'Yesterday is over'

Rubio's tone is softer but his message is the same

- Patrick Wintour

Marco Rubio, left, meets the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz

£JD Vance’s thuggish speech last year to the Munich Security Conference directed at the solar plexus of Europe marked the moment when a transatlantic breakup started, this weekend’s subsequent event, in a rainy and cold Bavaria, was where the debate about the terms of the divorce settlement got under way.

Marco Rubio, Washington’s chosen representative this year, is a diplomat, so he softened the Trumpian tone with references to German beer, the Beatles, Dante and the Mayflower. But his speech remained a stern warning that if Europe wanted to continue on its path of civilisational decline, as this US administration sees it, America would not be interested and has different hemispheres on which to focus.

“Yesterday is over,” he said, and then spelt out what yesterday meant: mass migration threatening the civilisational erasure and the continuity of Christian culture, unfettered trade, massive welfare states, weak defences, climate cults, the outsourcing of sovereignty to international institutions, the rationalisation of a broken status quo by people “shackled with guilt and shame”. Unlike Vance, he did not laud rightwing European populist parties, but he nonetheless wrapped himself in their ideology. His next stop after Munich was Budapest where Viktor Orban faces a battle in April to remain in power.

An iron has entered the European soul about Trump, egged on by the many Democrats attending, and there is a willingness if not to confront him then at least to end the dependence and learn the lessons of the standoff over Greenland.