![\"Secretary](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/55095429945_2e9772373f_o-1024x702.jpg\")
Secretary Marco Rubio delivers remarks to the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany, February 14, 2026. (Official State Department photo by Freddie Everett)
<\/p>\nSecretary Marco Rubio delivers remarks to the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany, February 14, 2026. (Official State Department photo by Freddie Everett)
<\/p>\n
As delivered by Marco Rubio, Secretary of State
Hotel Bayerischer Hof
Munich, Germany
February 14, 2026<\/p>\n
Thank you very much.\u00a0 We gather here today as members of a historic alliance, an alliance that saved and changed the world.\u00a0 When this conference began in 1963, it was in a nation \u2013 actually, it was on a continent \u2013 that was divided against itself.\u00a0 The line between communism and freedom ran through the heart of Germany.\u00a0 The first barbed fences of the Berlin Wall had gone up just two years prior.<\/p>\n
And just months before that first conference, before our predecessors first met here, here in Munich, the Cuban Missile Crisis had brought the world to the brink of nuclear destruction.\u00a0 Even as World War II still burned fresh in the memory of Americans and Europeans alike, we found ourselves staring down the barrel of a new global catastrophe \u2013 one with the potential for a new kind of destruction, more apocalyptic and final than anything before in the history of mankind.<\/p>\n
At the time of that first gathering, Soviet communism was on the march.\u00a0 Thousands of years of Western civilization hung in the balance.\u00a0 At that time, victory was far from certain.\u00a0 But we were driven by a common purpose.\u00a0 We were unified not just by what we were fighting against; we were unified by what we were fighting for.\u00a0 And together, Europe and America prevailed and a continent was rebuilt.\u00a0 Our people prospered.\u00a0 In time, the East and West blocs were reunited. A civilization was once again made whole.<\/p>\n
That infamous wall that had cleaved this nation into two came down, and with it an evil empire, and the East and West became one again.\u00a0 But the euphoria of this triumph led us to a dangerous delusion:\u00a0 that we had entered, quote, \u201cthe end of history;\u201d that every nation would now be a liberal democracy; that the ties formed by trade and by commerce alone would now replace nationhood; that the rules-based global order \u2013 an overused term \u2013 would now replace the national interest; and that we would now live in a world without borders where everyone became a citizen of the world.<\/p>\n
This was a foolish idea that ignored both human nature and it ignored the lessons of over 5,000 years of recorded human history.\u00a0 And it has cost us dearly.\u00a0 In this delusion, we embraced a dogmatic vision of free and unfettered trade, even as some nations protected their economies and subsidized their companies to systematically undercut ours \u2013 shuttering our plants, resulting in large parts of our societies being deindustrialized, shipping millions of working and middle-class jobs overseas, and handing control of our critical supply chains to both adversaries and rivals.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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 \u2013 not just to power their economies, but to use as leverage against our own.<\/p>\n
And in a pursuit of a world without borders, 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.\u00a0 We made these mistakes together, and now, together, we owe it to our people to face those facts and to move forward, to rebuild.<\/p>\n
Under President Trump, the United States of America will once again take on the task of renewal and restoration, driven by a vision of a future as proud, as sovereign, and as vital as our civilization\u2019s past.\u00a0 And while we are prepared, if necessary, to do this alone, it is our preference and it is our hope to do this together with you, our friends here in Europe.<\/p>\n
For the United States and Europe, we belong together.\u00a0 America was founded 250 years ago, but the roots began here on this continent long before.\u00a0 The man who settled and built the nation of my birth arrived on our shores carrying the memories and the traditions and the Christian faith of their ancestors as a sacred inheritance, an unbreakable link between the old world and the new.<\/p>\n
We are part of one civilization \u2013 Western civilization.\u00a0 We are bound to one another by the deepest 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.<\/p>\n
And so this is why we Americans may sometimes come off as a little direct and urgent in our counsel.\u00a0 This is why President Trump demands seriousness and reciprocity from our friends here in Europe.\u00a0 The reason why, my friends, is because we care deeply.\u00a0 We care deeply about your future and ours.\u00a0 And if at times we disagree, our disagreements come from our profound sense of concern about a Europe with which we are connected \u2013 not just economically, not just militarily.\u00a0 We are connected spiritually and we are connected culturally.\u00a0 We want Europe to be strong.\u00a0 We believe that Europe must survive, because the two great wars of the last century serve for us as history\u2019s constant reminder that ultimately, our destiny is and will always be intertwined with yours, because we know \u2013 (applause) \u2013 because we know that the fate of Europe will never be irrelevant to our own.<\/p>\n
National security, which this conference is largely about, is not merely series of technical questions \u2013 how much we spend on defense or where, how we deploy it, these are important questions.\u00a0 They are.\u00a0 But they are not the fundamental one.\u00a0 The fundamental question we must answer at the outset is what exactly are we defending, because armies do not fight for abstractions.\u00a0 Armies fight for a people; armies fight for a nation.\u00a0 Armies fight for a way of life.\u00a0 And that is what we are defending: a great civilization that has every reason to be proud of its history, confident of its future, and aims to always be the master of its own economic and political destiny.<\/p>\n
It was here in Europe where the ideas that planted the seeds of liberty that changed the world were born.\u00a0 It was here in Europe where the world \u2013 which gave the world the rule of law, the universities, and the scientific revolution.\u00a0 It was this continent that produced the genius of Mozart and Beethoven, of Dante and Shakespeare, of Michelangelo and Da Vinci, of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.\u00a0 And this is the place where the vaulted ceilings of the Sistine Chapel and the towering spires of the great cathedral in Cologne, they testify not just to the greatness of our past or to a faith in God that inspired these marvels.\u00a0 They foreshadow the wonders that await us in our future.\u00a0 But only if we are unapologetic in our heritage and proud of this common inheritance can we together begin the work of envisioning and shaping our economic and our political future.<\/p>\n
Deindustrialization was not inevitable.\u00a0 It was a conscious policy choice, a decades-long economic undertaking that stripped our nations of their wealth, of their productive capacity, and of their independence.\u00a0 And the loss of our supply chain sovereignty was not a function of a prosperous and healthy system of global trade.\u00a0 It was foolish.\u00a0 It was a foolish but voluntary transformation of our economy that left us dependent on others for our needs and dangerously vulnerable to crisis.<\/p>\n
Mass migration is not, was not, isn\u2019t some fringe concern of little consequence.\u00a0 It was and continues to be a crisis which is transforming and destabilizing societies all across the West.\u00a0 Together we can reindustrialize our economies and rebuild our capacity to defend our people.\u00a0 But the work of this new alliance should not be focused just on military cooperation and reclaiming the industries of the past.\u00a0 It should also be focused on, together, advancing our mutual interests and new frontiers, unshackling our ingenuity, our creativity, and the dynamic spirit to build a new Western century.\u00a0 Commercial space travel and cutting-edge artificial intelligence; industrial automation and flex manufacturing; creating a Western supply chain for critical minerals not vulnerable to extortion from other powers; and a unified effort to compete for market share in the economies of the Global South.\u00a0 Together we can not only take back control of our own industries and supply chains \u2013 we can prosper in the areas that will define the 21st century.<\/p>\n
But we must also gain control of our national borders.\u00a0 Controlling who and how many people enter our countries, this is not an expression of xenophobia.\u00a0 It is not hate.\u00a0 It is a fundamental act of national sovereignty.\u00a0 And the failure to do so is not just an abdication of one of our most basic duties owed to our people.\u00a0 It is an urgent threat to the fabric of our societies and the survival of our civilization itself.<\/p>\n
And finally, we can no longer place the so-called global order above the vital interests of our people and our nations.\u00a0 We do not need to abandon the system of international cooperation we authored, and we don\u2019t need to dismantle the global institutions of the old order that together we built.\u00a0 But these must be reformed.\u00a0 These must be rebuilt.<\/p>\n
For example, the United Nations still has tremendous potential to be a tool for good in the world.\u00a0 But we cannot ignore that today, on the most pressing matters before us, it has no answers and has played virtually no role.\u00a0 It could not solve the war in Gaza.\u00a0 Instead, it was American leadership that freed captives from barbarians and brought about a fragile truce.\u00a0 It had not solved the war in Ukraine.\u00a0 It took American leadership and partnership with many of the countries here today just to bring the two sides to the table in search of a still-elusive peace.<\/p>\n
It was powerless to constrain the nuclear program of radical Shia clerics in Tehran.\u00a0 That required 14 bombs dropped with precision from American B-2 bombers.\u00a0 And it was unable to address the threat to our security from a narcoterrorist dictator in Venezuela.\u00a0 Instead, it took American Special Forces to bring this fugitive to justice.<\/p>\n
In a perfect world, all of these problems and more would be solved by diplomats and strongly worded resolutions.\u00a0 But we do not live in a perfect world, and we cannot continue to allow those who blatantly and openly threaten our citizens and endanger our global stability to shield themselves behind abstractions of international law which they themselves routinely violate.<\/p>\n
This is the path that President Trump and the United States has embarked upon.\u00a0 It is the path we ask you here in Europe to join us on.\u00a0 It is a path we have walked together before and hope to walk together again.\u00a0 For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding \u2013 its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe.<\/p>\n
But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, it was contracting.\u00a0 Europe was in ruins.\u00a0 Half of it lived behind an Iron Curtain and the rest looked like it would soon follow.\u00a0 The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come.<\/p>\n
Against that backdrop, then, as now, many came to believe that the West\u2019s age of dominance had come to an end and that our future was destined to be a faint and feeble echo of our past.\u00a0 But together, our predecessors recognized that decline was a choice, and it was a choice they refused to make.\u00a0 This is what we did together once before, and this is what President Trump and the United States want to do again now, together with you.<\/p>\n
And this is why we do not want our allies to be weak, because that makes us weaker.\u00a0 We want allies who can defend themselves so that no adversary will ever be tempted to test our collective strength.\u00a0 This is why we do not want our allies to be shackled by guilt and shame.\u00a0 We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization, and who, together with us, are willing and able to defend it.<\/p>\n
And this is why we do not want allies to rationalize the broken status quo rather than reckon with what is necessary to fix it, for we in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West\u2019s managed decline.\u00a0 We do not seek to separate, but to revitalize an old friendship and renew the greatest civilization in human history.\u00a0 What we want is a reinvigorated alliance that recognizes that what has ailed our societies is not just a set of bad policies but a malaise of hopelessness and complacency.\u00a0 An alliance \u2013 the alliance that we want is one that is not paralyzed into inaction by fear \u2013 fear of climate change, fear of war, fear of technology.\u00a0 Instead, we want an alliance that boldly races into the future.\u00a0 And the only fear we have is the fear of the shame of not leaving our nations prouder, stronger, and wealthier for our children.<\/p>\n
An alliance ready to defend our people, to safeguard our interests, and to preserve the freedom of action that allows us to shape our own destiny \u2013 not one that exists to operate a global welfare state and atone for the purported sins of past generations.\u00a0 An alliance that does not allow its power to be outsourced, constrained, or subordinated to systems beyond its control; one that does not depend on others for the critical necessities of its national life; and one that does not maintain the polite pretense that our way of life is just one among many and that asks for permission before it acts.\u00a0 And above all, an alliance based on the recognition that we, the West, have inherited together \u2013 what we have inherited together is something that is unique and distinctive and irreplaceable, because this, after all, is the very foundation of the transatlantic bond.<\/p>\n
Acting together in this way, we will not just help recover a sane foreign policy.\u00a0 It will restore to us a clearer sense of ourselves.\u00a0 It will restore a place in the world, and in so doing, it will rebuke and deter the forces of civilizational erasure that today menace both America and Europe alike.<\/p>\n
So in a time of headlines heralding the end of the transatlantic era, let it be known and clear to all that this is neither our goal nor our wish \u2013 because for us Americans, our home may be in the Western Hemisphere, but we will always be a child of Europe.\u00a0 (Applause.)<\/p>\n
Our story began with an Italian explorer whose adventure into the great unknown to discover a new world brought Christianity to the Americas \u2013 and became the legend that defined the imagination of a our pioneer nation.<\/p>\n
Our first colonies were built by English settlers, to whom we owe not just the language we speak but the whole of our political and legal system.\u00a0 Our frontiers were shaped by Scots-Irish \u2013 that proud, hearty clan from the hills of Ulster that gave us Davy Crockett and Mark Twain and Teddy Roosevelt and Neil Armstrong.<\/p>\n
Our great midwestern heartland was built by German farmers and craftsmen who transformed empty plains into a global agricultural powerhouse \u2013 and by the way, dramatically upgraded the quality of American beer.\u00a0 (Laughter.)<\/p>\n
Our expansion into the interior followed the footsteps of French fur traders and explorers whose names, by the way, still adorn the street signs and towns\u2019 names all across the Mississippi Valley.\u00a0 Our horses, our ranches, our rodeos \u2013 the entire romance of the cowboy archetype that became synonymous with the American West \u2013 these were born in Spain.\u00a0 And our largest and most iconic city was named New Amsterdam before it was named New York.<\/p>\n
And do you know that in the year that my country was founded, Lorenzo and Catalina Geroldi lived in Casale Monferrato in the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia.\u00a0 And Jose and Manuela Reina lived in Sevilla, Spain.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know what, if anything, they knew about the 13 colonies which had gained their independence from the British empire, but here\u2019s what I am certain of:\u00a0 They could have never imagined that 250 years later, one of their direct descendants would be back here today on this continent as the chief diplomat of that infant nation.\u00a0 And yet here I am, reminded by my own story that both our histories and our fates will always be linked.<\/p>\n
Together we rebuilt a shattered continent in the wake of two devastating world wars.\u00a0 When we found ourselves divided once again by the Iron Curtain, the free West linked arms with the courageous dissidents struggling against tyranny in the East to defeat Soviet communism.\u00a0 We have fought against each other, then reconciled, then fought, then reconciled again.\u00a0 And we have bled and died side by side on battlefields from Kapyong to Kandahar.<\/p>\n
And I am here today to leave it clear that America is charting the path for a new century of prosperity, and that once again we want to do it together with you, our cherished allies and our oldest friends.\u00a0 (Applause.)<\/p>\n
We want to do it together with you, with a Europe that is proud of its heritage and of its history; with a Europe that has the spirit of creation of liberty that sent ships out into uncharted seas and birthed our civilization; with a Europe that has the means to defend itself and the will to survive.\u00a0 We should be proud of what we achieved together in the last century, but now we must confront and embrace the opportunities of a new one \u2013 because yesterday is over, the future is inevitable, and our destiny together awaits.\u00a0 Thank you.<\/p>\n
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