Europe is still clinging to America’s security blanket

US secretary of state Marco Rubio’s speech to the Munich Security Conference (MSC) last week was significant not for what he said, but for European leaders’ reaction to it.

Rubio’s speech was more conciliatory than US vice-president JD Vance’s memorable broadside against Europe delivered at last year’s MSC. Vance’s aim was to shake things up, lay down the law and remind his audience that Europe’s special relationship with Washington was over. He said Europe needed to stand on its own two feet and take responsibility for its security. He delivered this message with brutal clarity.

This year, Rubio reiterated many of Vance’s points, but he did so in a more diplomatic tone. The fact that the same message was delivered two years in succession indicates that Washington means business. Those labouring under the illusion that last year’s address by Vance was a one-off must now realise that it wasn’t. Europe really is on its own.

Yet, even though there was no substantive difference in the thrust of Vance’s and Rubio’s addresses they provoked a very different reaction from those in attendance. As the New York Times put it, ‘Vance’s speech last year was met by a stunned silence, even gasps’. A mood of paralysis enveloped the proceedings as Europe’s leaders were left asking, ‘What now?’.

Rubio’s approach was far softer. Like a slick salesman he invoked the term ‘friends’ five times, and used the word ‘together’ 25 times, over the course of his 20-minute speech.

Judging by European members’ response, they were clearly desperate to hear what sounded like a reassuring message from Washington. The audience broke into applause when Rubio stated that ‘we will always be a child of Europe’. At the end they even gave the secretary of state a standing ovation. For a few moments at least, they could enjoy the illusion that they were listening to a close family member.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said Rubio’s speech was ‘very reassuring’. Likewise, Wolfgang Ischinger, the chairman of the MSC, thanked Rubio for his ‘message of reassurance’. Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign-policy chief, also heard what she wanted to hear. ‘It was a good speech’, she told an interviewer: ‘It was saying that Europe is important, that Europe and America are very intertwined and good allies, and have been for so long and will be in the future.’

Yet Rubio, like the much blunter Vance, was not delivering a message of reassurance at all. He was urging Europe to take responsibility for its own future. ‘We do not want allies to rationalise the broken status quo rather than reckon with what is necessary to fix it’, he said: ‘We in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline.’

Yet this part of the speech didn’t seem to cut through to Europe’s leaders at all. And no wonder. Deep down, they know they lack the will and the moral resources necessary to reverse the continent’s cultural, economic and geopolitical decline. Despite their occasional calls for an independent Europe or ‘strategic autonomy’, to use the EU buzzword, they do not really believe in their own words.

In their heart of hearts, they know that they cannot survive without the military protection provided by the US. Their behaviour resembles that of resentful supplicants who do not wish to be reminded of their precarious status in our world.

Europe faces a crisis of political direction and leadership. Until its centrist political managers are replaced by a new generation of leaders committed to overcoming the broken status quo, the continent will remain in a state of stasis. That is one message that the crowd assembled in Munich does not want to hear.

Frank Furedi is the executive director of the think-tank, MCC-Brussels.