(AFP) – Secretary of State Marco Rubio sought to assuage European leaders’ worries Saturday about fraying ties with the United States while attempting to rally them behind US President Donald Trump’s ambitions. “The fate of Europe will never be irrelevant to our own,” he told the Munich Security Conference, adding that “ultimately our destiny is, and will always be, intertwined with yours”.
The top US diplomat’s speech was a striking contrast to the inflammatory words delivered from the same stage by Vice President JD Vance a year earlier, when he took aim at Europe for its immigration policy and accused it of curbing free speech. Tensions have soared recently over Trump’s ambitions to seize Greenland, an autonomous territory of EU and NATO member Denmark, and his frequent hostile comments about the continent.
Rubio said the United States under Trump wanted to lead a global “renewal and restoration”. Washington will be “driven by a vision of a future as proud, as sovereign, and as vital as our civilisation’s past,” he said in a speech that was greeted with applause from security and defence officials gathered in a Munich hotel. “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,” he said. Europe and the United States are meant to be together, he stressed, adding: “We want Europe to be strong. We believe that Europe must survive.”
– Shared history –
He talked up the United States’ and Europe’s shared history, referring to how the two sides had fought together after World War II to defeat communism. European settlers, he went on, had helped lay the foundations of the modern United States. “Our great Midwestern heartland was built by German farmers and craftsmen who transformed empty plains into a global agricultural powerhouse,” he said, adding on a lighter note that they also “dramatically upgraded the quality of American beer”. “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 names.”
Rubio’s speech also touched on topics close to Trump’s heart, from worries about immigration to Western countries, to deindustrialisation, and urged Europe and the United States to work together on these issues. By acting together “we will not just help recover a sane foreign policy,” he said. “It will restore to us a clear sense of ourselves. It will restore a place in the world, and in so doing, it will rebuke and deter the forces of civilisational erasure that today menace both America and Europe alike.”
© 2024 AFP
