Name: Secretary Marco Rubio Remarks at Munich Security Conference
Uploaded: 2026-02-15T04:15:37.000Z
Duration: 29 min 24 s
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We gather here today as members of a historic alliance, an alliance that saved and changed the world.

You know, when this conference began in 1963, it was in a nation.

Actually, it was on a continent that was divided against itself.

The line between communism and freedom ran through the heart of Germany.

The first barbed fences of the Berlin Wall had gone up just two years prior.

And just months before that first conference, before our predecessors first met here, here in Munich, the Cuban Missile crisis had brought the world to the brink of nuclear destruction.

Even as World War II still burned fresh in the memory of Americans and Europeans alike, we found ourselves staring down the barrel of a new global catastrophe.

One with the potential for a new kind of destruction, more apocalyptic and final than anything before in the history of mankind.

The time of that first gathering, Soviet communism, was on the march.

Thousands of years of Western civilization hung in the balance.

At that time, victory was far from certain.

We were unified not just by what we were fighting against, we were unified by what we were fighting for.

And together, Europe and America prevailed.

In time, the east and west blocks were reunited.

A civilization was once again made whole.

That infamous wall that had cleaved this nation into two came down, and with it an evil empire.

But the euphoria of this triumph led us to a dangerous delusion that we had entered, quote, the end of history.

That every nation would now be a liberal democracy.

That the ties formed by trade and by commerce alone would now replace nationhood.

That the rules based global order, an overused term, would now replace the national interest.

And that we would now live in a world without borders, where everyone became a citizen of the world.

This was a foolish idea that ignored both human nature and it ignored the lessons of over 5,000 years of recorded human history.

In this delusion, we embraced a dogmatic vision of free and unfettered trade.

Even as some nations protected their economies and subsidized their companies to systematically undercut ours, shuttering our plants, resulting in large parts of our societies being deindustrialized, shipping millions of working and middle class jobs overseas, and

handing control of our critical supply chains to both adversaries and rivals.

We increasingly outsourced our sovereignty to international institutions.

While many nations invested in massive welfare states at the cost of maintaining the ability to defend themselves.

This even as other countries have invested in the most rapid military buildup in all of human history and have not hesitated to use hard power to pursue their own interests.

To appease a climate cult, we have imposed energy policies on ourselves that are impoverishing our people, even as our competitors exploit oil and coal and natural gas and anything else, not just to power their economies, but

And in a pursuit of a world without borders, we opened our doors to an unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and

And now, together, we owe it to our people to face those facts and to move forward, to rebuild.

Under President Trump, the United States of America will once again take on the task of renewal and restoration, driven by a vision of a future as proud, as sovereign, and

And while we are prepared, if necessary, to do this alone, it is our preference, and

it is our hope to do this together with you, our friends, here in Europe.

For the United States and Europe, we belong together.

the roots began here on this continent, long before the man who settled and built the nation of my birth arrived on our shores, carrying the memories and the traditions and the Christian faith of their ancestors as a sacred inheritance, an unbreakable link between the old world and the new.

We are part of one civilization, Western civilization.

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 civilization 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 council.

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.

We are connected spiritually and we are connected culturally.

We believe that Europe must survive because the two great wars of the last century serve for us as history's constant reminder that ultimately our destiny is and will always be intertwined with yours.

Because we know that the fate of Europe will never be irrelevant to our own national security, which this conference is largely about, is not merely a series of technical questions.

How much we spend on defense or where, how we deploy it.

These are Important questions they are, but they are not the fundamental one.

The fundamental question we must answer at the outset is what exactly are we defending?

Because armies do not fight for abstractions.

A great civilization that has every reason to be proud of its history, confident of its future, and

aims to always be the master of its own economic and political destiny.

It was here in Europe where the ideas that planted the seeds of liberty that changed the world were born.

It was here in Europe where the world which gave the world the rule of law, the universities and the scientific revolution.

It was this continent that produced the genius of Mozart and Beethoven, of Dante and Shakespeare, of Michelangelo and da Vinci, of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

And this is the place where the vaulted ceilings of the Sistine Chapel and the towering spires of the great cathedral in Cologne, they testify not just to the greatness of our past or to a faith in God that inspired these marvels.

They foreshadow the wonders that await us in our future.

But only if we are unapologetic in our heritage and proud of this common inheritance, can we together begin the work of envisioning and shaping our economic and our political future.

A decades long economic undertaking that stripped our nations of their wealth, of their productive capacity and of their independence and the loss of our supply chain.

Sovereignty was not a function of a prosperous and healthy system of global trade.

It was a foolish but voluntary transformation of our economy that left us dependent on others for our needs and dangerously vulnerable to crisis.

Mass migration is not, was not, is some fringe concern of little consequence.

It was and continues to be a crisis which.

Which is transforming and destabilizing societies all across the West.

Together we can re industrialize our economies and rebuild our capacity to defend our people.

But the work of this new alliance should not be focused just on military cooperation and reclaiming the industries of the past.

It should also be focused on together advancing our mutual interests and new frontiers.

Unshackling our ingenuity, our creativity and the dynamic spirit to build a new Western century.

Commercial space travel and cutting edge artificial intelligence.

Industrial automation and flex manufacturing.

Creating a Western supply chain for critical minerals not vulnerable to extortion from other powers.

And a unified effort to compete for market share in the economies of the Global South.

Together we can not only take back control of our own industries and supply chains, we can prosper in the areas that will define the 21st century.

But we must also gain control of our national borders, controlling who and how many people enter our countries.

It is a fundamental act of national sovereignty.