Marco Rubio, America’s foreign policy supremo, went to the Munich Security Conference (MSC) on 14 February 2026, ostensibly to apply a balm to the wound that Vice-President JD Vance inflicted on the transatlantic alliance at last year’s event. Rubio’s tone may have been less confrontational this year, but the essence of his address to the assembled grandees of European defence policy was that Europe was weak, misguided and asleep to self-inflicted threats. He talked of, if obliquely, the racial superiority of Europeans and those of European descent.
Rubio dismissed the “rules-based international order” as an “overused term and a foolish idea”. He almost certainly misrepresented and conflated rules-based order with the contention that it was meant to foster the notion “where everyone became a citizen of the world”. It was probably a dig at the EU, which has put European citizenship and the free movement of people as a core plank in the Union’s evolution. The policy was introduced precisely to weaken narrow nationalism, which led Europe into many wars in the 19th and 20th centuries. No EU state has gone to war with another EU state in the 70 years since EU integration began. The free movement of people has also been good for Europe’s economy. Labour mobility sees money and skills move around the continent.
How capitalism works
Rubio went on to criticise free trade, blaming it for seeing factories close in the rich north and move to the cheap labour south. But this is how free market capitalism works. Is Rubio not in favour of the free market? Factories move to get cheaper labour. Jobs are lost in the richer places, but consumers get lower prices, more choice and new technologies brought to market more quickly than before.
Rubio, it turns out, is a protectionist. No surprise there. The Trump administration has repeatedly used or threatened to use tariffs as a weapon of foreign policy and as a means of coercing manufacturers to invest in America. It is a policy fraught with danger.
President Roland Reagan warned against protectionism. It tends to stifle marketplace competition, encourage complacent management, disincentivise capital investment and innovation and can seed tensions between nations. It is a race to the bottom.
Not surprisingly, given Donald Trump’s recent rescinding of America’s central climate change policy, Rubio hates net zero. So would you if your boss’ election campaign was substantially funded by fossil fuel businesses. He accuses Europe of “appeasing a climate cult”. Maybe he hasn’t noticed that half the world is regularly flooded, while other parts suffer rising sea levels. Others experience long droughts and enormous winds are now regular features of storms across the globe.
Playing the race card
Warming to his nonsensical theme of a global drive to create a world without borders, Rubio said:
“We opened our 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. We made these mistakes together, and now, together, we owe it to our people to face those facts and to move forward, to rebuild.”
If you can’t spot the race card there, you’re not paying attention. The key phrases are “the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people”. What he really means is the bogeyman much loved by the extreme right. It goes by the name of ‘The Great Replacement Theory‘. This piece of destructive conspiracy theory garbage argues that there is an Islamic plot to outbreed whites in America, the UK, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, destroy their institutions of government and law and subject the West to the rule of imams.
With Donald Trump taking on the burden of saving us from ourselves, Rubio says America will take on the world’s threats on its own, if required. It would rather do it with Europe, says the boy wonder Rubio. But be warned, it would be Europe under American control, a Europe stripped of finding a reasonable balance between capital and labour, a Europe devoid of meaningful power over big business. We could also see ICE-type thugs on the streets of Europe and the UK, tasked with deporting those whose skin colour, religion or creed do not align with the new American dawn.
You can read Rubio’s speech in its dark entirety, here.
As for me, I’m redoubling my effort to build and promote a liberal, robust and sustainably pan-European polity and economy to defend ourselves from the bully, the extremist, the fanatic, the ignorant, the malign and the delusional.
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