A Floridian Diplomat in Bavaria

A summary of the Secretary of State's speech at the Munich Security Conference

The skyline of Munich- the only major German city restored after World War II to its traditional architectural character.

Under Destruction

Such was the doomsday title of the official 2026 Munich Security Conference report. Conducted at the luxury Hotel Bayerischer Hof in the heart of the Bavarian Capital more known for Lederhosen and Beer Halls than high-stakes geopolitical maneuvering, The Munich Conference on Security Policy is the gold standard of global gatherings of VIPs to debate their ideas and concerns over the state of global security. While past editions have pointed the finger more at international terrorism, China, and Russia, this year’s main villain is none other than Donald Trump and his disruptive America First foreign policy. On the website, the conference’s organizers make no efforts to disguise their true beliefs. And I quote:

The most powerful of those who take the axe to existing rules and institutions is US President Donald Trump. For supporters, Washington’s wrecking-ball politics promises to break institutional inertia and compel problem-solving on challenges previously marked by gridlock. Yet, it is unclear whether demolition is really clearing the ground for policies that will ultimately serve the people. Instead, transactional deals may well replace principled cooperation, private interests may increasingly trump public ones, and regions may become dominated by great powers rather than governed by international rules and norms.

The condemnation is sharp, and reflects the German and European (as well as parts of the American) political, security, and think tank elite’s visceral hatred for the 47^th President and the entire apparatus of the current US Administration. For the president’s core supporters, this loathing is a proud vindication that The United States is finally standing up for the American people against the diktats of the so-called Globalists in Washington, Munich, and European Capitals. To opponents, as brutally laid out above, the world’s most powerful nation is destructively abandoning law-based international cooperation in favor of a more selfish, transactional return to the Great Power Politics of centuries past. German Chancellor Friederich Merz, for example warned in his speech that “the leadership claim of the U.S. is… perhaps already lost” and “the international order based on rights and rules… no longer exists.”

In the eyes of Merz and his fellow European elites, The Trump Administration is nothing less than an irredeemable abomination.

While there exist plenty of recaps and scholarly critiques of how the 2026 Munich Security Conference transpired, I thought I would share a critique of my own, as an American, regarding the conference’s marquis speech. Sorry, Herr Merz, but it wasn’t you… or any other European, but instead US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the full transcript of which can be found here. Rubio, who juggles multiple roles in the Trump Administration, including National Security Adviser, had a distinct mission in Munich. Unlike Vice President JD Vance, whose address last year excoriating European elites unleashed a wave of recrimination, Rubio used the Munich platform to ‘translate’ the Trump Administration’s strategy in a language palatable to those who despise the America President. Not an easy job!

Despite the closed minds of most of the attendees, Marco Rubio, in my assessment, pulled it off.

Multiple times throughout the speech, Rubio invoked the concept of Western Civilization, what he deemed “the greatest civilization in human history… bound to one another by the bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.” While such language is toxic, deemed a threat to “democracy” and the “liberal order” guarded so fiercely by American and European liberals, to me, I see Rubio’s words a mere affirmation of the multitude of achievements from both Americans and Europeans and ultimately a call to arms to regain our competitive spirit. However, Rubio was also, in line with Vance and the rest of the administration, critical of the direction Western countries have taken in recent decades.

The “rules-based order”, in Rubio’s words, is no more than an “overused term,” or worse, “a foolish idea that… has cost us dearly.” And the man fourth-in-line to the presidency pulled no punches:

We increasingly outsourced our sovereignty to international institutions while many nations invested in massive welfare states at the cost of maintaining the ability to defend themselves. This, even as other countries have invested in the most rapid military buildup in all of human history and have not hesitated to use hard power to pursue their own interests. To appease a climate cult, we have imposed energy policies on ourselves that are impoverishing our people, even as our competitors exploit oil and coal and natural gas and anything else – not just to power their economies, but to use as leverage against our own.

You don’t need me to summarize Rubio’s critique line-by-line, but the Floridian is crystal clear: while the Western World has sunk into the mud of climate hysteria and other acts of civilizational self-destruction, China has undertaken the largest military buildup in human history, more enormous than Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, and is not afraid to weaponize its vast economic leverage. Rubio also called for Europe to abandon the “shackles of guilt and shame” and openly embrace their heritage. While these words are not as jarring as the Vice President’s, and were peppered with multiple assurances of the eternal bonds between the two transatlantic poles, Europe’s elite are far more likely than not to dismiss Rubio’s appeals as an attack on their ‘sacred’ values. Especially after conflicts over trade and Greenland, there is little the current US administration can do to regain their trust. As the conference’s official report warned, European governments regard the United States under Donald Trump more as an enemy than a partner.

While Marco Rubio’s speech may not have softened the hearts of the VIPs at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof, it did please this author. Far from the sort of destruction of which a few Bavarian bigwigs have hyperventilated, Marco Rubio’s speech is instead an opportunity for Europe, the ancestral home of American identity and the cradle of Western civilization, to change course.