No sooner had Marco Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state, concluded his speech the other day at the Munich Security Conference than pundits on both sides of the Atlantic began debating the applause that followed.
For some, the standing ovation expressed heartfelt relief that Rubio had not spoken in the threatening style of his boss, President Donald Trump, or with the insulting bluster of Vice President J.D. Vance, who had given a speech in Munich a year earlier. For others, it was no more than the polite response of a European elite that has shed its illusions about a shared vision of the world and simply wants to keep frictions with Washington to a minimum as the two sides drift apart.
No sooner had Marco Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state, concluded his speech the other day at the Munich Security Conference than pundits on both sides of the Atlantic began debating the applause that followed.
For some, the standing ovation expressed heartfelt relief that Rubio had not spoken in the threatening style of his boss, President Donald Trump, or with the insulting bluster of Vice President J.D. Vance, who had given a speech in Munich a year earlier. For others, it was no more than the polite response of a European elite that has shed its illusions about a shared vision of the world and simply wants to keep frictions with Washington to a minimum as the two sides drift apart.
For me, both responses were premature. Yes, Rubio strained to assert the survival of a common project between Europe and the United States. But because modest gestures by this administration toward what was long considered normalcy in international relations have often been followed by unprecedented breeches to the global order—such as Trump’s repeated recent threats to take over Greenland after blandly mollifying statements about NATO—I waited to see what would follow.
As it turned out, it was not Trump himself, but the widely applauded Rubio who delivered the most consequential follow-up to Munich—and although little remarked upon in the U.S. press, it was deeply alarming.
After Munich, Rubio visited Hungary, where he expressed Washington’s alignment with Viktor Orban, the country’s profoundly autocratic prime minister, telling him that Hungary’s success was the United States’ success. It is hard to imagine how this could be reassuring to any mainline U.S. allies in Europe, all of which remain committed to democratic liberalism. Worse still, Orban, beyond degrading democratic rule in Hungary, is a committed ethnonationalist.
By now, it has been widely asserted that the second Trump administration is presiding over an assault on democratic norms in the United States. Many of Trump’s defenders deny this, but it is hard to read the effusively affirmed alliance with Orban as anything less than an authoritarian mission statement. The Trump administration’s vocal support for far-right parties in Europe is of a piece with its efforts to degrade democratic norms at home, whether by pushing false claims of past voter fraud, floating federal control of elections, hinting about a possible third Trump term, or suggesting—as Vance has—that the executive should not be bound by unfavorable court decisions.
The confluence between what one might call Orbanism and Trumpism was already evident in Rubio’s Munich speech, even though it went little noticed. Europeans, and indeed many Americans who hope for more continuity in their country’s foreign policy, may have been too quick to let their guard down amid the conference’s prevailing decorum. What analysts on both sides of the Atlantic should have been doing is connecting the dots.
In his speech, Rubio stressed the commonalities inherent in the trans-Atlantic relationship, but he was wrong on almost all the particulars—and patronizing to boot. Orban aside, European societies remain largely committed to participatory democracy, personal freedoms, and the rule of law. Americans who believe in democracy at home should hope that they continue to do so. One day, it may be Europeans making the call summoning Americans to recover their senses and, with them, the traditions that have often been considered Western norms.
A crucial task in the meantime is to think through the implications of Rubio’s advice to Europe, and to do so forensically, in order to uncover its contradictions and disturbing implications. The best place to start is with Rubio’s denunciation in Munich of “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 statement formed part of Rubio’s call for Europe to defend Western civilization—but only an imagined one, closely aligned with Orban’s white, Christian ethnonationalism. Just like occasional statements from the administration hinting that the United States was largely built by white settlers, it rests on a willful misunderstanding of history, if not sheer ignorance.
Europeans are wrestling with the prospect of demographic decline this century on a scale not seen since the two world wars. Germany, for example, is projected to lose nearly 5 percent of its population by 2050, leaving a society increasingly skewed toward older people and short of working-age youth. The Trump administration’s advice is to harden Europe’s borders and double down on a false notion of Europe as a place of fixed national identities, rooted in whiteness, 19th- and early 20th-century folk stereotypes, and Christianity as a universal standard.
The new emphasis on Christianity—embraced by Rubio and Vance, as well as some American opinion writers—is not just about excluding Muslims, as one might suspect. Some of its proponents imagine it as part of a revivalist toolkit to restore supposed family values and boost fertility rates, thereby ensuring the survival of the white race against migration from the global south.
Fertility rates are in steep decline all over the rich world. Despite costly efforts, no wealthy country—nor China, which combined fast economic growth with highly concentrated autocratic power—has discovered any way to change this reality. And a government-led call to Christianity is unlikely to, either.
It takes curiosity to uncover the facts about Europe’s national histories—and the truth is not only more interesting, but also stubborn. Consider the folkloric imagination of fixed European identities. Many of today’s European nation-states only began to acquire their contemporary forms and a patina of linguistic and cultural homogeneity in late modernity, especially in the 20th century. Prior to that, identities were much more localized and fluid, and migration was the norm.
It is especially striking that the European state that has staked out a position most strongly at odds with the Trump worldview about the threat of immigration to Europe’s cultural and racial survival is Spain.
This Iberian nation was not only deeply shaped by immigration from non-Christians in the past but also conquered and ruled by Muslims for centuries. Granted, that was long ago, but the continued existence of a Spanish-speaking nation owes as much to adaptation as to the Catholic reconquest that concluded in the 15th century. It speaks to the resilience of local cultures and to the fluidity intrinsic to human affairs.
At bottom, the Trump view that Europe should erect high barriers to immigration, much as the United States has, conveys the opposite of self-confidence. Trump, Vance, and Rubio would have us see Europe as weak. Yet strong and self-assured states are more willing to wager that they can assimilate diverse newcomers—not in unlimited numbers or in one fell swoop, but deliberately and in alignment with their demographic needs.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that race lies at the heart of the Trump administration’s stance on immigration. Aging and demographic decline are indeed sweeping the rich world, but that does not mean that the planet is running out of people. Indeed, the human population is projected to continue growing impressively at least until the end of this century. The problem that arises, for those who think in such terms, is that the young people of tomorrow will largely come from brown- and Black-skinned countries.
Here, one finds a disturbing convergence of ideas: the domestic specter of the so-called great replacement theory that Trump and some of his closest associates, such as Stephen Miller, have promoted—which holds that migrants threaten to “poison” America’s blood—and a much older form of global racial panic. That panic dates to the early 20th century, when popular U.S. authors such as Lothrop Stoddard warned that the world was about to be flooded by supposedly inferior races, or “under-men,” in books like The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat Against White World-Supremacy.
Europe has by no means reached a consensus that substantial, if carefully managed, immigration will be key to its future prosperity and survival, but it appears further along that path than the United States under Trump. The United States’ demographic needs are likely to combine with its diverse past and tradition of openness to eventually nudge it in Europe’s direction, rather than in the one Rubio pointed to. The question is how much damage the United States will do to itself—and the rest of the world—in the meantime.
