Bootlicking at the Munich Security Conference

The Munich Security Conference lived up to its reputation for being the festival of bland fanaticism that it’s always been, only more so this time. Disconnected ruling elites socializing and trafficking in the buzzwords that circulate within NATO and the Wall Street Journal. Intellectually a sham, politically a scam.

The capstone of this nightmare was remarks by Marco Rubio, who is acting national security adviser, Secretary of State, and the brainchild behind America’s illegal war on Venezuela and ongoing illegal blockade of Cuba. In the speech, Rubio expresses regrets about decolonization ever happening, urges his white onlookers to take pride in their historical imperialism, and considers the end of imperialism the beginning of the end for a Western culture that he explicitly said faces “civilizational erasure”—an idea copied directly from the great-replacement conspiracy theory in white supremacist ideology. He also seems to lament the outcome of World War II (!), rueing that:

For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding – its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe. But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, it was contracting. Europe was in ruins. Half of it lived behind an Iron Curtain and the rest looked like it would soon follow. The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come.

None of this is surprising coming from the man who proves it doesn’t matter if you’re ethnically Cuban; if you lie about history and brag about empire as if it was something you accomplished, you too might be a dirty sock puppet of fleeting convenience for white supremacy and oligarchy. Tío Thomas.

Mercifully, the adults in the room at Munich refused to be bullied and confronted Rubio with hard truths, calling out his racist imperialist agenda. No, wait, the opposite happened. F%&#k.

The idea that the European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, would be “very much reassured” by Marco Rubio’s remarks—at a moment when the US has declared itself a threat to Europe—is just real boot-licking nonsense; a betrayal of European citizenry. It’s not just von der Leyen. The elites in the room gave Rubio a mass standing ovation in response to his speech.

Meanwhile, American liberal pundits like Ian Bremmer also clapped like a trained seal as Rubio held forth about white nationalism and Western imperialism (literally), alongside actual white supremacists who could see Rubio’s remarks for what they were. So did Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman, who lauded Rubio’s performance for being friendly while making no comment of the racist, imperialist message.

One European diplomat commented to me on social media that while everyone fawned over Rubio publicly, I needn’t worry; behind the scenes they were all grousing quietly. That’s even worse! There were a few good eggs present, even some friends, but they were vastly outnumbered and were simply not in a position to be as candid as I am here. One of them, Ben Rhodes, reported this disturbing observation:

Time and again, I heard about how the recent crisis over Greenland had served as a wake-up call. Europeans also seemed to take on board the lesson that standing up to a bully is better than flattering him. But at the same time, many Europeans kept expressing gratitude for Trump.

…Repeatedly, I heard how Trump’s bullying had forced Europeans to get serious about their own defense. Some of this was framed around the commitment by NATO members to spend 3.5 percent of their GDP on defense, as demanded by Trump (the price goes up to 5 percent if you count infrastructure). Some of it was framed around the cold realization that Europeans could not count on America to defend them, as if Trump’s threats were tough love and not disregard and disdain. Either way, the Trump officials crowing about this achievement in Munich received plenty of reinforcement from the very Europeans they so often offend.

These rich, cosmopolitan liberals are certainly cowards, but from what Ben is reporting, they’re much worse: Munich-istas see in the demands of American fascism an opportunity to substitute military spending for public investment, bolstered by a reactionary imperialist identity politics as a unifying ideology to justify it all. European democracies are, with American help, transitioning toward becoming bona fide oligarchies. To get there, they’ll need the far right and liberals to combine forces despite positioning themselves as erstwhile opponents. Munich offers a model for what that might look like.

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The day after the Munich Security Conference, AOC dropped some gems: