U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speech at this year’s Munich Security Conference provided anxious Europeans with a degree of reassurance that the United States under President Donald Trump was still committed to its security alliance with Europe. After the Trump administration sowed doubt about the validity of NATO’s Article 5 defense guarantee for months, published a National Security Strategy that called for “cultivating resistance” to “Europe’s current trajectory,” and even issued veiled threats of using military force to acquire Greenland, Rubio underscored that partnership with Europe remains a central interest of the United States.

That was the good news. The bad news was that the basis for this proposed partnership is no longer the threat from Russia, a common interest in defending world order, or the values shared by liberal democracies—pillars that have served Americans and Europeans well for decades. Instead, the Trump administration is now calling for an alliance based on an ill-defined “Western civilization” that it claims derives from “centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices [of] our forefathers.” Aside from its vagueness and incoherence as a concept, Western civilization is a terrible foundation on which to base the world’s most long-standing and important alliance.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speech at this year’s Munich Security Conference provided anxious Europeans with a degree of reassurance that the United States under President Donald Trump was still committed to its security alliance with Europe. After the Trump administration sowed doubt about the validity of NATO’s Article 5 defense guarantee for months, published a National Security Strategy that called for “cultivating resistance” to “Europe’s current trajectory,” and even issued veiled threats of using military force to acquire Greenland, Rubio underscored that partnership with Europe remains a central interest of the United States.

That was the good news. The bad news was that the basis for this proposed partnership is no longer the threat from Russia, a common interest in defending world order, or the values shared by liberal democracies—pillars that have served Americans and Europeans well for decades. Instead, the Trump administration is now calling for an alliance based on an ill-defined “Western civilization” that it claims derives from “centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices [of] our forefathers.” Aside from its vagueness........

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