By Maria Popova

February 15, 2026

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s Valentine’s Day speech at the Munich Security Conference should do nothing to mollify a Europe still aghast over Vice President JD Vance’s break-up appearance at the 2025 MSC.

While he may have sounded a tad softer than Vance did a year ago, Rubio reiterated the same gripes — Europe is free-riding on America’s military might and pursues values that the Trump administration despises.

While he described the U.S. as “a child of Europe” and insisted that America wants Europe to survive, he completely ignored the main threats to that survival — Russian aggression and illiberal populism.

He put conditions on the type of Europe that the U.S. would support — i.e. ideologically align with the Trump Administration or else.

Rubio’s disdain for Cold-War-era communism is well-known, and he used the speech to denounce Soviet communism several times. He talked about its persistent security threat and the division it sowed in Europe. Yet, Rubio had absolutely nothing to say about Russia’s current attempt to restore the Soviet empire by re-invading and re-subordinating swaths of Europe.

Indeed, the word “Russia” does not appear in his speech, though it does pop up in Wolfgang Ischinger’s first question in the post-speech Q&A, during which Rubio admitted that Washington is unsure if Vladimir Putin wants to end the fighting.

Rubio neither condemned Russia’s expansionism, nor expressed support for Ukraine’s valiant defense of European security over the last four years. Instead, he barely mentioned the Russo-Ukrainian war in a both-siding and self-congratulatory half sentence about how the Trump administration has brought “the two sides to the table”.

What’s worse, in Rubio’s rendering of the post-Cold-War era, the worst mistake Europe made wasn’t to hope that economic interdependence would prevent the resurgence of Russian expansionism. The worst mistake, according to the secretary of state, was Europe’s decision to build a common market and pursue supranational integration.

According to Rubio, the current danger to Europe isn’t Russia’s repeated threats and hostility, but Europe’s open borders and freedom of movement.

Rubio criticized many of Europe’s fundamental features and policy priorities — its supranational integration, its attention to climate change mitigation, its welfare states, its diverse societies and free movement — all the things that have made Europe a political and economic powerhouse if not a superpower of the postwar, democracy-led world order. He used white supremacy dog whistle about “civilizational erasure”.

When Rubio talks about how European nations should be proud of their history and should be ready to fight for their liberty, he is not defining Ukraine as a European nation.

In calling on Europe to stop trying to “atone for the purported sins of past generations,” at best he criticized European efforts to educate their publics about the injustices of European imperialism. At worst, he made a nod to the German far-right politician Bjorn Hocke’s infamous argument that Germans should stop atoning for the Holocaust.

He promised a return to “sane foreign policy” — as the mouthpiece of the same administration threatening to invade Greenland.

Interestingly, among the dozen or so historical references to Europe’s great history or its contributions to founding or settling America, Rubio did not mention Eastern Europe at all.

This omission subtly suggests that Eastern Europe does not belong to the “Western civilization” that the U.S. purportedly would like to see survive, notwithstanding Donald Trump’s widely credited role in demolishing the world order its democracies have anchored.

The only mention of “the East” came in a reference to the “courageous dissidents” who defeated Soviet communism, followed by an assertion that “we have fought against each other, then reconciled, then fought, then reconciled again.”

This muddled sentence perpetuates the Cold War division of Europe into Western and Eastern parts and puts “the East” together with Russia, with whom the West has sometimes allied and sometimes fought.

This subtle sleight-of-hand is offensive and threatening to Eastern Europeans. It denies by omission their belonging to the transatlantic alliance and the geopolitical “West” — a fallacy at the core of Ukraine’s fight for independence.

Rubio’s language about Eastern Europe implies that today, the U.S. wants to reconcile with Russia. Most ominously, it seems to implicitly recognize Russia’s claim to domination over its Eastern European neighbours.

In other words, when Rubio talks about how European nations should be proud of their history and should be ready to fight for their liberty, he is not defining Ukraine as a European nation. Otherwise, he wouldn’t omit the fact that Ukraine is the one European country that fights for its liberty as a proud nation-state every single day with amazing tenacity.

Instead, Rubio relegates the sacrifice of Ukrainians on behalf of the free world to half a sentence of both-siding equivalency.

The applause that Rubio received for the trite compliments to Europe as “cherished allies and our oldest friends” was both misguided and misplaced. The final phrase “our destiny together awaits” sounds even ominous in the context of the demands for fundamental changes of course that the U.S. is making of Europe.

Broadly speaking, the uneasy combination of compliment and threat of the presentation recalled Putin’s words to Ukraine in February 2022: “Like it or not, you’ll have to bear it, my beauty”. Not exactly a Valentine’s Day message, unless of course you’re a geopolitical predator.

Meanwhile, Europeans who found comfort in the misdirection perpetrated in Munich that all is well in the transatlantic alliance may find themselves slowly losing not only their reassurance, but also their dignity.

Policy Columnist Maria Popova is the Hiram Mills Associate Professor of Political Science at McGill University and Co-Director of the Jean Monnet Centre Montreal. With Oxana Shevel, she recently published a book titled Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States.