Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s well-received speech at the annual Munich Security Conference came with calls for Europe to be strong, but not just on national defense. The thrust of the speech was about identity and culture. Without those, soldiers and generals have nothing to defend.
“Armies fight for a way of life,” Rubio said. “And that is what we are defending: a great civilization that has every reason to be proud of its history.”
Rubio emphasized that while the “technical questions” of national security (“how much we spend on defense or where, how we deploy it”) are “important questions … they are not the fundamental one.”
“The fundamental question we must answer at the outset is what exactly are we defending, because armies do not fight for abstractions,” Rubio said.
The sub rosa context: Europe’s center-right parties, just as filled with Never-Trumpers as the old “conservative” establishment is in the United States, better get past their allergy to what they deride as “the culture wars.” Otherwise, they’ll face retribution from voters who are choosing surging new parties on the right who get the gist of Rubio’s admonitions.
The Munich Security Conference has been held as a “marketplace of ideas” almost every year since 1963. It brings together heads of state and government, ministers, top military leaders, and journalists to cover the event.
European observers are comparing Rubio’s speech favorably with Vice President JD Vance’s speech a year ago in the same conference. Vance caused a stir with a speech that came as a cold shower for the Europeans in attendance.
“The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor,” the vice president said. “And what I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values — values shared with the United States of America.”
By contrast, Rubio at times used different imagery. He said, for example, that the reason why “President Trump demands seriousness and reciprocity from our friends here in Europe” is “because we care deeply. We care deeply about your future and ours.”
“And if at times we disagree, our disagreements come from our profound sense of concern about a Europe with which we are connected — not just economically, not just militarily,” Rubio continued. “We are connected spiritually, and we are connected culturally.”
Top Europeans rushed to praise Rubio’s message as more reassuring. Typical was Munich Security Conference Chairman Wolfgang Ischinger’s comment to Rubio that, “I’m not sure you heard the sigh of relief in this room,” adding that the message of “reassurance, of partnership” compared to the tense atmosphere of previous years.
But the message from Rubio and Vance was the same: If you allow mass immigration with no hope of assimilation to the pre-existing culture, if you allow that culture to wither or the Left to disparage it, if practice free trade with countries that do not reciprocate, if you cripple your economy in the name of climate — if you behave as conservatives, and the West in general, have for decades now, then you are courting your own destruction.
Both speeches were equally Churchillian in reach and rhetoric. Both informed conservative parties in Europe that if they fail to reclaim the cultural ground they have lost to the Left in the past two decades, they will squander the values that make the Western alliance possible.
Of course, the applause for Rubio led the Trump administration’s domestic critics to throw a hissy fit.
Typical was The Atlantic’s Thomas Wright, who groaned that all this praise came “despite the fact that Rubio, like Vance, clearly misunderstands Europe, and is in denial about the threats facing the United States and the transatlantic alliance.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), invited to give her views on national security for reasons that were not immediately clear, was unintentionally comical when she injected her identity politics.
AOC objected that Rubio, when reviewing the various ways that Europeans made the U.S. into what it is today, said that “horses, our ranches, our rodeos — the entire romance of the cowboy archetype that became synonymous with the American West — these were born in Spain.” Added AOC: “I believe Mexicans and the descendants of enslaved African peoples would like to have a word on that.”
Spain brought horses to the New World, and with them the vaquero habits that in the West were forged into cowboy culture. It was another reminder that modern Leftists are not just ignorant of economics, but also of history and culture, and rigidly apply their identity-driven formulas where they clearly don’t belong.
But the reason stateside sufferers of Trump derangement syndrome hated Rubio’s speech is that it was just as much about domestic policy as it was about defense. Rubio knows that it is not only in Europe that the Left is busy tearing up national identity and culture. The fact that leftists are trying to do the same here is what Trump’s fights with the Smithsonian, with the universities, and with Hollywood in general are all about.
When Rubio railed at Munich against how the decolonization of the 1960s and 1970s handed the Soviet Union unnecessary victories that made people from Vietnam to Zimbabwe suffer, he brought to mind the Left’s push to “decolonize” our museums.
THE GREAT BRITISH HOMESCHOOL CRACKDOWN
“We do not want our allies to be shackled by guilt and shame,” said Rubio. “We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization, and who, together with us, are willing and able to defend it.”
Foreign policy is, in some ways, though not all, an extension of this cultural fight. The sooner all conservatives realize that, the more effective our battle against the Left will be.
