Last year, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance stunned European leaders with a speech at the Munich Security Conference that accused them of censorship and suppressing free speech. The unorthodox address served as a rude awakening to U.S. President Donald Trump's second term.

One year on, on Saturday, Feb. 14, Secretary of State Marco Rubio addressed the same audience with a more conciliatory message about shared histories and values. Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, called it "reassuring" in a subsequent panel discussion—although other officials are already murmuring discontent over dismissive references to the United Nations and climate change, as well as Rubio's justification of U.S. use of force in Venezuela and Iran.

Last year, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance stunned European leaders with a speech at the Munich Security Conference that accused them of censorship and suppressing free speech. The unorthodox address served as a rude awakening to U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term.

One year on, on Saturday, Feb. 14, Secretary of State Marco Rubio addressed the same audience with a more conciliatory message about shared histories and values. Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, called it “reassuring” in a subsequent panel discussion—although other officials are already murmuring discontent over dismissive references to the United Nations and climate change, as well as Rubio’s justification of U.S. use of force in Venezuela and Iran.

Here’s the full transcript of Rubio’s speech:

We gather here today as members of a historic alliance, an alliance that saved and changed the world. When this conference began in 1963, it was in a nation—actually, it was on a continent—that was divided against itself. The line between communism and freedom ran through the heart of Germany. The first barbed fences of the Berlin Wall had gone up just two years prior.

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. 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—one with the potential for a new kind of destruction, more apocalyptic and final than anything before in the history of mankind.

At the time of that first gathering, Soviet communism was on the march. Thousands of years of Western civilization hung in the balance. At that time, victory was far from certain. But we were driven by a common purpose. We were unified not just by what we were fighting against; we were unified by what we were fighting for. And together, Europe and America prevailed and a continent was rebuilt. Our people prospered.  In time, the East and West blocs were reunited. A civilization was once again made whole.

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. But the euphoria of this triumph led us to a dangerous delusion: that we had entered, quote, “the end of history;” 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—an overused term—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.

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. 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—shuttering our plants, resulting in large parts of our societies being de-industrialized, shipping millions of working and middle-class jobs overseas, and handing control of our critical supply chains to both adversaries and rivals.

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. 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. 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—not just to power their economies, but to use as leverage against our own.

And in a pursuit of a world without borders, we opened our doors to an unprecedented........

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