“We Americans may come off as a little direct and urgent in our counsel,” Marco Rubio said in an apparent effort to calm the nerves of European leaders gathered at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof for the Munich Security Conference on Saturday. Everyone in the room likely knew what he was referring to: The year before, Vice-President J.D. Vance had used the same annual convening to deliver a shocking harangue against U.S. allies, including Sweden and the U.K., accusing them of censoring right-wing speech and oppressing Christians; at least one German diplomat, according to Le Monde, had been reduced to tears. Rubio came this year to make nice, and he called for renewed diplomacy between the U.S. and Europe by appealing to the “sacred inheritance” they supposedly share — “the deepest of bonds,” as he put it, “forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage.” In the wake of President Trump’s retreat from NATO and the Paris Agreement, this “reassuring” posture, as conference chairman Wolfgang Ischinger characterized it, earned Rubio a standing ovation.

But there was a catch — “mistakes” needed to be rectified first, Rubio said: “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.” At the same time, he went on, countries across Europe “invested in massive welfare states at the cost of maintaining the ability to defend themselves” and now rely on the U.S. to deter threats posed by nuclear powers like Russia. These were familiar diagnoses — the........

© Daily Intelligencer