When US secretary of state Marco Rubio took to the stage at the annual Munich Security Conference on Saturday, he laced his address with reassurance, hailing the “unbreakable link” between the US and Europe dating back to the arrival of European settlers on the American continent.
“We will always be a child of Europe,” he said.
The crowd of European leaders, ministers and senior officials rose to their feet to applaud, but it was less out of admiration than pure relief.
The first 13 months of Donald Trump’s second term in office have created the biggest crisis in the transatlantic relationship for decades, as his aggressive foreign policy and transactional relationships with allies rattle long-standing US partners in Europe and disrupt their eight-decade-long security pact.
While Rubio’s tone was politer than the diatribe delivered by US vice-president JD Vance on the same stage the previous year — the first of a year-long series of blows dealt by Trump’s administration to the EU and Nato — the substance of the US message was little changed.
Rubio repeated the administration’s talking points, including lambasting European energy policies to “appease a climate cult” while “impoverishing our people”, and claimed that mass migration raised the prospect of “civilisation erasure”.
“Rubio is the best we can hope for from the [US] administration,” said a senior European minister who was in the room. “But he was still pretty clear that if the transatlantic relationship is not broken, it’s significantly different from what we are used to.”
European officials said that in many ways Vance’s 2025 speech was easier to handle because it was so overtly aggressive that it ensured unity in response. Rubio’s nuance made it harder to determine the threat, they said.
“That’s the thing: if you break stuff, it’s not so easy to put it back together,” said one European minister who was in the audience. “It is nice that [Rubio] held out a hand instead of poking us in the eye . . . but nothing has changed.”
Speaking straight after Rubio, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen was clear that despite the shift in rhetoric, the US-European relationship remained fundamentally strained. Europe had suffered “shock therapy”, she said. “Some lines have been crossed that cannot be uncrossed anymore . . . The European way of life, our democratic foundation and the trust of our citizens, is being challenged in new ways.”
Officials said that Rubio’s softer tone had allowed more optimistic voices in Europe to push the message that business as usual was still possible.
Nato secretary-general Mark Rutte defended Rubio’s decision to skip a meeting with European leaders that was expected to discuss Ukraine, citing a schedule clash. He said Rubio “had something else, important stuff to do”.
“[The US] has to take care of the whole world, not just Europe. They cannot be everywhere. I totally understand it,” Rutte said.
The annual Munich event has become a health check on the state of the transatlantic relationship. This year it came just a few weeks after Trump threatened, and then backed down from, potential military action to seize Greenland from Nato ally Denmark.
It was the most extreme example in a series of relationship-straining events and followed Trump’s tariffs on European countries last year and his support for Eurosceptic political candidates in recent EU elections.
One senior EU diplomat said Rubio’s real message to the continent was his visit to Slovakia on Sunday, followed by Hungary — two of the most problematic governments for Brussels.
“Rubio sent the right message of reassurance and got a standing ovation, but behind closed doors Europeans say that there is no going back because the Greenland fiasco cut to the bone,” said Alina Polyakova, president of the Center for European Policy Analysis, a Washington-based think-tank. “The good news is that the tone from Europe this year is focused and pragmatic rather than reactive and emotional: that’s a positive change.”
Seemingly unbridgeable gaps between the US and Europe are most prominent on Ukraine and the approach to US-led peace negotiations.
While Trump is demanding Ukraine make concessions in order to advance the talks, European capitals say he should instead be putting pressure on Russia, either through increasing military support to Kyiv or imposing more sanctions on Moscow.
“The Americans often return to the topic of concessions,” Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his speech to the conference. “Too often those concessions are discussed in the context only of Ukraine, not Russia.”
European leaders in Munich pushed Rutte, in particular, to be firmer with the US on the peace negotiations and not to endorse Trump’s approach, people briefed on the discussions told the FT.
“Russia has it in its hand to stop [the war]. But we also have it in our hand. And it is America and Europe and Ukraine together that can bring [Russia] to stop it,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz told the conference.
The scale of unease is such that even Germany, a country that has always refused offers from Paris to join the French nuclear umbrella and counted on the US atomic shield, is considering changing tack. Merz announced on Friday he had “initiated talks” with French President Emmanuel Macron about the continent’s nuclear deterrence.
There is also anxiety in European capitals that the Trump administration fundamentally dislikes the EU as an institution and would rather deal with individual states — an approach that many in Europe believe undermines decades of European integration designed to ensure peace and prosperity.
Roderich Kiesewetter, a German conservative MP, said: “The impression of the speech of Rubio was more a damage control exercise with regard to the statements of Trump. But he clearly doesn’t appreciate the EU. He has a very nationalist view of Europe.”
Yet after a year of turbulence from Washington, much of the European security and defence community was willing to regard the glass as being half full rather than half empty.
A German government insider said: “Essentially Rubio repeated Vance’s analysis on the decline of western civilisation and mass migration. But on the practical side, which is what matters to us, he managed to convince us that he was pro Nato — we can work on that basis.”
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