The Situation: Translating Rubio

The Situation on Friday considered the role of punctuation in a judicial opinion.

Today, I want to translate Marco Rubio’s speech at the Munich Security Conference into plain simple English.

Speeches in diplomatese can be hard for normal English speakers to parse, so I thought a good translation would be helpful to those who might not understand the code in which the secretary of state was speaking. 

Don’t thank me.

Rubio begins by harkening back to communism to remind European listeners that they owe us, that we saved them from a terrible fate, and that we are thus the good guys who command the moral high ground irrespective of current behavior:

We gather here today as members of a historic alliance, an alliance that saved and changed the world. 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.

At that time, victory was far from certain. But we were driven by a common purpose. 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 and a continent was rebuilt. Our people prospered. In time, the East and West blocs were reunited. A civilization was once again made whole. 

Translation: In the good old days, we had a common enemy. We were one civilization fighting the bad guys. We were one, you and I—brotherly nations, one might say. Remember that. You owe us. You should do what I say. Because it was in our unity, which is to say your doing what I say, that we won and protected our civilization.

It was in this victory, in Rubio’s fable, that the problem arose:

[T]he 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.

Note a few things about this passage. First, that it is a total parody of what anyone actually ever believed. Sure, there were delusions at the end of the Cold War era. But the phrase “The End of History” never meant the list of things that follow in Rubio’s account. And few people actually subscribed to the list of things that follow. Second, note as well the evident contempt for the idea of a rules-based order, a phrase Rubio derides as “overused.” Of all phrases in the post-Cold War world to single out for derision, it’s a curious choice. A lot of the rules-based order worked pretty well, after all.

”And [the delusion] has cost us dearly,” he goes on. It was because of “this delusion,” he says, that “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.” It was because of this vision that 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.” It was because of this vision that, 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 to use as leverage against our own.” And most perniciously, “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 the future of our people.” 

Rubio continues: “We made these mistakes together, and now, together, we owe it to our people to face those facts and to move forward, to rebuild.”

Rubio is smarter than to go to Europe and speak in the accusatory second person. He leaves that to J.D. Vance and to the National Security Strategy documents. You guys are in civilizational decline, those documents say and the vice president says.

Rubio fashions himself cleverer. He states it all in the first person plural. We are one, he says, and we are all in civilizational decline together.

Doesn’t that feel better?

But we’re not quite one. Because the United States, unlike Europe, is facing the music—and facing it like a man:

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 as vital as our civilization’s past. 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. 

Note here both the bravery and the inclusiveness. Rubio is willing, if it truly necessary, to take on the hard task of renewal and restoration all by ourselves. We are men, after all. If Europe is truly committed to abandoning its heritage, America will pick up the mantle and carry the banner of our collective civilization’s past without help—like Byzantium did for Rome for a thousand years. But it is “our preference” to do it together—which, again, means that you do what I say.

Rubio here goes into a strange reverie about “Western civilization,” about how America inherited it, and how President Trump wants a strong Europe: “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.”

This is why we tried to annex Greenland, you see. It was because we care. It was because “We are connected spiritually and we are connected culturally."

He goes on in this vein for a long time. He covers Mozart and Da Vinci and the Beatles and the Sistine Chapel and the creation of universities. The whole rest of the speech is oriented around this idea that we—the United States and Europe—are one civilization that we collectively have to protect together. Yet he chronically returns to this idea that we must protect it by resisting trade liberalization and mass migration and international organizations and that other rot that crept in after the Cold War.

Rubio must think himself very clever indeed. He went to Europe and both flattered Europe and defended Trump administration policies assaulting Europe in the same speech, and he got himself a standing ovation from the Europeans along the way.

The trouble, as the avowedly hard-headed Rubio must understand at some level, is that Europeans can only care so much what the American secretary of state says about how much he loves them and cares about them. They see the way America behaves. When you’re threatening to annex Greenland and destroy NATO and when you’re slapping tariffs on allies, it doesn't matter very much whether you’re speaking in the first person plural about a shared cultural and civilizational history. In fact, such talk can start to sound a whole lot like Russian claims of a shared civilizational history with Ukraine.

When you’re deriding the rules-based global order while killing civilians in international waters, it’s no great comfort that you dress up the American protection racket vis-à-vis Europe as some kind of belief that Europe should be strong and that President Trump cares enough to be direct about it.

Because however Europeans might have applauded, not a single person in the room could possibly believe that any aspect of this bears the slightest resemblance to the truth.

Here’s an honest translation of Rubio’s speech:

American policy has changed. It is now wholly transactional and roots in no principles whatsoever. We want things from countries and will demand them and will use all kinds of coercive powers to get them. We have few inhibitions in this respect.

But all of that is rude to say. And it makes us look bad. And it makes you all worry. So let’s collectively indulge the polite fiction that we have more in common than we do. Let’s overstate a shared history. Let’s pretend we agree on shared challenges. And let’s pretend I’m not saying that the basis for our future cooperation is that you submit to our will. The first step in this regard is that I flatter you. The second step is that you applaud for me. 

And then I will fly home.

And The Situation will continue tomorrow.