Following Munich, the U.S.–European Relationship Faces a Key Moment

By John O’Sullivan

Wednesday, February 18, 2026

 

When Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrived in Europe to attend the Munich Security Conference and visit with the European Union’s most rebellious member states, Hungary and Slovakia, he was preparing to deal with several serious practical disagreements with his European hosts as well as with an undeniable sense of malaise in transatlantic relations. He did so with panache and some success, after delivering a well-crafted speech on the underlying civilizational bonds uniting Europe and America. And though he left both a better understanding of U.S. positions and a better mood (signified by the standing ovation he received in Munich) by the time of his departure, he also made clear that the Trump administration will fight its corner on those disputes that remain undecided.

 

Consider the most urgent and basic of these disputes: Washington differs from most European governments on the crucial question of whether Russia poses an existential threat to Europe. That disagreement is being quietly ignored while President Trump’s peace initiative is being pursued with crossed fingers. In this interregnum, NATO allies have accepted in principle a new definition of burden-sharing — all NATO members will increase defense spending, and Europe will finance Ukraine’s military resistance (including the purchase of U.S. arms) while the U.S. maintains a smaller but still vital conventional force on the continent. Eventually, peace talks will either succeed or fail. In the former case, U.S. support for security guarantees to Ukraine will presumably be in the settlement (maybe because President Trump doesn’t believe that Russia is a threat); in the latter, the war will continue and the president will come under heavy European pressure to add some kind of U.S. backup to strengthen support for Ukraine. That will be a key moment for all of NATO.

 

Will it be a fatal moment? I don’t think so. Yes, since the publication of the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, there’s been a great outpouring of European rhetoric about NATO’s collapse and Europe’s need for “strategic autonomy.” The reality is that Europe and America would both lose from the collapse of NATO. America would lose several major military allies in a multipolar world of great powers in which the U.S. is no longer the undoubted hegemon. Europe outside NATO would have to invest massively not only in conventional defense to replace U.S. forces on the ground, but additionally on a new European nuclear deterrent to compensate for the loss of the American nuclear umbrella. That would require money that Europe’s weak economies simply don’t have. “Strategic autonomy” for Europe would be more expensive for America and too expensive for Europe.

 

The pressing post-Ukraine need is for more defense spending that’s devoted to strengthening NATO — not for duplicating it incompetently. That spending will have to be financed from cuts in the domestic spending of Europe’s welfare states. France and Britain have both shown the political difficulty of cutting welfare, while Germany wrestles with a self-destructive energy policy dictated by Green partners in a coalition government.

 

The necessity of NATO after Ukraine is a no-brainer — indeed, most of the problems between Europe and the U.S. either don’t involve NATO or are easier to solve in a functioning serious military alliance in which ideology must take second place to reality on a regular basis.

 

Yet the EU seems intent on complicating matters, as Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau highlighted late last year:

 

My recent trip to Brussels for the NATO Ministerial meeting left me with one overriding impression: the U.S. has long failed to address the glaring inconsistency between its relations with NATO and the EU. These are almost all the same countries in both organizations. When these countries wear their NATO hats, they insist that transatlantic cooperation is the cornerstone of our mutual security. But when these countries wear their EU hats, they pursue all sorts of agendas that are often utterly adverse to US interests and security — including censorship, economic suicide/climate fanaticism, open borders, disdain for national sovereignty/promotion of multilateral governance and taxation, support for Communist Cuba, etc etc. This inconsistency cannot continue.

 

The problem for Washington is that this inconsistency is built into the EU and its justifying ideology of Europeanism, both of which are radically opposed to the principles of American foreign policy as laid out in NSS 2025. As several European commentators have observed, usually disapprovingly, the NSS believes that nation-states are the building blocks of international relations and that the national interest should determine foreign policy most of the time. But opposition to nation-states and “nationalism” is the foundational principle of the EU. Its ideology considers them to be the causes of war, racism, xenophobia, chaos, and many other bad things. And if you examine Landau’s list of agenda items pursued by the EU that damage American interests and security, you’ll see that they derive logically from the EU’s preference for transnational agencies and multilateralism over national democratic governance.

 

These preferences and the laws and regulations reflecting them — which are friendly to left-progressivism and hostile to conservatism — are not only obstacles to American diplomacy but also unpopular with large numbers of voters, sometimes majorities, in their own countries. Increasingly, the EU has sought to insulate its policymaking from this democratic opposition — hence Brexit and referendums that went the wrong way and had to be reversed or “got ’round.” But until the Trump administration, it generally had the support of U.S. policymakers who, ignoring its less-than-democratic character, saw the EU as a flattering imitation of Uncle Sam. The EU is in fact a rival political regime to sovereign democracies — and increasingly self-conscious about that flagship role.

 

Take one current controversy: When the NSS was published, it was received by most European politicians as hostile to Europe. In fact, as many commentators pointed out, it was extremely friendly to Europe, praising the continent for its vast historical achievements. Yet this praise — amplified in Secretary Rubio’s speech — was praise for the “Wrong Europe”: not the Europe of directives, harmonization, and Net Zero, but the Europe of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution. And even that praise elicited a few angry responses that Rubio was celebrating slavery, piracy, genocide, and colonialism. But these responses illustrate the reflexive historical masochism that animates the case for a post-historical Europe of Acronyms and Quangos almost as revealingly as the passionate defenses against Vice President JD Vance’s criticisms of EU censorship last year illustrated its suffocating illiberalism. Compare and contrast what post-historical Europe disavows and what it embraces — and consider which Europe we want as our ally.

 

Here’s another: A passage in the NSS justified U.S. support for “patriotic” conservative parties, which oppose mass immigration and face threats of cancellation by EU institutions and member governments. This support was reiterated even more sharply by Rubio’s final stop in Budapest, where he gave a full-throated and resounding endorsement of Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party in the approaching April election. Supporting foreign political parties in elections has its risks: It complicates diplomacy with governments of opposing parties then or later. But in Hungary, the EU is backing the main opposition party as strongly, and though the polls show the opposition somewhat ahead, it’s generally agreed that the race is close in reality. So the Rubio (i.e., Trump) endorsement could well make the difference between an Orbán victory or defeat — between having a strong ideological ally or a Brussels-leaning novice at the helm in Hungary at a time when major questions on the NATO alliance are liable to be decided.

 

And, finally, there’s the growing transatlantic dispute between Elon Musk and the EU, which accuses him of violating EU laws and regulations designed to protect democracy against disinformation. But officialdom has no monopoly on truth, which its rules on countering disinformation have sometimes suppressed. The Trumpian view is that EU and UK anti-disinformation rules undermine political liberty and sovereignty, criticism of mass immigration, free speech, the rights of political opposition, national identities, civilizational self-confidence, the interests of US tech corporations, and, oh, democracy too. (The Brits are shamefaced about this, the Euros arrogant.) If it’s a coincidence that the fines against X were announced the day after the release of NSS 2025, it’s a telling one.

 

We shouldn’t forget the question of “Who fired first?” In considering the disputes now and in the future between the Trump administration and the European Union, remember the remark of a last-century French general: “This animal is vicious. When it’s attacked, it defends itself.”