The greatest threat to the West is immigration, not Moscow

The initial reaction from Europeans in attendance to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speech at the recent Munich Security Conference was relief. The mere fact that Rubio had reaffirmed Washington’s commitment to the Atlantic alliance calmed the nerves of NATO nations. They have been rattled by President Donald Trump’s demands for America’s acquisition of Greenland from Denmark, as well as by the general tone of the administration’s attitude toward its European allies. It was also considered to be not as confrontational as the address given to the same gathering a year ago by Vice President JD Vance.

Vance frightened the Europeans because he bluntly called them out for hypocrisy about democracy. The liberal elites who run most of Western Europe like to talk about defending democratic values, especially in contrast to Russia and its invasion of Ukraine. Yet by seeking to suppress right-wing parties that have protested unfettered immigration from Africa and the Middle East, it’s clear that they don’t really believe in such values. Just look at the ensuing impact this has had on their own countries, especially with respect to the growing influence of Islamists.

This particular issue wasn’t mentioned in the secretary of state’s speech, and that gratified the cross-Atlantic foreign-policy establishment that despises the administration both men serve. While they were pleased by Rubio’s emphasis on Europe and the United States needing one another, they also chose to downplay the substance of the address. In many respects, it was similar in purpose to Vance’s more controversial speech.

Rubio’s purpose

Rubio’s main purpose was not so much to mollify the Europeans, who remain up in arms about Trump’s demands for Greenland, despite the fact that they are still unwilling to pay their fair share of the defense of a continent that relies primarily on American military might to preserve its independence. Rather, it was an eloquent reminder that the real threat to Europe is the one posed by the same issue raised by Vance—namely, that the erasure of borders and consequent unfettered mass immigration by those who don’t believe in the values of Western civilization, who are undermining the national identities of those countries.

Equally important, he was again sounding the alarm about the way environmentalist extremism and globalist economics—promoted by the same liberal elites who advocate open-border policies on both sides of the Atlantic—aren’t just undermining Western economies and the futures of their citizens. They’re also hamstringing the ability of these nations to defend themselves. As he rightly asserted, the rational way forward for the United States and its allies is to again embrace the specific civilizational legacy of the West, rooted in democratic systems of government, culture and faith that the toxic neo-Marxist doctrines of the left are trying to destroy. At the same time, Europe should follow America’s lead in attempting to re-industrialize and to stop outsourcing its ability to manufacture goods and defense materials to a Chinese communist state that cares little for its environmentalist pieties and that poses a genuine geostrategic threat.

Above all, Rubio made it clear that their faith in multilateralism and the United Nations is not only letting them down. An unwillingness to acknowledge that the world body has been a dismal failure—not to mention a destructive force that is enabling antisemitism—is a far more crucial difference between Trump and the Europeans than the president’s critics understand.

That didn’t escape the notice of The New York Times. The so-called newspaper of record devoted no less than four separate articles to the job of pointing out that Rubio’s somewhat more diplomatic enunciation of American principles was at odds with the positions held by most NATO member nations, in addition to the Trump-hating foreign-policy establishment in the United States. They were right about that. But far from this being proof that Rubio is just a more pleasant facade to what they see in Trump’s mindless destruction of the post-World War II order, his speech pointed out some basic truths that needed to be reiterated.

What he said also explained why the administration’s approach is not only a justified defense of the interests of the United States and the West, but also in the best interests of the State of Israel and the defense of Jews everywhere.

Obsessing about Russia

The analyses by the Times were correct in pointing out that nowhere in Rubio’s speech did he mention Russia or the claim, so often asserted in Munich by many Europeans, that Moscow is the primary threat to the West.

The reason Rubio omitted mentioning Russia is not because the administration approves of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine or his ill-advised decision to reject American efforts to broker an end to that destructive war. Trump opposes the war and wants it to end on terms that will preserve Ukrainian independence, even if that means that it won’t get back all of the territory it had back in 2014, when the land war really started (a reasonable compromise rooted in what is possible rather than fantasies).

Washington also understands that the nightmare scenarios about the Russian army overrunning Europe after a conquest of Ukraine that were echoed in the Times’s stories are equally unrealistic. In its current state, Russia isn’t capable of posing such a threat. Its failure to defeat Ukraine testifies to that. While still a dangerous rogue nuclear state allied with China and Iran, it is but a shadow of the once mighty Soviet empire that, before its defeat in the Cold War, did pose such a threat to Europe.

The Europeans—and the Americans who agree with them—seem to think it is still 1987, and the forces of the since-disbanded Soviet-led Warsaw Pact face them in the middle of Germany. But they are equally wrong to be so angry about Trump’s demands for Greenland and his more transactional approach to the alliance. If they want to step up and pay for their own defense—a frequent theme echoed by many at the Munich conference this year—they can certainly do so. The only problem is that no one seriously believes that they can or will accomplish that. These countries have grown prosperous while being sheltered by the umbrella of the U.S. defense establishment, with few signs that they are willing to make the sacrifices to pay for the kind of armed force that will ensure their security against Russia or anyone else.

The most crucial issue facing Europe today isn’t the war in Ukraine or Putin. It’s the way so many in the West have abandoned a defense of their own values and civilization. Contrary to the conventional wisdom peddled by the liberal media, it wasn’t Trump that broke the Western alliance. Rather, it was the European elites who abandoned their own heritage and belief in its eternal truth and put in its place a failing neo-Marxist mindset that rendered them vulnerable to subversion from within long before Russia invaded Ukraine.

Immigration and antisemitism

Rubio’s message that this civilization is rooted in part in the Christian faith unsettled many people. That shouldn’t frighten Jews, who should understand that it is the Judeo-Christian tradition that is the guarantee of their freedom and security in Europe, as well as in the United States. The efforts of Islamists and secular Europeans to discard that tradition are directly linked to the red-green alliance of Marxists and Islamists that has been the engine of a surge in antisemitism around the globe since the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab terror attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Pointing this out isn’t xenophobic or Islamophobic; it is simply recognition of an unfortunate reality.

As the Times wrote, the Europe that exists now doesn’t really resemble the one that created and cherished the Western canon that Rubio exalted as being as integral to American identity as it is to that of the old world from which it emerged. Mass immigration from Muslim countries in the past decade and longer has transformed many of these nations for the worse, where belief in their own political, cultural and faith traditions has declined precipitately. Rubio didn’t specifically mention it, but a natural consequence of these trends has been growing hostility toward Israel and Jews that is present everywhere in Europe—except, that is, in those nations, like the Czech Republic and Hungary, which agree with Trump about defending borders and national traditions.

Rubio also didn’t mention Israel, which most Europeans have largely betrayed since Oct. 7. Nevertheless, the foreign-policy principles he enunciated in Munich—opposition to mass immigration from Africa and the Middle East, preservation of borders and Western civilization—are essential to the security of the Jewish state and its war of self-defense against genocidal Islamists.

Many Americans, like the Europeans, have gotten caught up in Trump’s trolling of his critics and his efforts to push allies to start acting as if they are as invested in their own defense as the United States has been. Some, especially in the Jewish community, are also stuck in an outdated mindset that wrongly identifies today’s immigration of antisemitic populations to Western nations as somehow analogous to past chapters of history, in which Jews fled persecution and sought a safe haven in America and elsewhere.

They should realize that the policies stated by Rubio in his Munich speech are not just correct, but inextricably linked to any effort to roll back the tide of Jew-hatred, and the support for Jewish genocide and Israel’s destruction that has gained so much support on the political left. If they are serious about supporting Israel’s continued existence, then they should stop sniping at Trump and obsessing about Russia, and get behind the administration’s efforts to wake up the Europeans to what is really threatening the West.

© JNS