The North American Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, stated this Saturday that he does not know if Russia is really serious about ending the war in Ukraine, while Washington continues to press for a peace agreement.
“We don’t know if the Russians are serious about ending the war,” the senior US official said at the Munich Security Conference, with the conflict about to enter its fifth year.
The official also tried to calm his European partners by stating that Washington wants to “invigorate” the transatlantic relationship, so that a strong Europe helps the United States in its mission to renew the world order.
The head of American diplomacy adopted a conciliatory tone when speaking at the Munich Security Conference before an audience of European leaders, traumatized by President Donald Trump’s recent desire to seize Greenland.
“We seek not to separate, but to invigorate an old friendship and renew the greatest civilization in human history,” he said.“We want a revitalized alliance,” he insisted.
In a dense speech, Rubio attacked “massive immigration”, climate policies that “impoverish our people” and the “madness” of free trade that deindustrialized Europe and the United States “for the benefit of derivatives and adversaries.”
He also praised the “spiritual and cultural” connection on both sides of the Atlantic, based, as he explained, on the language, Christianity and European origin of millions of Americans.
The United States will be “driven by a vision of a future as proud, as sovereign and as vital as our civilization’s past,” he said at the Munich Security Conference in Germany.
“And although we are willing, if necessary, to do it alone, we prefer and hope to do it together with you, our friends in Europe,” he added.“We don’t want our allies to be weak, because that makes us weak,” he also said.
The Secretary of State, who is of Cuban origin and remembered his Spanish ancestors, harshly attacked immigration, two months after the Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy used that argument to say that Europe is facing a “civilizational erasure.”
“Mass immigration” is “a crisis that is transforming and destabilizing societies throughout the West,” he said.We must “regain control of our borders,” which “is not xenophobia, it is not hatred, it is a fundamental exercise in sovereignty.”
Rubio also attacked the UN, while Washington promoted its Peace Board, an organization sponsored by Trump, which discretionally invited dozens of countries and assumed conflict resolution functions.
“We cannot ignore, today, that in most of the most urgent issues it has no answers and has practically had no role,” Rubio said.
The Secretary of State gave as an example that the UN did not know how to stop the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, nor “limit the nuclear program of the radical Shiite clerics of Tehran.”
And he maintained that the institution led by António Guterres did nothing against the “threat to our security” posed according to him by the Venezuelan “narco-terrorist dictator” Nicolás Maduro, captured by Washington on January 3 on accusations of drug trafficking.
Rubio’s speech marked a departure from the one delivered a year earlier, at the same forum, by Vice President JD Vance, who accused European leaders of endangering the continent’s security through their immigration policy and regulatory measures against extremist and hate speech on North American platforms and social networks.
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The day before, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte argued that “a strong Europe in a strong NATO means that the transatlantic link will be stronger than ever.”
The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, considered this Saturday that the bloc of 27 must “go into higher gear” and “assume its responsibilities” in Defense.
