'Cowboys' in Germany
"Under President Trump, American leadership is back. That means free speech, courageous diplomacy that puts our nation first, and peace through strength." This is a tweet from US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, posted on Sunday and then spread from Elon Musk's account on X, a hellish hodgepodge that broadcasts Trump administration propaganda day and night, fake news about immigrants raping young women in the UK (and for which Musk calls for the "castration of the DOGE director" as if dressed as a superhero). He also amplifies the tweets of other Trumpist leaders when he finds them of interest, as in the case we are discussing.
Secretary Rubio's message supported the unpresentable rant that US Vice President JD Vance delivered to European leaders at the Munich Security Conference, and also its immediate precedent: the no less insolent warnings that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth launched to the TAN member states on Wednesday. Both Hegseth and Vance again exercised that dusty cowboy diplomacy that Ronald Reagan and the Bushes, father and son, already practiced: the "brave" diplomacy that Rubio celebrates. Generally, both in politics and in everyday life, only the loudest, most incapable and, of course, most cowardly proclaim themselves "brave." The specific cases of Hegseth (former star presenter of the conservative Fox network) and Vance (author of some thin novels) warn us of the dangers of allowing television celebrities and writers with pretensions to access positions of responsibility.
In the final stretch of the gloomy German election campaign, the rants of Hegseth and Vance were powerful expressions of support – without naming them – for the neo-Nazis of Alternative for Germany (AfD), who according to the polls will be the winners of the elections on Sunday but will obviously condition – already condition – everything in German politics. The pro-Nazi, or neo-Nazi, sympathies of Trumpism are not limited to the raised arm of Elon Musk. All this, together with Trump's unilateral move with Putin to decide when and how the war in Ukraine should end (which will be concretized in the meeting, this Tuesday in Riyadh, between the aforementioned Marco Rubio and the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov), makes it clear that – as the president of the Munich Conference said – [between Europe and the US] is no longer so common.
Heusgen's tears sum up well the path that Europe and the world have taken. If – as is foreseeable – the European response that is beginning to be prepared with the emergency summit this Monday in Paris consists of plunging Europe into an arms race, we will have to recall the film Red Phone: We're Flying to Moscow, with that general cowboy who was riding, madly, a nuclear missile.