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........

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