The annual Munich Security Conference is the world’s leading forum for serious political and military leaders. Last year, United States Vice President JD Vance shocked Europe’s geopolitical elite by warning it of the Islamisation of European cities if illegal immigration wasn’t checked.
At last week’s Munich Security Conference, America’s official tone changed. Vance was kept away. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who doubles up as national security advisor, delivered the keynote address. In attendance were military and political leaders from across the world. Pakistan’s army chief, Asim Munir, unrecognised by German security officers, was briefly asked for his identity card at the entrance. India was represented by External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar.
The assembled Europeans feared the worst. They were relieved when Rubio struck a conciliatory tone. Rubio declared that the US and Europe shared a “millennia-old civilisation” and how this could give birth to the “New Western Century” rather than presage the West’s “civilisation erasure”.
Rubio encouraged Europeans to shed their colonial guilt and reclaim, along with the US, leadership of the world. He said Europe should reject the “shackles of guilt and shame” over their colonial past and spoke glowingly of “Christian faith, culture and heritage”.
It was a script that could have been written by the White House and probably was. President Donald Trump is a strong votary of reclaiming Western global supremacy. Rubio echoed that sentiment: “For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding – 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. But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, it was contracting.
“The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings. Against that backdrop, then, as now, many came to believe that the West’s age of dominance had come to an end and that our future was destined to be a faint and feeble echo of our past. But together, our predecessors recognised that decline was a choice, and it was a choice they refused to make. This is what we did together once before, and this is what President Trump and the United States want to do again now, together with you.”
It was stirring stuff. But not all – not even Europe’s military and political elite – were impressed. As the Wall Street Journal reported: “Though the Europeans and the Trump administration are on speaking terms once again, there are few illusions. The deep fissures caused by last month’s crisis over Greenland have been papered over, but not fixed. What used to be an alliance of kindred souls is viewed by both sides today as a marriage of convenience, loveless and lacking basic trust.”
The audience in Munich knew that Rubio’s uplifting words were meant to be a balm to calm allied nerves. Critical issues lie ahead for the Trump administration. The November 2026 Congressional midterm elections loom. Opinion polls predict Trump’s Republican party will lose its wafer-thin majority in the House of Representatives.
Also looming is a landmark US Supreme Court judgement on Trump’s tariffs. If the court finds against the arbitrary tariffs, mandatory refunds could be ordered, hitting the US economy. While inflation and jobs are under control and US GDP growth is over 2 per cent on an annual basis, retail prices remain high.
Trump has been forced to call back Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents from Minneapolis amid nationwide protests. Trump’s favourability rating has plunged. If he loses the House of Representatives in November, his combative policy agenda will be as good as over at the halfway mark of his second and final term.
Trump’s MAGA base is deeply upset by the president’s obsession with foreign wars in Gaza and Ukraine. They want “America First”. That means taking care of America’s economic problems, not intervening in foreign wars.
Trump also knows, despite what he told Rubio to say in Munich, that the Western Century is not going to be easy to rebuild. It has already crossed the point of no return in its “managed terminal decline”, as Rubio admitted in Munich.
So how will the US-led Western empire end? Alok Sheel, former secretary of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council (PMEAC), attempted to answer this question: “Empires in the past ultimately yielded to superior powers beyond their borders. Rome fell to ‘barbarians’ from western Europe, Islamic empires to Mongols, the Chinese and Indian empires to newly industrialised Europe and an overstretched British Empire to the US.
“The biggest threat to the American Empire arises not from ‘barbarians’ beyond its borders, but from political forces within. The jury is still out on whether the US system of institutional checks and balances would auto-correct to restrain executive excess – as seen in civil society’s pushback against ICE in Minneapolis – or result in a broad collapse that makes it hard for this empire to recover over the decades.”
Rubio in Munich conceded the limits to what a declining West can do in the face of rising powers of the Global South. He declared, “We need a unified effort to compete for market share with the economies of the Global South. Together we can prosper in the areas that will define the 21st century.”
That is the real message from Munich – and from a chastened Trump administration: unity between the declining West and a rising South will shape the 21st century.
(The writer is an editor, author and publisher. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)
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