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Marco Rubio delivers tough love to Europe — and the overgrown teenage brats know ‘dad’ is right

An American statesman was born on a German stage over the weekend.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s impressive performance at the Munich Security Conference gives us an alluring glimpse of the president he could be one day.

Rubio drew a standing ovation from the assembled European heads of state, intelligence chiefs, and military leaders for a speech that was no less forceful or frank than VP JD Vance’s address that jarred the same forum last year, but was delivered with a mellifluous voice and calm humility that disarmed even the most arch Euro-socialist.

Rubio was warm and reassuring rather than sneering and contemptuous.

But that was no accident. He was playing “Good Cop” to Vance’s “Bad Cop,” a strategy that paid off with the collective “sigh of relief” that conference chairman Wolfgang Ischinger expressed afterwards, as he motioned to the audience to sit and praised Rubio’s “message of reassurance.”

Except, as Rubio later told a Bloomberg journalist who was trying to find a wedge between him and his friend Vance: “I think it’s the same message.”

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They’re on the same team, for now, anyway.

The beauty of the speech, large parts of which were written by Rubio, was its broad-brush clarity.

He mapped out precisely how and why the West had lost our way. In the euphoria of our Cold War triumph we fell for the “dangerous delusion that we had entered the end of history,” that every nation would now be a liberal democracy and we would “live in a world without borders.”

This “foolish idea ignored both human nature [and] the lessons of over 5,000 years of recorded human history,” he said.

In our hubris and naivete, we embraced a “dogmatic vision” of unfettered trade and mass migration, “even as some nations [hello, China] protected their economies and subsidized their companies to systematically undercut ours — shuttering our plants, resulting in large parts of our societies being deindustrialized, shipping millions of working and middle class jobs overseas and handing control of our critical supply chains to both adversaries and rivals.”

His criticism of unchecked mass migration was slammed afterwards by Democrats, Eurocrats and their media handmaidens as racist, but it is a crisis they ignore at their peril.

“In a pursuit of a world without borders, we opened our doors to an unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture and the future of our people,” he said.

From this undeniable diagnosis of the problem, he quickly moved on to what Politico described as “Rubio’s love letter” to Europe.

It was a heartfelt, almost poetic, tribute to the history and ideas that formed America. But he sprinkled in some kryptonite for the liberal mind when he pointed out the Christian roots of our shared culture and warned that we must be “unapologetic in our heritage and proud of this common inheritance.”

“We are part of one civilization — Western civilization. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir,” he said.

In a critique that spectacularly missed the point, The New York Times snarked that Rubio’s Europe no longer exists, citing “halal counters” in Munich and a nearby Afghan grocery store as counterpoint.

Rubio described America as “a child of Europe.”

But, really, he was describing a relationship that, since the Cold War, has grown into an unhealthy dependency of Europe on America, akin to the resentful 30-year-old son still living in his parents’ basement.

Rubio was like the father who offers warm encouragement along with a strong dose of tough love. In his heart, the overgrown teenage brat knows dad is right that he has to stand on his own two feet, although he’d rather die than admit it.

“We in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline,” Rubio continued. “We do not seek to separate, but to revitalize an old friendship and renew the greatest civilization in human history.”

He also cleverly reframed past pungent criticism of Europe expressed by Vance and President Trump as a sign of that love and regard.

“We Americans may sometimes come off as a little direct and urgent in our counsel,” he said, but that is only because “we care deeply . . . We want Europe to be strong . . . Our destiny is and will always be intertwined with yours.”

That last line, which came about a third of the way into the 18-minute speech, was greeted with uncharacteristically rapturous applause from the audience.

He finished with a tantalizing promise of the sunlit uplands ahead, “a new century of prosperity” that America wants to chart with “you, our cherished allies and our oldest friends.”

The whole speech is well worth reading and ought to be analyzed in every history class.

What a contrast to bottom-feeding Democrats like AOC and Gavin Newsom, who hovered around the fringes of the conference vying for the title of least impressive presidential candidate of 2028.

They exposed themselves as intellectual and moral pygmies mouthing canned phrases like “rules-based world order” that they have heard foreign policy wonks like Joe Biden (hah!) use.

AOC loves the phrase so much that in one of her word salad expositions, she used it four times in 40 seconds.

In his speech the next day, Rubio gave her a deliciously subtle sideswipe when, almost under his breath, he described the cliche as an “overused term.”

AOC tried to mock Rubio after his speech in a clip that went viral for reasons she didn’t anticipate: “My favorite part was when he said that American cowboys came from Spain,” she said. “I believe the Mexicans and descendants of African slave peoples would like to have a word on that.”

As social media wags were quick to point out, Spain introduced horses to Mexico.

Newsom, for his part, didn’t even try to talk about foreign policy. It was all climate alarm and how “stupid” the president is.

But never fear, “Donald Trump is temporary,” and Gorgeous Gavin will be your “stable and reliable partner,” he said, with all the sincerity of a used car salesman.

In any case, one day, let’s hope we look back at Rubio’s speech as the moment that the rest of the West began to regain its senses.

It’s a clear choice for us in 2028, too. Do we bound into the future with optimism and elan on the path forged by Trump or do we go back to flogging a dead horse with the threadbare ideas the Democrats can’t seem to let go?

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