What the American Right Wants From Europe

It tells you something notable about the world of the 2020s that Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speech to the Munich Security Conference earned a brief standing ovation. Put the same speech in the mouth of any Republican politician from the Iraq war through the late 2010s, and its themes and flourishes would have been seen as essentially reactionary — maybe understandably so, given American piety and jingoism, but certainly not a tone that sophisticated and progressive Europeans ought to welcome.

Now, though, a call to control borders and rebuild military and industrial might and to prioritize national interests over international institutions and Western civilization over global citizenship — all rooted in a vision of the trans-Atlantic relationship as an extension of Europe’s Christian heritage and its empire-building and missionary-sending past — well, if that right-wing vision of the European-American relationship is what it takes to keep the United States invested in NATO, then at least some European elites are willing to stand up and applaud.

This is, in fact, the rough bargain that the American right is offering to Europe at the moment. There has been a lot of talk about the potential abandonment of our European alliance by an American populism that supposedly holds the Old World in disdain. But it’s closer to the mark to say that the American right often identifies powerfully with Europe, but the Europe it wants to love is not the Europe that’s been built over the past few generations, so American conservatives are trying to alter the beloved as the price of their affection.

Which leaves European elites with a complicated set of options. If they join the applause for Rubio at Munich — saying, in effect, “I don’t care why you love me, as long as you love me” — they are continuing in a relationship knowing that their partner expects them to change, to become more nationalist, religious, free-market-oriented and better armed. They can actually try to make that kind of change (the preference of some of the continent’s nationalists), or they can wait and hope that the American demand will change or soften over time (with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Munich tour a source of hope for that potential future). Or more radically, they can refuse the relationship entirely and look for partners who seem to love them as they are (like India, with which the European Union just concluded a big trade-and-migration deal).

As an American conservative with Europhilic tendencies, I naturally think the first option is the best for Europe’s future. Just because a message is associated with President Trump doesn’t make it worth ignoring, and Europe would be better off in almost every way if it moved in the direction suggested by the Rubio address: more politically stable if it successfully limited mass migration, more dynamic if it chose deregulation over deindustrialization, more optimistic and creative and fecund if it recovered religious faith, more capable of defending its ideals if it spent more money on defense.

But American conservatives should also be clear about the tensions inherent in their appeal for European change. The obvious one divides Rubio from his boss: When the secretary of state says, “We Americans may sometimes come off as a little direct and urgent in our counsel,” he’s pretending that we didn’t just have a pointless mini-crisis over Greenland in which the Trumpian ask wasn’t “direct and urgent” so much as immoral and destructive, less a demand for healthy change than an abusive demand for submission.

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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is also the host of the Opinion podcast “Interesting Times.” He is the author, most recently, of “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook

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