Marco Rubio

We cannot continue to allow those who blatantly and openly threaten our citizens and endanger our global stability to shield themselves behind abstractions of international law which they themselves routinely violate.

This is the path that President Trump and the United States has embarked upon.

It is the path we ask you here in Europe to join us on.

It is a path we have walked together before and hope to walk together again.

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.

Europe was in ruins.

Half of it lived behind an iron curtain and the rest looked like it would soon follow.

The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come.

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 recognized that decline was a choice, and it was a choice they refused to make.

President Trump is deeply committed to your success because your success is our success.

Because this relationship we have here in Central Europe through you is so essential and vital for our national interests in the years to come.

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.

This, even as other countries have invested in the most rapid military buildup in all of human history and have not hesitated to use hard power to pursue their own interests.

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 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.