The end of the alliance: Europe and the US in the Trump era

Ruth Deyermond looks at Marco Rubio’s speech at the Munich Security Conference and argues that the US is now an unreliable partner and that Europe must develop its own defence capabilities and architecture.

A seemingly unbridgeable gap now exists between the US and Europe on matters of security and politics; as a result, there is an urgent need to develop a European security architecture that does not depend on Washington. Ironically, what has made this gap impossible to ignore is US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s attempt at the Munich Security Conference to repair some of the damage done a year ago.

Rubio’s remarks were notably different in tone from Vice President JD Vance’s hostile and inflammatory speech in 2025. This was greeted with relief by some; and many European diplomats claimed to be reassured by it. But while the tone was clearly intended to calm tensions, the content remained largely unchanged  from Vance’s tirade.

The vision outlined in Rubio’s speech is one in which the US is not bound to NATO allies by shared liberal values like democracy and human rights or respect for the rule of law. Instead, what ties Europe and the US together is culture and heritage, Christianity, “ancestry”, and the superiority of what he calls Western civilisation, described by Rubio as “the greatest civilisation in human history”. These things, he claimed, are menaced by European weakness and by “the forces of civilisational erasure”.

European Commission Vice President Kaja Kallas was the clearest in pushing back against this vision, noting acerbically that “woke, decadent Europe is not facing civilisational erasure” and asserting that “European enlargement is vital for securing democracy and overcoming Europe’s own imperial history”.

Rubio’s speech confirmed the radical ideological gap that has now opened between the US and Europe. To a worrying extent, the US now represents precisely the things that post-1945 Europe organised to prevent: authoritarianism; aggression; might-makes-right; and the glorification of imperialism, driven by civilisational mythologising. It increasingly resembles not the ally that helped to foster liberal democracy in the aftermath of authoritarian destruction, but the dark Other of Europe’s past against which contemporary European identity has been built. In the medium- and long-term Europe – both the European Union as an institution and the democratic states inside and outside it – cannot maintain a close alliance with a state dominated by this ideology while preserving its identity and values.

The speech highlighted another point of rupture: the rejection of “the rules-based international order”. This seems to refer to what is often called “the International Liberal Order” that emerged in the moment of post-Cold War US dominance, and in which democracy, human rights, non-aggression, respect for international law, and economic liberalism were core principles (even if not always adhered to in practice). This is clearly an order that the Trump administration rejects – as does Russia.

But the term more properly describes another order, the one that is not shaped by shared values but by the rules: respect (in theory) for the primacy of state sovereignty; territorial integrity; and international law as embodied by the UN Security Council. These rules were an attempt to learn the lessons of World War Two, which made the consequences of rejecting these devastatingly clear.

Worryingly this order, too, is rejected by the Trump administration. Although Rubio advocated reform of the UN in his speech, he also criticised the “abstractions of international law” and praised lawless acts such as the targeted killings of alleged drug runners in the Caribbean. From the start, the current Trump administration has made it clear that it does not consider itself to be constrained by law or by the principles of state sovereignty and territorial integrity. These are the building blocks of a world without major war; if the world’s most powerful state knocks them down, it is creating a world in which disputes have to be resolved by force.

This rejection of the rules-based order is being directed, among many other targets, towards the US’s supposed allies in NATO, Denmark and Canada. A collective security alliance cannot survive as a meaningful organisation when the major threat to some of those inside it comes from its most powerful member.

Attempts to paper over Trump’s determination to seize Greenland were badly damaged by the insulting public comments of Senator Lindsay Graham, who asked the audience “who gives a s**t who owns Greenland?”, and his even more insulting comments in private to the Danish and Greenland prime ministers.

A third point of rupture is Ukraine and Russia. The Trump administration has split from its former allies in Europe in abandoning support for Ukraine and pressuring Kyiv to agree to a peace settlement that would mean capitulation. That, and the desire to develop economic ties with Russia and to rehabilitate it diplomatically – clear, for example, in the late 2025 US peace plan – stand in sharp contrast to European assessments of the growing threat from Russia and the importance of Ukraine to European security. Rubio made almost no mention of this in his speech but it was central to those of key European leaders.

The consequences of this split between Europe and the US are enormous, and will only grow. Behind the diplomatic affirmations of continued alliance, and despite their own deep reluctance, many Europeans are moving to greater security independence from the US. This will carry huge economic – and therefore probably, political – costs, but there is no realistic alternative.

The Trump administration, which seems to have assumed that Europe has no choice but to bend to Washington’s will, are angry to discover that disregard for international law and untrustworthiness as an alliance partner carries penalites. They were forced into a humiliating climbdown on Greenland by European pushback, and they have been unable to successfully pressure Ukraine in part because Europe has stepped up support. They are reportedly trying to stop the EU prioritising European arms manufacturers in defence procurement. And concerns about illegality appear to have led the UK government to block the use of UK air bases in an attack on Iran. The US is losing influence and money.

Marco Rubio’s Munich speech seemed designed to reassure while reasserting an ideology and a rejection of a rules-based order that leave the US and its former European allies further apart than at any point since the 1940s. It has not been enough to reverse the move towards some form of divorce, which is now necessary for European security and its political integrity. Both Europe and the US will be poorer and more insecure as a result.

By Dr. Ruth Deyermond, Senior Lecturer in Post-Soviet Security at King’s College London.