Marco Rubio’s Impressive Speech

By Eliot A. Cohen

Tuesday, February 17, 2026

 

As Cabinet members snarl at representatives and senators, and social media fills with semiliterate trolling and insults by public officials, we need to remember that rhetoric—the art of persuasive speech—still matters. Marco Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state, gave an excellent demonstration of that fact at this year’s Munich Security Conference.

 

Any contemporary speech carries the burden of multiple audiences. In this administration, the first and most important is the volatile and tempestuous president. But at Munich, there are other audiences as well: those in the room who represent not only a European but a global national-security elite; European and other politicians outside the room who care chiefly about domestic politics but are aware of international politics; real and potential enemies; and an American audience taking the measure of its country’s leaders.

 

Delivering speeches at Munich is a perilous business. In 2018, Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster gave a podium-thumping address about nuclear proliferation and jihadists. A month later he was sacked; he’d received a tweeted dressing-down in midair on the way back for having acknowledged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Last year, J. D. Vance headed in the other direction—denouncing democratic decay in Europe while calling out errant allies by name. This undiplomatic tirade went over well in the White House, but marked him as a belligerent nativist abroad and something of an isolationist at home. The speech might have elevated his standing with MAGA world, but showed him to be out of the mainstream of American foreign-policy views as measured by consistent polling of what the American people want. Vance’s tone was loutish in the distinctive, and tiresome, Trump way.

 

Rubio’s lengthy speech this past weekend was very different. There was nothing in it to offend the president, who was referenced three times, enough to flatter but not so often as to seem to grovel. The phrase sigh of relief was used by Rubio’s European host after the speech, and he meant it: The secretary of state received a standing ovation at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof. The American political class, including those on the right, cheered as well. Fox News approvingly noted, “Rubio Fuels 2028 Speculation.”

 

This reception was not surprising. Rubio is not merely bright and well spoken but a far more experienced politician than anyone else in the Trump Cabinet: He spent eight years in the Florida House of Representatives, including two as the youngest speaker and the first Cuban American to hold that position; served three terms in the Senate with weighty experience on the Foreign Relations Committee and the Select Committee on Intelligence; and now holds the combined roles of national security adviser and secretary of state in the highly personalistic Trump White House.

 

At 55—older than he looks—Rubio is a politician in his prime. It is highly unlikely that his career is over. He has articulated high principles and shown the occasional streak of ruthlessness and expediency—the latter having landed him in the Cabinet of a man he once despised. In theory, he has indicated his intention to play second fiddle in a Vance administration, but the current vice president would be a fool to take that as the final word. If the slippery turns of politics leave Vance exposed or failing, Rubio will undoubtedly do to him what he did to his mentor Jeb Bush, shunting him to the side with brutal skill. He assuredly wants to be president and might very well end up there.

 

There is every reason, then, to take his speech seriously and examine it carefully. While keeping Trump onside, Rubio sought not only to reassure but to rally Europeans. Where Vance seems only to have desired to berate and insult, there was something more urgently coaxing in Rubio’s tone. He seems to understand that the United States needs allies, that NATO was and should remain a cornerstone of American foreign policy, and he probably knows as well that an alienated Europe is dangerous for the United States. He spoke of our “intertwined destiny” and asserted that “the fate of Europe will never be irrelevant to our own.” In short, he reaffirmed the old saw that the only thing worse than fighting with allies is fighting without them.

 

His description of the common bonds, however, was predominantly civilizational. He cited poets and authors rather than political thinkers: Shakespeare, Mozart, Michelangelo, and the Beatles got shout-outs, not Montesquieu or John Locke. God appeared once, Christianity twice, and cathedrals, but not the Mother of Parliaments in London.

 

He disparaged globalism and the “rules-based international order,” though not in nearly as simple-minded a fashion as Pete Hegseth or his subordinates, a dull array of bumpkin Metternichs. The main themes that Rubio hit were the profoundly damaging consequences of unfettered free trade and mass migration. In this, he addressed the justifiable anger that has fueled populism in the United States and abroad, and that even now baffles an uncomprehending wealthier class that does not feel, understand, or even particularly care about what its fellow citizens are experiencing.

 

Like Vance, Rubio named no foreign adversary—not Russia, China, Iran, or jihadist fanatics. This was partly out of deference to a president who thinks not of enemies but only of potential counterparties to be bargained with, bullied, swindled, or accommodated. And Rubio was evasive when asked about Moscow and Beijing in the brief question-and-answer session. But he also reflected an introversion in the West that can easily go too far.

 

Rubio’s critique of the rules-based international order echoed that of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. Both accept the truth that such rules as have existed have resulted much more from American hard and soft power well exercised than from a Kantian consensus among right-thinking politicians. Far more troubling was Rubio’s substitution of the word civilization for values.

 

Rubio’s vaunting of America’s roots in Europe may not play well with the descendants of enslaved peoples, Native Americans, and Asian American immigrants. His celebration of Europe’s expansion—“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”—may seem rather one-sided to populations that felt the lash as much as or more than the benefits of colonial rule. And the invocation of Christian civilization leaves at best an uncomfortable marginality for atheists, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Muslims, and Jews.

 

Abraham Lincoln once said, “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.” There was in Rubio’s speech, however, no “decent respect for the opinions of mankind,” no affirmation of innate human equality, no insistence on the fundamental natural rights of the individual, no reverence for God without proclaiming the preeminence of any sect. The Declaration mandates no particular American foreign policy, but the values the document embodies have always informed it, even as American statesmen have struggled to reconcile the country’s many mundane interests with the principles that gave it birth.

 

This was indeed a noteworthy divergence. It may represent Rubio’s actual views, or alternatively, his adroit maneuvering within an ideologically constrained political space. The son of refugees from Castro’s Cuba must have within him something that echoes Lincoln’s faith and that of the Founders—at least so one hopes. Whichever it is, his speech outlined a path for American foreign policy that may wander from older verities yet prove far more acceptable to America’s allies, and far more constructive, than that of the first year of an administration so shamefully out of the American norm.