was not a love for the speech.

There was a smidgen of relief, however, because…

Second, it was a better, friendlier speech than JD Vance’s. Is that an extremely low bar? Sure — but Rubio cleared it! DW Chief International Correspondent Richard Walker said, “Rubio’s message was much warmer in its tone, it was really trying to pull on European heartstrings to try and create a sense of common purpose, to create, almost, a unified theory that links security to a different idea of ... the West. A lot of people [sat MSC] do seem to be relieved that it wasn’t guns blazing like JD Vance.” Furthermore, Rubio did not make the same attacks on European free speech policies that Vance did, nor did he meet with the AfD party afterwards.²

Rubio’s speech was crafted to be friendlier to the European audience. He opened by noting, “we gather here today as members of a historic alliance, an alliance that saved and changed the world.” In a subtweet of Vance and Trump, he acknowledged, “we Americans may sometimes come off as a little direct and urgent in our counsel.” He made a solid joke about German immigrants “dramatically upgraded the quality of American beer” that went down well. His biggest applause line was when he said, “for us Americans, our home may be in the Western Hemisphere, but we will always be a child of Europe.” He closed by noting, “America is charting the path for a new century of prosperity, and that once again we want to do it together with you, our cherished allies and our oldest friends.”

Little wonder Ischinger said immediately afterwards that, “I’m not sure you heard the sigh of relief through this hall when we were just listening to what I would interpret as a message of reassurance, of partnership.” Or, as one American CEO put it to me, “it was the best we could have hoped for.”

That said, the sighs of relief were short-lived, because…

Third, Rubio’s speech was just JD Vance’s speech with a human face. DW’s Walker also noted that, “when you listen closely to what Rubio was saying there was an awful lot of the kind of Trumpian view of nation that was going right through [the speech].” And he’s right. These sections in particular highlighted the Trump administration’s “my way or the highway” approach to international relations:

We can no longer place the so-called global order above the vital interests of our people and our nations. We do not need to abandon the system of international cooperation we authored, and we don’t need to dismantle the global institutions of the old order that together we built. But these must be reformed. These must be rebuilt.

For example, the United Nations still has tremendous potential to be a tool for good in the world. But we cannot ignore that today, on the most pressing matters before us, it has no answers and has played virtually no role [to solve problems in Gaza, Iran, Ukraine, and Venezuela.]

In a perfect world, all of these problems and more would be solved by diplomats and strongly worded resolutions. But we do not live in a perfect world, and we cannot continue to allow those who blatantly and openly threaten our citizens and endanger our global stability to shield themselves behind abstractions of international law which they themselves routinely violate.

This is the path that President Trump and the United States has embarked upon. It is the path we ask you here in Europe to join us on. It is a path we have walked together before and hope to walk together again….

We do not want our allies to be weak, because that makes us weaker. We want allies who can defend themselves so that no adversary will ever be tempted to test our collective strength. This is why we do not want our allies to be shackled by guilt and shame. We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization, and who, together with us, are willing and able to defend it.

Distilled to its essence, this is the exact same message Vance was sending last year: Europe needs to get its shit together and embrace the definition of Western civilization that Trump and his coterie embrace or get out of the way. Or, as Foreign Policy’s Rishi Iynegar and John Haltiwanger put it, “[Rubio] Rubio also dedicated much of his address to reiterating points Vance made a year earlier… much of it was old wine in a new bottle, slightly more chilled.” Most Europeans were unpersuaded by the friendlier tone — including some of Trump’s friendlier counterparts in the region.

Will Europeans be willing to follow where Trump is leading? Well, besides Trump’s profound unpopularity, the thing is…

Fourth, Rubio’s speech was logically contradictory when it wasn’t explicitly pro-imperialist. Trump supporters likely suspect that I, as an East Coast academic, am just trotting out the “i” word as a reflex action. And fair enough — but read this section and tell me any other way to interpret it:

For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding – its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe.

But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, it was contracting. Europe was in ruins. Half of it lived behind an Iron Curtain and the rest looked like it would soon follow. The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come.

Against that backdrop, then, as now, many came to believe that the West’s age of dominance had come to an end and that our future was destined to be a faint and feeble echo of our past. But together, our predecessors recognized that decline was a choice, and it was a choice they refused to make. This is what we did together once before, and this is what President Trump and the United States want to do again now, together with you.

Rubio’s speech was quite clear in asserting the superiority of Western civilization and bemoaning the fact that Europeans might have absorbed the idea that other civilizations have value.

Furthermore, Rubio’s definition of civilization was grounded exclusively in Christianity and white European heritage. Rubio referenced Christianity three times in the speech — never Judeo-Christian, just Christian. And after a brief aside about the rule of law, Rubio’s discussion of European contributions to Western civilization are limited to cultural greats like Mozart and the ethnic contributions of Germans, Spaniards, Italians, English, and Scotch-Irish to the settling of America.

In doing so, Rubio completely elides any discussion of, you know, the classical liberal tradition of Montesquieu or John Locke or Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill. Rubio can’t embrace that tradition because he is way too busy bashing mass migration. A failure to understand the roots of civic nationalism in Western civilization, however, is to deny a key comparative advantage — its ability to absorb others from across the globe. It’s an even cruder reductionism of “civilization” than Samuel Huntington’s version, and that’s saying something.

Asserting the superiority of a civilization while denying the very elements of the civilization that make it dynamic is the logical contradiction at the heart of Rubio’s weird speech.³

In the end, however….

Fifth, one could probably throw Rubio’s speech immediately into the rubbish pile. I say this not to be mean, but rather to echo a mantra I heard repeatedly at Munich: in 2026, actions speak louder than words. Nothing that Rubio said erases the dovish U.S. posture towards Russia, Trump’s appetite to colonize Greenland, or various U.S. efforts to weaponize European dependence. More telling than Rubio’s MSC speech was his decision to skip a key meeting with European leaders to discuss Ukraine, canceling at the last minute. Europeans continue to call for “de-risking” from the United States.

In other words, not much has changed because of Rubio’s speech — and that’s my fundamental take.

More Munich thoughts tomorrow!

1. My understanding is that they tried this at Davos after Trump’s speech there, but it didn’t take.

2. Though I’m not sure going to visit Viktor Orban is all that much of an improvement.

3. Even weirder: the section of the speech where Rubio documents his European ancestry without ever acknowledging his Cuban heritage.