MUNICH — American Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrived in Germany Friday carrying the weight of a fracturing alliance, acknowledging a “new era in geopolitics” as European leaders openly question whether they can still count on Washington, according to BBC News.
His appearance at the Munich Security Conference, the West’s premier gathering of defense minds, comes at perhaps the most precarious moment in transatlantic relations since World War II. President Donald Trump’s recent threats to seize Greenland from NATO ally Denmark have left European capitals reeling, wondering if the protective umbrella they’ve sheltered under for eight decades is finally collapsing.
“The world is changing very fast right in front of us,” Rubio told reporters, carefully sidestepping questions about whether his message would be gentler than last year’s caustic address by Vice President JD Vance, who attacked European immigration and free speech policies. That speech triggered twelve months of unprecedented tension.
Now French President Emmanuel Macron speaks openly of European “independence” from America, while fifty world leaders have descended on Munich to reckon with an uncomfortable truth: the United States may no longer be a reliable guardian.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz opened the conference with a direct appeal to Washington “let’s repair and revive transatlantic trust together” before dropping a bombshell. He revealed confidential discussions with France about creating a joint European nuclear deterrent, a dramatic shift for a continent that has long depended on American nuclear protection.
The Greenland crisis has crystallized European anxieties. Trump’s insistence that the semi-autonomous Danish territory is vital to US security, claiming without evidence it’s “covered with Russian and Chinese ships”, has been viewed as a watershed betrayal. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen plans to confront Rubio directly about the threats.
Eight former US ambassadors to NATO and eight retired American supreme commanders felt compelled to issue an extraordinary public letter defending the alliance. NATO isn’t charity, they insisted, but a “force-multiplier” that amplifies American power in ways that would be “prohibitively expensive” to achieve alone.
Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine grinds on, with President Volodymyr Zelensky arriving in Munich seeking “new steps toward our shared security.” Russia and Ukraine announced they’ll participate in another round of US-brokered talks in Geneva next week, though recent Abu Dhabi negotiations yielded no breakthrough.
Dutch Foreign Minister David van Weel captured Europe’s dilemma: his country is making “big sacrifices” to increase defense spending to five percent of economic output by 2035, but warned it will “take time” before Europeans can shoulder their own security burden.
The question hanging over Munich’s gilded conference halls is whether that time has run out and whether the West as we’ve known it can survive this reckoning.
