Nein, es geht nicht um „Back to Business as Usual“.

European leaders are getting the Trump administration’s message: Their relationship with the United States will not return to business as usual—and they are beginning to emancipate themselves, Anne Applebaum argues.

On Saturday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave the most important American speech at the Munich Security Conference. He was more civil than J. D. Vance, who attacked and insulted many European governments last year, but Rubio still disappointed longtime allies, Applebaum writes.

Rubio did not mention the war in Russia and Ukraine. “He did not refer to the democratic values and the shared belief in freedom that once motivated the NATO alliance, and that still motivate its European members,” Applebaum continues. “Instead, he offered a vision of unity based on a misty idea of inherited ‘Western civilization’—Dante, Shakespeare, the Sistine Chapel, the Beatles—which would fight against the real enemies: not Russia, not China, but rather migration, the ‘climate cult,’ and other forms of modern degeneracy.”

“The speech worked like a Rorschach test. If you wanted to hear some positive news, you might have been satisfied by the emotive expressions of unity. But one of my German friends clearly heard a ‘dog whistle’ to the German far right,” Applebaum continues. “I spoke with a couple of Poles who noticed that the list of great men and great artworks failed to include anyone or anything from their half of the European continent. An Indian colleague was alarmed by the praise for colonialism. In Rubio’s repeated references to Christianity, a lot of Americans heard a shout-out to Christian nationalists. And many, many people noticed the oddity of the attack on migration, coming from a son of migrants.”

“Plenty of people heard the open messages and the subtle ones, with some unexpected results,” Applebaum continues. Yesterday, it was reported that finance ministers from six European states would meet to discuss jump-starting the economy. “Instead of investing in America, Europeans will have to keep more of their money at home.”

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— Emma Williams, associate editor, audience and engagement, *The Atlantic*