Marco Rubio is portrayed as one of the Trump administration’s star performers as US secretary of state. A versatile, opportune and fluent politician from Cuban-American roots in Florida, he has adapted his positions and beliefs adroitly to Trump’s. That showed up clearly in his weekend speech on US-European relations to the Munich Security Conference and in his follow-up meetings with Robert Fico in Slovakia and yesterday with Viktor Orbán in Hungary. He invited Europeans to join the US on this journey but did not change its trajectory.
Rubio gave full voice to the new US doctrine of great power geopolitics, ethno-cultural identity and national interests set out in his department’s National Security Strategy. That warns of prospective “civilisational erasure” if Europe persists with immigration. It rejects a rules-based international order and is founded on joint rule by great powers in their respective regions. That does not include the European Union, regarded as too committed to such undesirable objectives. Rubio invited Europeans to join the US in a new century of prosperity based on these values – and gilded his message with a celebration of Americans’ European roots.
That gesture earned him applause, but leaves his European allies in a quandary. Rubio has not changed the new US vision. It is based on a romantic account of settler-colonialism in the US , a new doctrine of empire in world affairs and a set of values that cuts right across EU commitments to the rule of international law and open economies. This does not set the scene for the seriousness and reciprocity Rubio invokes, but for a much more contested and turbulent recalibration of future transatlantic relations. The Trump administration’s determined ideological internationalism was seen in Rubio’s Slovakian and Hungarian meetings with leaders who oppose deepening European integration.
Rubio’s European message is crafted to appeal but calculated to draw unwary Europeans into a political trap they should reject.