The American Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, confirms the White House line: “We are not trying to separate but to revitalize an ancient friendship.” Meanwhile, Starmer and Von der Leyen continue to talk about rearmament. And Sánchez, who fears nuclear power, protests.
The decline of the West is not inevitable. This is the belief expressed by Marco Rubio in the speech he gave yesterday at the Munich Security Conference. The US Secretary of State first pointed the finger at the concept of the “end of history”. “In this illusion, we have embraced a dogmatic vision of free and unbridled trade, while some nations protected their economies and subsidized their companies,” he declared, criticizing the effects of globalization: from unregulated immigration to green policies. “We made these mistakes together,” he continued, “and now together we have a duty to our people to face these facts and move forward to rebuild. Under the presidency Trumpthe USA will once again take on the task of renewal and reconstruction, driven by the vision of a future as proud, sovereign and vital as the past of our civilization.”
“We don’t want allies to rationalize the status quo in crisis, rather than deal with what is needed to solve the problem,” he continued. «We Americans have no interest in being polite and orderly guardians of the controlled demise of the West. We do not seek to separate, but to revitalize an ancient friendship and renew the greatest civilization in human history,” he added. «We don’t want our allies to be weak. Because this makes us weaker”, he also said, also underlining that Americans will “always be children of Europe”. «America is blazing the trail for a new century of prosperity. And, once again, we want to do it together with you, our dear allies and our oldest friends. We want to do it together with you, with a Europe proud of its heritage and history, with a Europe that has the spirit of creation and freedom that sent ships into uncharted seas and that gave birth to our civilization, with a Europe that has the means to defend itself and the will to survive”, he concluded.
Far from embodying an isolationist spirit, Rubioin his speech, distanced himself greatly from the unrealistic naiveties of Francis Fukuyama as much as by the dark fatalism of Oswald Spengler. Europe, this is the gist of his speech, can take back its destiny both by abandoning the ideological errors of the last twenty years and by finding a new convergence with the United States. The points on which to collaborate, second Rubioare numerous: from the protection of borders to the reindustrialization of Western economies, passing through the restoration of control of supply chains. All this, without obviously neglecting the cultural heritage that was the basis of the West. Because – and this is the deepest meaning of the intervention of Rubio – the Western crisis today is first and foremost cultural, philosophical and, in a certain sense, spiritual.
Words, those of the Secretary of State, very different from those of Emmanuel Macron who, the day before yesterday, had even defined Europe as an “example” that others should follow. The problem is that, among many leaderships of the Old Continent, there is a total lack of reflection on the decline of the West. Just think of the speech held yesterday in Munich by Keir Starmer. “We are no longer the Britain of the Brexit years,” he said, promoting a rapprochement between London and the EU. “We want to combine our leadership in the fields of Defence, technology and Artificial Intelligence with that of Europe to multiply our strengths and build a shared industrial base across the continent,” he said. For its part, always yesterday, Ursula von der Leyen he stated that we need to “build a European backbone of strategic facilitators: in space, in intelligence and in deep attack capabilities”.
In short, rather than questioning the European crisis to try to reverse it, many leaderships of the Old Continent continue not to address the problem at all. And what makes the situation worse are the internal rifts. Yesterday, in Munich, Pedro Sanchez he defined nuclear rearmament as “too dangerous”: a more or less veiled jab at Friedrich Merz who, on Friday, announced that he wanted to create a European atomic deterrent together with Macron. Without forgetting that the Franco-German axis itself is now increasingly creaking. Beyond the superficial declarations, the German Chancellor and the head of the Elysée are in fact very distant on numerous issues (from American tariffs to the defense sector).
The real point is that, like it or not, the USA has gone through a profound crisis which, starting from the Iraq syndrome, unfolded through the Great Recession. From this crisis, they began to reflect on past mistakes, and then changed course. In this sense, despite its limitations, the Trump administration represents the outcome of this long self-critical process. In the parts of the Old Continent, however, many continue to deny the evidence, basking in the illusion of a world that no longer exists. Of course, the current American president, on some dossiers, has in a certain sense given a wake-up call to Europeans: Merz had to admit the re-emergence of power politics, while the EU Commission backtracked on some green drifts.
However, both in Brussels and in London there is still a lack of overall, structural and philosophical self-criticism. It is from here that the possibility of a rebirth of the Old Continent passes. Or its definitive decline. The old entrenched European elites should pay attention to the words of Rubio. But we already know they won’t.
