Get audio access with any FP subscription. Subscribe Now ALREADY AN FP SUBSCRIBER? LOGIN

Get audio access with any FP subscription.

ALREADY AN FP SUBSCRIBER? LOGIN

Ongoing reports and analysis

No sooner had Marco Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state, concluded his speech the other day at the Munich Security Conference than pundits on both sides of the Atlantic began debating the applause that followed.

For some, the standing ovation expressed heartfelt relief that Rubio had not spoken in the threatening style of his boss, President Donald Trump, or with the insulting bluster of Vice President J.D. Vance, who had given a speech in Munich a year earlier. For others, it was no more than the polite response of a European elite that has shed its illusions about a shared vision of the world and simply wants to keep frictions with Washington to a minimum as the two sides drift apart.

No sooner had Marco Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state, concluded his speech the other day at the Munich Security Conference than pundits on both sides of the Atlantic began debating the applause that followed.

For some, the standing ovation expressed heartfelt relief that Rubio had not spoken in the threatening style of his boss, President Donald Trump, or with the insulting bluster of Vice President J.D. Vance, who had given a speech in Munich a year earlier. For others, it was no more than the polite response of a European elite that has shed its illusions about a shared vision of the world and simply wants to keep frictions with Washington to a minimum as the two sides drift apart.

For me, both responses were premature. Yes, Rubio strained to assert the survival of a common project between Europe and the United States. But because modest gestures by this administration toward what was long considered normalcy in international relations have often been followed by unprecedented breeches to the global order—such as Trump’s repeated recent threats to take over Greenland after blandly mollifying statements about NATO—I waited to see what would follow.

As it turned out, it was not Trump himself, but the widely applauded Rubio who delivered the most consequential follow-up to Munich—and although little remarked upon in the U.S. press, it was deeply alarming.

After Munich, Rubio visited Hungary, where he expressed Washington’s alignment with Viktor Orban, the country’s profoundly autocratic........

© Foreign Policy