Ben Rhodes

So I'm just going to give a little rundown here where the security conference took place over Valentine's Day, but no love lost between the U.S.

and Europe.

And there's really nothing more romantic, Eamon, I have to say, than being in a windowless series of rooms with a bunch of technocrats and government officials talking about the collapse of the rules-based order.

I will say that there were a couple of speeches that kind of shadowed everything.

One was J.D.

Vance's from last year, which people were still talking about, where he went there, defended kind of right-wing nationalism, told the Germans to accept the

far-right AFD, and then Trump's usually grotesque and long-winded scolding and self-adulating threats about Greenland to Davos, although he did say he wasn't going to invade it now.

This year at the conference, the role of proxy for the Trump administration was played by Secretary Marco Rubio, who offered a more subtle version of the J.D.

Vance message, although he slipped in plenty of nationalist imperialist dog whistles.

After listing the crimes and his view of the post-World War II international order, including trade and investing in welfare states and other good things like dealing with climate change, he got down to business.

So I want to play a clip from this Rubio speech for us to respond to.

All right.

So I wrote something up on Substack about this, but I was there.

And one of the strange things I noticed was, on the one hand, the Europeans in private, you know, and sometimes in public are, you know, furious, alarmed, freaked out about the U.S.,

and what Trump's doing.

On the other hand, there was a lot of thank you for kicking us in the ass and we were going to spend a little more on defense and it's all because of you.

And they gave Rubio a standing ovation.

It felt like a kind of abusive relationship.

You know, they've been kind of, you know, well abused and now they're like kind of thanking us for kicking them in the ass.

But I mean, what did you think of Rubio's speech and the kind of the vibes coming out of Munich?