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Marco Rubio: America is not interested in polite managed decline of the West

We must revitalize the old alliances

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The following is an excerpt taken from U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speech at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday, Feb. 14, 2026.

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Thank you very much. We gather here today as members of a historic alliance, an alliance that saved and changed the world. When this conference began in 1963, it was in a nation — actually, it was on a continent — that was divided against itself. The line between communism and freedom ran through the heart of Germany. The first barbed fences of the Berlin Wall had gone up just two years prior.

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And just months before that first conference, before our predecessors first met here, here in Munich, the Cuban Missile Crisis had brought the world to the brink of nuclear destruction. Even as World War II still burned fresh in the memory of Americans and Europeans alike, we found ourselves staring down the barrel of a new global catastrophe — one with the potential for a new kind of destruction, more apocalyptic and final than anything before in the history of mankind.

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At the time of that first gathering, Soviet communism was on the march. Thousands of years of Western civilization hung in the balance. At that time, victory was far from certain. But we were driven by a common purpose. We were unified........

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