America's Great Undoing: Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference - Bo Forbes

On February 14, 2026, Marco Rubio spoke at the Munich Security Conference. With everything going on in the U.S. and elsewhere, why should we care what Rubio said in an international meeting taking place thirty miles north of the border of the Swiss Alps?

Rubio is the first person since Henry Kissinger to hold the positions of secretary of state and national security advisor simultaneously. His speech signals the principles that define the U.S. and those with which other nations must align to avoid tariffs, sanctions, or imperial incursions. It tells Americans what the stakes are, whose rights are in danger, and what falling in line will cost those who do.

The Munich Security Conference, founded in 1963, bills itself as the world’s leading forum for debating international security. Its official goal is to support diplomacy and bring about a peaceful resolution of international conflicts.

Picture a traditional Bavarian hotel in the middle of the city surrounded by a handful of adjacent venues. Inside, heads of state and government officials network with diplomats, parliamentarians, ministers, generals, journalists, thought leaders, and political scientists. Dubbed “Davos with guns,” the conference is surrounded by police from Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Snipers are positioned on the rooftops to spot and eradicate threats.

Who exactly was Rubio’s audience?

In 2020, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published a report on the conference participants. It reads, “The ‘Who’ at the 2020 conference included ‘a lot of old white men among the hundreds of invited attendees.’” That year, the conference titled itself “Westlessness,” seemingly without a trace of irony.

In 2022, journalist Belén Fernández wrote a piece for Al Jazeera entitled “Business as usual in Munich: white men rule the world.” Dr. Jennifer Cassidy, a diplomatic scholar at the University of Oxford, tweeted that the “most diverse thing to happen in that room” was the sight of a businessman sporting an orange tie.

In 2025, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance delivered a screed about Europe’s biggest danger being not the specter of Russia but its “threat from within.” By this he meant unregulated migration and the “dilution of national [i.e. white] identity.”

In what now appears an eerie foreshadowing of the Trump administration’s incursions on human rights, Vance said at the 2025 conference,

“You cannot win a democratic mandate by censoring your opponents or putting them in jail—whether that’s the leader of the opposition, a humble Christian praying in her own home, or a journalist trying to report the news. We shouldn’t be afraid of our people, even when they express views that disagree with their leadership.”

Within a few months of those words, the Trump administration would ramp up its persecution of officials who disagree with their policies, including New York Attorney General Letitia James, former FBI director James Comey, and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

And on January 18, 2026, the U.S. government arrested two Black journalists, Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, for reporting on a protest at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota in which demonstrators protested a church pastor who is also an ICE official. Lemon and Fort currently face federal charges of conspiracy and violating the FACE Act (which protects access to religious worship).

The administration has also vilified Black and Brown immigrant communities, most recently Somalians, Haitians, and anyone who “looks” to be an immigrant—that is to say, Black, Brown, and Indigenous people. The administration has abducted and deported numerous U.S. residents and U.S. citizens to other countries, which I have covered here. And in November of 2025 in a post on Truth Social, Trump accused six Democratic lawmakers of sedition and recommended that they be hanged.

In Vance’s 2025 speech, he excoriated European leaders for restricting the free speech of far-right groups in Europe, particularly Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. He concluded with his signature awkward gallows humor: “And trust me, I say this with all humor, if American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thun—(here he struggled to recall the activist’s name) Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.”

As it happened, “a few months of Elon Musk” was all the Trump administration itself could survive. In June of 2025, four months after Vance’s ill-advised speech, Musk and the president had a public breakup. On his way out the door, Musk used his platform on “X” to foreshadow Trump’s prominent presence in the Epstein files.

Vance’s speech was widely considered the nail in the coffin for U.S.-Europe relations, a view reinforced by Trump’s extended phone conversation with Russian leader Vladimir Putin that same week.

It’s often a “tell” who world leaders choose to meet on such a trip before returning home. Vance made time for Alice Weidel, head of the far-right Alternative for Germany party.

Suffice it to say that J.D. Vance set the bar on foreign diplomacy so low that even Marco Rubio’s xenophobic rant was able to clear it, though barely.

In the weeks leading up to the 2026 conference, Trump withdrew the U.S. from sixty-six international conventions, treaties, and organizations. Included among these were the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change signed by the George H.W. Bush administration in 1992 and unanimously approved by the Senate soon afterward, the United Nations Educational, Cultural, and Scientific Organization (UNESCO) founded in 1945 after World War II to contribute to international peace and security, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the World Health Organization.

Photo: Alex Kraus, Bloomberg via Getty Images

This Year’s Munich Security Conference

On the opening night of the conference, February 13, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz noted in his own speech that the title of this year’s conference, “Under Destruction,” was a reference to the rules-based international order. (It may well have been a reference to U.S.-global relations as well.)

The following night, February 14, Rubio directed his speech as much to the U.S. as he did to Europe and to other global leaders.

Let’s decode a few key passages in Rubio’s talk.

The End of Territorial Integrity

Rubio’s speech begins by referring to two of the biggest geopolitical crises of the year prior to the first conference in Munich in 1963—the Cuban Missile Crisis and the building of the Berlin Wall—and their eventual resolution. Then he continues:

“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.

The term “rules-based international order” emerged from the devastation wrought by World War II, and refers to a framework of rules, norms, and institutions that guide the behavior of nations via democratic values. It is also inextricably bound up in market capitalism and Western supremacy, and is often critiqued for its hypocrisy.

At the heart of the rules-based international order is the principle that a nation can’t invade its neighbor militarily or assassinate people on another nation’s soil. Trump and his administration don’t agree with this principle. Trump has imperial designs on Canada, Greenland (its water and other natural resources, as well as its geopolitical location, Ukraine (its natural resources), Venezuela (its oil), and Gaza (its land for his own development) needs to upend the rules-based order, which is why Vance last year and Rubio this year openly express their contempt for this order because it’s too liberal and not America-first enough.

Rubio is signaling openly that liberal democracy and territorial integrity (read: the inviolability of borders) is not a priority for the United States—that it is, in fact, a delusion. In other words, Trump’s desire to occupy Greenland is not an aberration but the new norm, as is Russia’s desire to occupy Ukraine and Israel’s to occupy Palestine.

He’s reiterating for European leaders, Trump’s base, U.S. citizens, and nations worldwide that nationalism (think “America first”) should eclipse all other interests and principles.

Climate Policy: “Drill, Baby, Drill”

Rubio follows this with a hefty dose of climate denial.

“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.”

Here, Rubio echoes the far-right and MAGA belief that climate change and climate crisis are hoaxes. (I’m not sure they believe this. Rather, it’s a convenient excuse to embrace fossil fuels and short-term profits openly. The profit justifies the belief and practices rather than the other way around.)

Rubio is claiming that U.S. efforts to create renewable energy systems cause job loss and poverty, two key issues for the MAGA base. Rubio is underlining the administration’s principle that investing in corporate alliances and short-term profits is a priority, with no thought for the consequences to climate, communities, or citizens. (After all, when you have enough money to “colonize Mars,” you can get in your rocket and leave when Earth becomes uninhabitable.)

Rubio is mistaken on many levels. For one, the Trump administration widely views China as its greatest danger. Yet thanks to Republican pandering to corporate interests, the U.S. is lagging far behind China in renewable energy, and likely to drop even further down the list of top energy generation due to Trump’s renewed commitment to coal.

Total electricity generation, top ten countries. Source: Irena.org

Immigration Policy: Whites Only

Rubio says, “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.”

Rubio’s reference to “a world without borders” as a “foolish idea” is a xenophobic dog whistle. Having warmed up on “xenophobia lite,” Rubio amps up to the full-throttle version:

“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.

Translation: Rubio is talking here about whiteness. As we know, Trump offered white South Africans fleeing equality a fast-track to U.S. citizenship, while repeatedly attempting to deport Black, Brown, Muslim, Palestinian, and Ukrainian immigrants legally in the U.S. This is because in most autocracies, immigrants threaten the “cohesion” of Western societies, the continuity of (white) culture, and the future (i.e. survivability) of white culture.

Rubio’s alluding here to Great Replacement Theory, the conspiracy theory which alleges that Jewish, Black, and Brown immigrants and residents are “poisoning the blood of the nation,” are “terrorists,” or intend to “rape or kill” or replace (white) U.S. citizens.

Great Replacement Theory also contends that liberal and progressive politicians deliberately seek to change U.S. demographics by replacing conservative white people with Black, Brown, and progressive Jewish people—therefore “endangering” the survival of white people. Part of this delusional conspiracy theory is the belief that progressives are trying to replace white voters with Black, Brown, and Indigenous voters who will elect leaders who vote for initiatives that begin to address racial and other forms of inequity and who endanger corporate wealth and the billionaire class. (For more about how Great Replacement Theory influences the Trump administration’s approach to immigration, see this piece.)

Intro to Christian Nationalism

Now Rubio flavors his white nationalism with Christian nationalism:

“The men who settled and built the nation of my birth arrived on our shores carrying the memories and the traditions and the Christian faith of their ancestors as a sacred inheritance, an unbreakable link between the old world and the new.”

Here, Rubio leaves out First Nations people who inhabited America before settlers did and who contributed to land stewardship and democratic governing strategies. He overlooks non-Christian immigrants, including Jews, Muslims, Baha’i, Hindus, Buddhists, and others. And he omits the Black Americans whose labor during and after enslavement built the U.S.

Here’s what’s bothering Vance, Rubio, and other Christian nationalists in and adjacent to this administration: According to the Pew Research Center, Christianity in the U.S. has declined significantly over the past several decades, from approximately 78 percent in 2007 to about 62 percent in 2025.

The decline in Christianity so threatens many in the current administration that at a Turning Point event in late 2025, J.D. Vance publicly shared his wish that his wife Usha, who is Hindu, would convert to Christianity. (You can file this under “not gonna happen,” as Usha was raised by parents who are Telugu Brahmins from Andhra Pradesh, India. There is a centuries-long history of Christians attempting to convert Hindus in India, dating from early colonial engagements to modern missionary efforts.)

Rubio’s continues,

“We are part of one civilization, Western civilization. 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.”

Here, Rubio again emphasizes white Christianity, white culture, white heritage, white language (English), white ancestry, and “sacrifices”—the notion that everything white people have inherited is through sacrifice and hard work rather than land theft, genocide, enslavement, Jim Crow, racial capitalism, and systemic oppression. (Racial capitalism is the process through which white individuals and institutions exploit the bodies and the labor of others who they racialize for exploitative purposes. For more, read this piece.)

“It was this continent that produced the genius of Mozart and Beethoven, of Dante and Shakespeare, of Michelangelo and da Vinci, of the Beatles and 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. They foreshadow the wonders that await us in our future.

Here, Rubio centers the work of white artists who were either Christian or expressed Christian themes. Rubio unaware (or pretending to be) that the Beatles and the Rolling Stones (and countless musicians) were inspired by Black musicians and by early rock and roll, Motown, and particularly in the Stones’ case, blues musicians such as Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and John Lee Hooker.

These are not simply omissions but examples of cultural memoricide, the attempt that colonial societies and autocratic regimes to erase the culture, existence, and memory of those whose land they have taken and who they wish to subjugate.

The Cost of The New “Golden Age”

Rubio promises that the artistic influences that he has whitewashed “foreshadow the wonders that await us in the future,” presumably coming from other Christian artists. But there’s a condition—or rather, a cost:

“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.

Translation: We can have these wonders only if we “unapologetically” adhere to and express pride in white Christian heritage. Rubio continues,

“Commercial space travel and cutting-edge artificial intelligence, industrial automation and flex manufacturing, creating a Western supply chain for critical minerals not vulnerable to extortion from other powers, and a unified effort to compete for market share in the economies of the global South.

Translation: A “Western supply chain for critical minerals” will be extorted from vulnerable nations such as Venezuela, Ukraine, and Greenland and should not themselves be “vulnerable” to “extortion from other powers.”

He’s also saying the quiet part out loud: “a unified effort to compete for market share in the economies of the global South” indicates a desire to plunder those economies. Rubio seems here to refer in part to longstanding agreements that China and Russia have made with some African nations involving protection for their leaders or building resources such as railways in exchange for natural resources. Rubio’s saying that the U.S. needs to establish greater dominance in the plundering of the global South—in other words, he doesn’t want to leave the spoils to Russia and China.

Here’s the other condition Rubio has for white American prospering and, for that matter, European prospering:

“But we must also gain control of our national borders. Controlling who and how many people enter our countries, this is not an expression of xenophobia, it is not hate, it is a fundamental act of national sovereignty. And the failure to do so is not just an abdication of one of our most basic duties owed to our people. It is an urgent threat to the fabric of our societies and the survival of our civilization itself.

Rubio’s words are preciselythe expression of xenophobia for which he has already laid the foundation. He’s saying that national (white, Christian) sovereignty is the most important principle that ties the people of the U.S. together—a bold lie. And “gaining control” of national borders (which means illegally trafficking and deporting U.S. residents and citizens and stripping them of their legal status) is the only way to ensure the “safety” of the “fabric of our (white, Christian) societies and the survival of (white, Christian) civilization.

Here, Rubio is sending an important signal to Europeans and to Americans: In order to be “safe” from U.S. persecution, you must adhere to white Christian nationalism.

“For example, the United Nations… could not solve the war in Gaza, instead it was American leadership that freed captives from barbarians and brought about a fragile truce. It has not solved the war in Ukraine. It took American leadership in partnership with many of the countries here today just to bring the two sides to the table in search of a still elusive peace. It was powerless to constrain the nuclear program of radical Shia clerics in Tehran. That required 14 bombs dropped with precision from American B-2 bombers. And it was unable to address the threat to our security from a narco-terrorist dictator in Venezuela. Instead, it took American special forces to bring this fugitive to justice.

Here, amid a genocide, no less, Rubio casts Israeli citizens as “captives” and Palestinian citizens resisting occupation (which they have a legally enshrined right to do) as “Barbarians.” He also means Muslims, Palestinian Jews, and Palestinian Christians who have existed in Palestine for millennia.

Rubio is pretending that there is any sort of “truce” (as though there is a “war” rather than a genocide) or as though there is a ceasefire (which hasn’t happened) rather than a nation legally responsible for aiding and abetting a genocide. Rubio then justifies the U.S. bombing of Iran over a treaty that Trump himself, in his first administration, let lapse.

He calls Venezuela’s Maduro a “narco terrorist” to justify their invading Venezuela and killing civilians under the guise of “protecting the U.S. from a “security threat” even though drug trafficking networks are global and not confined to a single country, particularly Venezuela. Furthermore, Trump has also openly stated that the primary impetus for invading Venezuela was to gain control of their oil resources.

And then,

“Our story began with an Italian explorer whose adventure into the great unknown to discover a new world brought Christianity to the Americas and became the legend that defined the imagination of our pioneer nation. Our first colonies were built by English settlers, to whom we owe not just the language we speak, but the whole of our political and legal system.”

Rubio would have us believe that the Wet is in decline because the U.S. and Europe became ashamed of their legacies of plunder, colonialism, land theft, and cultural erasure and began to back away from these legacies.

He goes on to praise the Scots-Irish settlers and the German farmers who “build the Midwestern heartland” and who just happen to be Trump’s ancestral influences. He then betrays his own ancestral lineage:

“And you know that in the year that my country was founded, Lorenzo and Catalina Giroldi lived in Casal Monferrato in the kingdom of Piedmont, Sardinia, and Jose and Manuela Reyna lived in Sevilla, Spain. I don’t know what, if anything, they knew about the 13 colonies which had gained their independence from the British Empire, but here’s what I’m certain of. They could have never imagined that 250 years later, one of their direct descendants would be back here today on this continent as the chief diplomat of that infant nation.”

Here, you’d think that in citing his family history, Rubio might honor his parents, Mario and Oriales Rubio, Cuban immigrants who moved to the U.S. in 1956, just a few years before the 1959 Castro revolution. They traveled back to Cuba several times after 1959 before deciding to remain in the U.S. and becoming citizens in 1975. Instead, Marco skips his parents and goes back several generations to identify with the Spanish (or white) side of his heritage.

But this makes sense, because proximity to whiteness has always required a surrender of one’s fultural heritage, cultural memory, and ancestral practices.

Rubio added, “So in a time of headlines, heralding the end of the transatlantic era, let it be known and clear to all that this is neither our goal nor our wish. Because for us Americans, our home may be in the Western Hemisphere, but we will always be a child of Europe.”

To be clear, the Western Hemisphere includes North and South America, and according to many geographers, also portions of Europe, Africa, Antarctica, and Asia.

To hear Rubio say that the U.S. “will always be a child of Europe” struck me as incredibly odd. Rubio, Vance, Trump, and the rest of his cabinet for the most part have an extraordinary disdain for Europe and believe America to be the more powerful, “advanced” nation. (Hence the repeated pattern of haranguing European leaders.)

During this part of Rubio’s speech, I kept hearing the words of Ta-Nehisi Coates, who said, “But race is the child of racism, not the father.” By this he meant that racism is the not the result of any difference between people, but is itself the origin of the concept of race, which was constructed to justify the oppression, exploitation. The concept of race was created to justify the oppression and exploitation of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people.

The Icing on the White Nationalist Cake

Before returning to the U.S., Rubio chose to travel to Hungary for a chummy visit with Viktor Orban, its prime minister and autocrat-in-chief. Here, he endorsed Orban ahead of the April elections. (This is significant, as Orban faces a parliamentary election in April; polls show him behind in what many consider the most extensive threat to his power since 2010.)

Here, I’ll also add that Orban’s Fidesz party stands for national sovereignty, strict anti-immigration policies, promoting traditional family values (i.e. is is notoriously anti-LGBTQ+), and fostering a "central power field" within Hungary.

Rubio echoed his fellow cabinet members’ alignment with Orban, reassuring him that Hungary’s success was critical to the success of the U.S. In other words, autocracies across the world must stick together.

He told Orban that relations between the U.S. and Hungary had entered a “golden age,” and would remain so as long as Orban is running the country.

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Astonishingly, Rubio’s speech was met with a standing ovation from European leaders, some of whom were on board with his policies and some of whom were visibly relieved that the tenor of his white nationalism was a little “softer” than Vance’s.

This kind of pandering, along wiith the accolades Rubio’s speech garnered from countless pundits, tells us where the lines have been drawn. And that standing against autocracy and fascism will have a cost.

As always, the reward will be retaining our own humanity.

Michael McFaul, a former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, told Politico that Vance’s:JD Vance attacks Europe over free speech and migration. (2025, February 15). https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ceve3wl21x1o

Trump issued a presidential memorandum announcing the withdrawal of the U.S. from sixty-six international conventions: Zelinsky, A. S. J. (2026, February 18). The Cost of US Withdrawal From 66 International Organizations, Conventions, and Treaties. https://www.thenation.com/?post_type=article&p=587548