In the space of just a year, European leaders have heard three descriptions of how the Trump administration is reimagining the American relationship with its allies. Each strikes a bit of a different tone, but all are intended to push them into a new era in which Washington’s commitment to defend them faces new limits.
One was delivered by Vice President JD Vance last year, a blistering condemnation of European-style democracy, arguing that waves of immigrants and Europe’s restrictions on its own far-right parties pose a greater threat to the continent than Russia’s aggression.
The second was a far easier-to-swallow version of a similar message from Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Saturday. He described a hazy and sometimes idealized cultural history shared by Europe and the United States and argued that each faced “civilizational erasure” unless it figured out a way to control its borders.
Then, at the same conference, the most senior defense official to attend, Elbridge Colby, the under secretary of defense for policy, offered a classic American national-security message about shared interests, not values, recommending that both sides focus on “nuts and bolts kind of stuff.”
If the Europeans emerged a bit confused, it’s understandable.
Mr. Vance and Mr. Rubio could well end up as rivals for the presidential nomination in 2028 — or as running mates. So how they described America’s role and purpose with its allies was intended as much for audiences at home. They know each phrase will be weighed by MAGA supporters who are suspicious of the degree to which the Trump administration has intervened around the world, whether in Venezuela or Iran, Syria or Greenland.
But their immediate audiences were NATO allies. While the Europeans have committed to spending far more on their defenses between now and 2035, they also know that should the breach with the United States widen, they would need to replicate America’s vast powers and reach — a project that would cost them far more, and could take 10 to 20 years.
Mr. Vance’s speech last year was met by a stunned silence, even gasps. Mr. Rubio’s softer version on Saturday morning drew a standing applause by those in the hall of the Bayerischer Hof hotel, a stately remnant of the old Europe that Mr. Rubio seemed to be idealizing. His words were deemed reassuring by the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen.
The chairman of the security conference, Wolfgang Ischinger, noted that while Mr. Vance talked about NATO as “them,” Mr. Rubio referred to the alliance as “we.” Still, he said that Mr. Rubio’s speech was a “starkly American view of the world.”
For many European officials and analysts, the reaction quickly turned cautious. Mr. Rubio’s case for the alliance barely touched on the threats from Russia and other adversaries, and was far more of a defense of the white Christian heritage that he said connects Europe and the United States.
While Mr. Rubio did not mention the far-right parties that Mr. Vance praised, he seemed to give voice to the argument that the purpose of national security strategy was to protect “one civilization: Western civilization.”
“We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share,” he said, “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.”
He argued that the Trump administration has “no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline,” adding, “We do not seek to separate, but to revitalize an old friendship and renew the greatest civilization in human history.”
And it was noticed by everyone that Mr. Rubio chose to travel from Munich to Slovakia and Hungary, countries run by populist far-right parties that are skeptical of the European Union and that have moved closer to Russia, especially on the war in Ukraine.
Luuk van Middelaar, a Dutch historian and former E.U. official, called the Rubio speech “well-crafted, and therefore all the more dangerous for the Europeans, offering a new pact on the basis of a shared civilization, but omitting the Vance part of a year ago, which comes with U.S. alignment with MAGA allies in Europe.”
So in a sense, he argued, “the Europeans are walking into a trap.” Mr. Rubio “tried to embrace us in a shared story of history and peoples, kin and religion, while leaving out an awful lot of nonwhite Europeans — and Americans, too.”
A senior European official described Mr. Rubio’s argument as a poison pill. His case for defending “Western civilization,” he said, was offered as a bargain for America’s defensive umbrella, with its implicit suggestion that the United States and its Western allies were fighting to preserve a whiter, more Christian Europe. It would make it far harder, he argued, for European leaders to interact with the rest of the world, let alone with their own non-Christian citizens.
While some Europeans understand that Mr. Vance and Mr. Rubio are speaking to two audiences — one in Europe, one in the United States — Mr. Colby is not a politician. He is a conservative defense scholar who finds himself cast in the role of explaining a Trump national security strategy that is shifting each week.
He spoke of “common sense and flexible realism,” dismissing talk of shared values as “hosannas or shibboleths.” From “our part of the political spectrum, I’m not sure that’s true,” he said.
Instead, “let’s ground our partnership on something more enduring and durable and kind of real, like shared interests,” Mr. Colby said. “The values are obviously there, and the history is there,” he said. But “you can’t base an alliance on sentiment alone,” and “maybe there are differences of values.”
That message went over far better with Europeans, like Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany, who in his opening remarks to the conference said pointedly, “The culture wars of the MAGA movement are not ours.”
Mr. Colby’s view of a relationship of shared interests is far closer to where the Europeans want to be, with his open commitment to collective defense and the American nuclear guarantee.
Mr. Colby insisted that over time Europe would have to defend itself in any conventional war, noting that America’s presence at the core of NATO is integral to ensure that conventional conflict does not escalate to a nuclear one.
After all was said, Europe was left wondering which America it is allying with, said Ivan Krastev, a Bulgarian political scientist who is a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, a research institution in Vienna.
“Sometimes we say we can do without the Americans, and then sometimes we’re relieved that America seems to be back,” he said.
Europeans who see in Mr. Rubio a return to the kind of American ally they have known since the end of World War II “are fooling themselves,” he said.
“And you could say Europeans want to be fooled, since they are dependent on the U.S. even more today than in 1989,” the year that the Berlin Wall was breached, given Russia’s four-year war in Ukraine, which directly challenges European security.
Europeans are less worried about the pressure to spend more on the military as the United States turns to China, Mr. Krastev said.
“What Europeans are most worried about is that this administration became highly ideological,” he said. “What is new is the readiness of the U.S. to enter European domestic politics. And what’s interesting is not what Rubio said here but where he goes from here” — to Slovakia and Hungary.
Steven Erlanger is the chief diplomatic correspondent in Europe and is based in Berlin. He has reported from over 120 countries, including Thailand, France, Israel, Germany and the former Soviet Union.
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