Von der Leyen, not Rubio, delivers most consequential speech on European defence at Munich Security Conference

The spectacle of seemingly grateful European leaders leaping to their feet to applaud Marco Rubio for being slightly nicer to them at the Munich Security Conference this year was embarrassing.

They looked like victims trapped in a coercive relationship. But the image was only part of the story.

Because peel back the expressions of gratitude, applause and standing ovations for the US Secretary of State, and what became clear was a more determined Europe, starting to contemplate a permanently unreliable ally and preparing accordingly.

After JD Vance debuted at Munich by detonating a load of verbal bombs on an unsuspecting audience last year, the decision to substitute the Vice President for Mr Rubio in 2026 was akin to applying salve to soothe the wounds caused by deploying the battle axe.

Last year, Mr Vance told stunned Europeans that their greatest threat was not Russia or China but their own migration and free speech policies. He met with the far-right AfD leader while in Germany, signalling the Trump Administration’s open attempts to promote lookalike MAGA movements across Europe.

But far worse was to come from Mr Vance and his boss, US President Donald Trump.

Their threat to invade Greenland, territory administered by NATO ally Denmark, combined with the raid on Venezuela to seize potentially lucrative oil reserves, was the final round of shock therapy that has jolted the Europeans back to life.

“Some lines have been crossed that cannot be uncrossed anymore,” observed EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in her speech at Munich.

Mr Rubio didn’t cross any new lines. That was expected. He is broadly liked in Europe and regarded as the administration’s “grown-up”.

Bill Browder, the human rights campaigner and businessman who is campaigning for sanctions and financial structures to cripple Vladimir Putin’s war economy, said he sensed another motive for Rubio’s arrival in Germany.

“I think Trump got spooked by the threatened buyers’ strike on US government debt during the Greenland fiasco and sent Rubio to Munich to make nice with the Europeans,” he said on the sidelines of the conference.

Mr Rubio made much nicer than Mr Vance did. But his speech was merely an inauthentic JD-lite second helping of last year’s main course.

He dwelt heavily on the favoured MAGA trope — that Western civilisation is under threat because of Europe’s migration policies, i.e. acceptance of non-white migrants.

“We are part of one civilisation — Western civilisation,” Mr Rubio told world leaders assembled in the ballroom.

“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 civilisation to which we have fallen heir.

“And so this is why we Americans may sometimes come off as a little direct and urgent in our counsel.

“This is why President Trump demands seriousness and reciprocity from our friends here in Europe. The reason why, my friends, is because we care deeply. We care deeply about your future and ours.

“And if at times we disagree, our disagreements come from our profound sense of concern about a Europe with which we are connected — not just economically, not just militarily.

He told the Europeans that all this concern was out of a desire to protect their connected spirituality and culture and urged Europe to hold hands with the Trump Administration as it implemented tougher border policies and confronted de-industrialisation.

He said the US would always be a “child of Europe”, and that their future and destinies together were “inevitable”.

“I’m not sure you heard the sigh of relief through this hall when we were just listening to what I would interpret as a message of reassurance, of partnership,” Wolfgang Ischinger from the MSC told Mr Rubio immediately afterwards.

Ms Von der Leyen described it as “reassuring”.

But the many Europeans expressing relief may have been gaslighting themselves.

In Mr Rubio’s own words, it was the “same message” as the Vice President’s.

As the Finnish Member of the European Parliament Mika Aaltola noted, Russia was not mentioned once, and Ukraine was only cited as a case study for UN failure.

“The ‘Acoustic Diplomacy’ is polished, but the void where leadership should be is deafening,” Mr Aaltola said.

Even when factoring in that it is primarily aimed at voters at home, who will soon be asked to cast their ballots in one of the most important midterm elections in decades, the Trump Administration’s obsession with European domestic politics, over European security, is becoming absurd.

Mr Rubio’s decision to borrow Mr Vance’s wolf-warrior tactics is particularly shameless, given that since last year’s conference, the world has watched the Trump Administration’s ICE raids culminate in the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Yet, you don’t see European leaders flying to the United States to lecture the Americans about the overreach of ICE raids and equating it to the decline of an entire civilisation.

The Europeans have opted for restraint rather than retaliation.

The EU’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, who has had a rocky start to her job and put many counterparts, including Mr Rubio, offside with her often hawkish and dogmatic positions on Russia, said there was something to work with after his speech.

But she artfully pushed back and said: “Contrary to what some may say woke decadent Europe is not facing civilisational erasure.”

She added that many countries were lining up to join the club and there was even support for EU membership in Canada.

Mr Rubio’s speech dominated the event, as did the reaction. But it was far less consequential than the one given by President von der Leyen who used her Munich address to say it was time to breathe life into Europe’s mutual defence clause.

This clause says that if a member state is the victim of armed aggression on its territory, the other member states have an obligation to aid and assist it by all the means in their power.

“In simple terms, one for all and all for one,” Ms Von der Leyen described it.

Sound familiar?

That’s the same catchphrase NATO uses to define Article 5 — the idea that an attack on one shall be treated as an attack on all. The EU’s treaty is actually stronger than Article 5 in defining an obligation for members to respond, whereas NATO says members can then decide what action they deem necessary to respond.

“Mutual defence is not optional for the EU,” von der Leyen said.

“We must grow a European backbone of strategic enablers: in space, intelligence, and deep strike capabilities. No taboo can go unchallenged.”

This was also important. “Strategic enablers” are the military capabilities that the US provides that Europe currently cannot do for itself.

Ms Von der Leyen is tacitly signalling a world where the US cannot be 100 per cent counted upon to back Article 5. Without the US guarantee, there is no NATO.

“I’m a government official, and we don’t engage in speculation,” Elbridge Colby, the undersecretary at the Pentagon, said in an appearance at the conference, when asked if the US would respond if Russia attacked.

He added that actions meant more than “shibboleths” under Mr Trump and pointed to the US President’s willingness to use military force against Iran and Venezuela.

Publicly and privately, there is no consensus view in Europe about whether the Trump Administration would come to Europe’s rescue if Mr Putin tried to test out that scenario.

One European intelligence boss that The Nightly spoke to was privately adamant that the US was still very much committed.

Publicly, so is NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, who told a selected group of journalists, including The Nightly: “I know the United States is completely invested in NATO.”

“They don’t want to leave NATO. They are committed to Article 5. They were just extremely frustrated,” he said.

But Mr Rutte’s Pollyanna approach to US relations and warm personal relationship with Mr Trump may also be a factor in Ms Von der Leyen’s push for a militarised EU.

The NATO boss shocked Europeans when he recently told Members of the European Parliament to “keep on dreaming” if they thought they could defend themselves without the US.

Unprompted, Ms Von der Leyen used her Munich platform to rebuff this.

“I would like to tell him… no, my dear friend, there is not only status quo that goes on or division and disruption there is a lot in between,” she said, smiling.

“And status quo is not satisfactory, not for us, neither for the United States, so an independent Europe means let’s develop our strength without constantly leaning on someone else,” she said.

Mr Rutte insisted that Ms Von der Leyen’s personally targeted pitch was a case of “nothing to see here”.

But she is undeniably setting out a path for a Plan B if NATO proves incapable of withstanding the Trump administration’s constant assaults.

It is possible that Europe may learn to speak more with actions too.