Two speeches, given a year apart in Munich, reveal the true substance of American leadership on the global stage. In 2025, Vice President JD Vance scolded European leaders about the value of individual European dignity and the need to heed the voices of European citizens when crafting and implementing policy. In 2026, Secretary of State Marco Rubio reminded European leaders that the United States and Europe have a shared culture, history and heritage, saying "the United States and Europe, we belong together."
"We are part of one civilization – Western civilization," Rubio said. "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."
Vance gave a lesson in the present when he said "of all the pressing challenges that the nations represented here face, I believe there is nothing more urgent than mass migration. Today, almost one in five people living in this country moved here from abroad. That is, of course, an all-time high. It’s a similar number, by the way, in the United States, also an all time high. The number of immigrants who entered the EU from non-EU countries doubled between 2021 and 2022 alone. And of course, it’s gotten much higher since."
"And we know the situation," Vance went on. "It didn’t materialize in a vacuum. It’s the result of a series of conscious decisions made by politicians all over the continent, and others across the world, over the span of a decade. We saw the horrors wrought by these decisions yesterday in this very city," Vance said, referencing one of the many brutal, fatal stabbing attacks carried out by Muslim migrants in northern Europe. "And of course, I can’t bring it up again without thinking about the terrible victims who had a beautiful winter day in Munich ruined. Our thoughts and prayers are with them and will remain with them. But why did this happen in the first place?"
Rubio focused on the past to cultivate a sense of commonality between American and European leaders, saying that the events of the late 20th century led the collective European and American consciousness to believe that we had hit the "end of history," where global conflict was over and every nation would become a "liberal democracy."
"This was a foolish idea that ignored both human nature and it ignored the lessons of over 5,000 years of recorded human history. And it has cost us dearly," Rubio said. Just as Vance had condemned European leaders for eschewing the individuals who comprise their democracies, Rubio blasted them for "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."
"A people who are prevented by authoritarian 'hate speech' laws from speaking their minds, praying their conscience, who are blocked by globalist industrial policies from working an honest living, raising families with dignity and a fair wage, who are also watching their national cultures be hollowed out by the collaborating trends of corporatism and mass migration, cannot survive intact. These combined forces create conditions for the preponderance of extremist ideologies, whether on the far left or on the far right, and the state of our nations will become disordered, chaotic, and weak.
"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," Rubio said jointly of the US and Europe. The big difference between Vance's remarks in 2025 and Rubio's in 2026 is that Rubio put America in the same boiling pot of water as Europe, and European leaders seemed at least more open to the ideas when they were not being rebuked for their failures.
"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. We made these mistakes together, and now, together, we owe it to our people to face those facts and to move forward, to rebuild," Rubio said.
Europe and the United States are both ill from these self-made sicknesses, but unlike Europe, the US has taken hold of the reins and is trying desperately to change course, if not reverse it entirely. Rubio noted that "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’s past. 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."
His speech is worth listening to in its entirety, as is Vance's. Both taken together give a clear vision for how America should address the world, tend to our relationships with our European allies, and save Western Civilization from the brink of outright disaster.
Vance in 2025 asked this question: "I’ve heard a lot about what you need to defend yourselves from, and of course that’s important. But what has seemed a little bit less clear to me, and certainly I think to many of the citizens of Europe, is what exactly it is that you’re defending yourselves for. What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important?"
Vance was begging Europe to recognize what makes its culture, heritage, and history worth fighting for and saving because from the American vantage point, Europe is instead doing everything in their power to burn it down. Rubio took time to answer it—over the past year Europe has delivered no coherent answer of their own.
"We are connected spiritually and we are connected culturally. We want Europe to be strong. We believe that Europe must survive, because the two great wars of the last century serve for us as history’s constant reminder that ultimately, our destiny is and will always be intertwined with yours, because we know – (applause) – because we know that the fate of Europe will never be irrelevant to our own," Rubio said.
"It was here in Europe," Rubio went on in his speech, "where the ideas that planted the seeds of liberty that changed the world were born." This is the fundamental answer: what is it that is worth defending in Europe? The glory and wonder of Western Civilization, from Ovid to Michelangelo to Shakespeare to the Rolling Stones.
"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," Rubio said, both telling these European leaders to take pride in what their nations have achieved and created and letting them know that these things are of value to the greatest empire the earth has ever seen—the United States of America—as well.
"They foreshadow the wonders that await us in our future," he went on. "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."
Together, Vance and Rubio issued calls to European leaders that must be heeded. Vance may have seemed like the bully at first, spurred on by the historic win of Trump's second term, demanding accountability from a Europe that has ignored their responsibilities to their own populations, the culture they created, and their American child. But it left the door open for Rubio to come in and say "we are harsh because we love you, because the world cannot afford to lose Europe."
These are the men who together should lead, and the American GOP must not pit them against each other, but give them a pathway to unite and pilot not just the ship of America, but the world, to a restoration of the Western values that create freedom and prosperity for all nations that adopt them.
