As Marco Rubio boarded his flight for Munich on Thursday night, he sought to reassure nervous Europeans that they weren’t about to be berated by America. ‘We’ll be good,’ he said. It appears the US Secretary of State kept his word when he addressed the Munich security conference this morning.

Rubio kicked off his speech by harking back to 1963, the year Munich played host to the first security conference. Back then, he said, ‘the line between communism and freedom ran through the heart of Germany.’ ‘Soviet communism was on the march and thousands of years of western civilisation hung in the balance.’ Triumphing over communism had, however, allowed the West to be seduced by the ‘dangerous delusion that we entered “the end of history”’. The West’s leaders, he said, had made mistakes allowing free trade to flourish globally; they had ‘appeased a climate cult’ and invested in ‘massive’ welfare states at the cost of defence.

Mass migration featured heavily in Rubio’s speech. The West, he said, had opened its ‘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.’ This was a theme the Secretary of State returned to regularly throughout his address.........

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