Last weekend, Secretary of State Marco Rubio traveled to Germany for the annual Munich Security Conference, where he delivered a speech that was both reassuring to the European dignitaries in the audience and nerve-wracking because of its references to the kind of MAGA culture-inspired war themes that Europe generally shivers at. After the remarks, European leaders were left obsessing about the same question they came in with: Is the United States still committed to Europe’s defense?
Ordinarily, that question wouldn’t even be asked. Since NATO was established in 1949, Europe’s security has depended on America, which deployed hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops to the Continent to keep the Soviet Union from expanding and also covered the part of Europe west of the so-called Iron Curtain with its nuclear umbrella. Once the Soviet Union collapsed and NATO expanded east, taking in former Soviet satellite states, the U.S. nuclear umbrella grew with it.
The Europeans, however, aren’t as confident now about the U.S. nuclear umbrella. President Donald Trump’s administration has spent the first 13 months of its second term browbeating European allies for penny-pinching on their militaries, opening their borders to migrants and making peace talks between Ukraine and Russia harder than they need to be.
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