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One Year After Vance Rebuked Europe, World Leaders Brace for Rubio’s Message

Secretary of State Marco Rubio disembarks from his plane at Munich airport, Feb. 13, 2026. (Alex Brandon/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

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World leaders are assembling in Germany for the annual Munich Security Conference this weekend as memories of Vice President JD Vance’s stern rebuke one year ago still hang in the air.

Instead of Vance, foreign leaders will hear an address from Secretary of State Marco Rubio Saturday morning.

The speech will focus on how “a strong America is good for our nation, but also for our European allies,” according to the State Department.

“I think it will be well received. We’ll see,” Rubio told the press as he prepared to depart Washington, D.C., for Europe on Thursday.

Rubio declined to give any specifics about his planned speech or comment on whether it would be more “conciliatory” than Vance’s address last year, but the secretary said Europeans “want to know where we’re going.”

“The world is changing very fast right in front of us. The old world is gone—frankly, the world that I grew up in—and we live in a new era in geopolitics, and it’s going to require all of us to sort of reexamine what that looks like and what our role is going to be,” Rubio said.

The Munich Security Conference is a leading forum for world leaders and experts to debate security policy.

Wolfgang Ischinger, who chairs the Munich Security Conference, told reporters Monday he views transatlantic relations as “in a considerable crisis of trust and credibility.”

Europeans became acutely aware of a new tone out of Washington, D.C. last year, when Vance addressed European leaders at the conference and expressed concern over the “threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values.”

Vance named multiple European countries and detailed instances in which those governments curtailed freedom of speech and expression, including in the United Kingdom, where Vance said the “backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons, in particular, in the crosshairs.”

“In Britain, and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat,” Vance said after telling the story of a man who was found guilty of breaking the U.K.’s “buffer zones” law while praying silently outside an abortion clinic. Vance also criticized Europe over its immigration policy.

“In Washington, there is a new sheriff in town. And under [President] Donald Trump’s leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer it in the public square, agree or disagree,” Vance told the crowd.

Vance and Rubio are commonly flanking Trump during high profile meetings with world leaders. Across D.C., the two are viewed as the frontrunners for the 2028 presidential election, though neither has confirmed any plans to run for president.

Rubio, like Vance, has proven to be a clear communicator and is expected to bring a direct message to Munich, though as Rubio told the press, the world will have to “wait till Saturday” to find out just how direct.

European leaders are “most nervous about being criticized on issues such as mass migration and freedom of speech … which is exactly why Secretary Rubio should be raising these issues,” says Nile Gardiner, director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at The Heritage Foundation and former aide to Lady Thatcher.

On the eve of Rubio’s speech, Wilson Beaver, a senior policy advisor for defense budgeting and NATO policy at The Heritage Foundation, said “the majority of European leaders and American leaders are both trying to strike a more conciliatory tone this year.”

Much of Europe has changed in regard to defense spending since Vance delivered his speech last year, as Beaver points out.

“Conservatives have been criticizing Europe for years and years, and some of us are so used to doing it that they haven’t stopped,” Beaver said. “But actually, European behavior has changed quite a bit.”

In June 2025, Trump received a commitment from nearly every NATO country to increase defense spending to 5% of their GDP by 2035.

Discussion over Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine is inevitable, as is conversation related to Trump’s expressed desire for the U.S. to own Greenland, which Beaver predicts will be the most likely issue contributing to “heated rhetoric from the Europeans” in Munich.

Speaking from a U.S. defense perspective, Beaver says he will be watching to see if Rubio makes the “case for the American national security shift in the Western Hemisphere,” adding Rubio needs “to make the case to Europe about how it’s good for everyone that we’re reasserting ourselves in our backyard.”

Additionally, Beaver hopes Rubio will challenge Europeans to sever close ties with China.

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