David Rowe on [political cartoon gallery in London]
* * * *
LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
February 15, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson
Feb 16, 2026
The Trump administration’s white nationalist project was on full display this weekend at the 62nd Munich Security Conference that took place from February 13 to 15, 2026. The Munich Security Conference is the leading international forum for discussions of security policy. It was begun in 1963, at the height of the Cold War, to be an independent venue for experts and policymakers to discuss the most pressing security issues around the globe.
While the USSR absorbed neighboring countries as satellites, the U.S. and its allies and partners embraced a theory that international relations could achieve permanent peace so long as they emphasized representative democracy, economic interdependence, and international organizations. The equality, shared norms, and costs for wars that this system built, the theory went, along with new mechanisms for negotiation, would prevent global military conflict like those the world had suffered twice in the early twentieth century.
Since World War II, those values have reinforced civil rights and created opportunities for women and people of color, created dramatically higher standards of living around the globe, and prevented global wars. But the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 changed global calculations. Rather than defending the tenets of democracy, American leaders focused on spreading capitalism into the newly accessible states, arguing that democracy and capitalism went hand in hand.
At home, the end of the Cold War meant that the extremist Republicans who hoped to destroy business regulations and slash taxes, as well as halt infrastructure projects and end civil rights protections, no longer had to work with Democrats to stand against the USSR. They focused on getting rid of those they called the American “left,” a term that for them included not just Democrats but also Independents and traditional Republicans in the mold of President George H.W. Bush, who believed the government had a role to play in regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, promoting infrastructure, and protecting civil rights.
Extremist Republicans attacked their opponents as socialists even as their tax cuts and deregulation were moving money dramatically upward: at least $50 trillion moved upward from the bottom 90% to the top 1% between 1975 and 2020. Republican leaders and media figures fed their audiences the story that the middle class was imploding not because of Republican policies but because undeserving Black people, people of color, and feminist women demanded government handouts. This narrative fueled Trump’s political rise. He promised to fix the economic dispossession of those the modern economy left behind, by “draining the swamp,” restoring white men to control, and rebuilding the American middle class.
Once in office, though, Trump continued Republican policies of tax cuts and deregulation, maintaining his hold over his supporters by increasing attacks on racial and gender minorities and on women. As he distanced himself from democratic principles, he cozied up to Arab monarchs and Russia’s president Vladimir Putin. Like right-wing media leaders, he championed Hungarian prime minister Victor Orbán, who had destroyed democracy in Hungary in favor of establishing autocracy.
At the Munich Security Conference last year, just after Trump had taken office for the second time, Vice President J.D. Vance announced the U.S. was switching sides in global affairs. Henceforth, it would work to destroy the values of representative democracy and the global systems of trade and security that the U.S. and partners constructed after World War II.
In their place, officials in the Trump administration and their media allies have embraced the Great Replacement theory that says Brown and Black migration to Europe and the U.S. is destroying “western civilization.” Such migration must be stopped, they argue, and Brown and Black people purged from the U.S. and Europe. The end of equal rights for migrants will enable white Christian men to dominate society and pass laws that reinforce traditional religious and patriarchal hierarchies.
A report the organizers of the Munich Security Conference released before this year’s event named the elephant in the room: “the changing role of the United States in the international system.”
The report looked back to the statement of U.S. secretary of state Dean Acheson, who oversaw the development of the post–World War II global order, that he was “present at the creation.” Now, the report said, we may be present at its destruction. “The world has entered a period of wrecking-ball politics. Sweeping destruction—rather than careful reforms and policy corrections—is the order of the day. The most prominent of those who promise to free their countries from the existing order’s constraints and rebuild stronger, more prosperous nations is the current US administration. As a result, more than 80 years after construction began, the US-led post-1945 international order is now under destruction.”
Trump is leading that destruction, the report says, but it’s not clear that he is clearing the ground for new policies that will secure Americans’ safety, prosperity, or freedom. It warns that Trump is building a world based on private transactions that privilege a global elite and replace international cooperation with a few powerful countries. “Ironically,” it says, “this would be a world that privileges the rich and powerful, not those who have placed their hopes in wrecking-ball politics.”
When he opened this year’s conference, German chancellor Friedrich Merz warned the Trump administration that “[t]he leadership claim of the U.S. is being challenged, perhaps already lost,” and that the world of great-power rivalry the U.S. is trying to set up will leave the U.S. alone and weakened. “We Germans know a world in which might makes right would be a dark place,” he said. “Our country has gone down this path in the 20th century until the bitter and dreadful end.”
“The culture war of the MAGA movement is not ours,” Merz said. “Freedom of speech ends here with us when that speech is turned against human dignity and the constitution. And we don’t believe in tariffs and protectionism, but in free trade. We stand by climate agreements and the World Health Organization.”
In his speech to the conference yesterday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was less confrontational than Vance was last year, but the message was the same. He attacked all three of the pillars on which the U.S. has previously stood in foreign affairs. Global trade has ruined the U.S. economy, he said, while international institutions have undermined sovereignty, and “a climate cult” has imposed energy policies that are “impoverishing our people.”
He focused, though, on “mass migration,” which he claimed “threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people.” He called for Europe to join with the U.S. in rejecting the tenets of the post–World War II vision, claiming that “[w]e are part of one civilization—Western civilization. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.”
His description of that shared heritage reflected the Trump administration’s fantasy past. It was all white and Christian, quite weirdly erasing the Indigenous Americans who were central to the development of a peculiarly “American” identity in the eastern colonies of North America and the reality that the vast majority of the American West was Indigenous, Spanish, and Mexican for hundreds of years before it became part of the United States in 1848.
Rubio’s version of the U.S. did not include Black Americans at all, even though they were among the first inhabitants of the colonies that became the U.S., and even though he called out the Rolling Stones, who built their body of work on that of Black American blues musicians like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, as part of “western civilization.” Rubio even ignored his own family’s arrival in the U.S. from Cuba in 1956, rooting his own heritage not in the modern migration from Latin America to the U.S. that the administration is criminalizing, but in eighteenth-century Spain.
Entirely ignoring the threat of autocratic Russia against Europe, Rubio pushed Europe to abandon the values of democracy in favor of imperialism. He said the U.S. had “no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline” and urged Europe to work with the U.S. for a return to western “dominance.”
From Munich, Rubio will travel to Hungary to visit with Orbán, who is facing an election on April 12, following a stop in Slovakia, whose leader is also a Trump ally.
Rubio’s version of history echoes that of the Nazis during World War II and ignores the strength of the real multicultural history of the United States. European leaders wanted no part of it.
European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas rejected the ideology behind Rubio’s speech. “Contrary to what some may say, woke, decadent Europe is not facing civilizational erasure,” she said. She noted that other nations want to join the E.U. and those that are already members want the E.U. “to take a stronger role in the world: To defend our values. To take care of our people. To push humanity forwards.”
Kallas disputed the argument that the postwar order is economically backward compared to autocracy, noting that since the fall of the Soviet Union, nations that have joined the E.U. have grown economically more than twice as fast as Russia. She reiterated the value of international trade and security partnerships, and she reminded the audience that “the vast majority of countries also want the same thing: stability, growth, and prosperity for their people. The best way to get there is to go together.”
As Merz had done, Kallas called for Europeans to assert their own agency to protect “not only our excellent living standards, health and happiness, but the lessons we have learnt from our own history.”
Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton said in Munich that Trump “has betrayed the West, he’s betrayed human values, he’s betrayed the NATO charter, the Atlantic Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” and warned he is modeling himself after Putin.
The Trump administration’s attempt to replace the postwar international order with a great-power system driven by autocracy has opened the door for Democrats to suggest a different kind of U.S. foreign policy. A number of elected Democrats traveled to Munich, where they tried to counter administration officials’ message. California governor Gavin Newsom touted his state’s climate policies and signed a memorandum of understanding with Deputy Governor Oleksandr Kulepin of Lviv, Ukraine, to strengthen trade and commercial ties with Lviv Oblast, California’s sister-state.
Representatives Jason Crow (D-CO) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) cut more closely to the heart of the crisis that led to Trump’s rise by calling for a U.S. foreign policy rooted in the working class. “We can’t fall into right-wing populism’s lie that the most vulnerable in society are to blame for wealth inequality in our countries,” Ocasio-Cortez later summarized her argument. “We need to build movements that tell the truth: the story of wealth inequality is not a cultural one, but a class one.” At Munich, she said: “We want to make sure that we dive deeply into shared innovation, investment, strategic priorities, and trade policies that ensure the benefits of that trade actually benefit working-class people and that we restrain ourselves from the military interventions of our past.”
“Our foreign policy is being turned into an extortion ring for Big Oil, for the Trump family, for elites,” Crow said. ‘They’re bullying our partners and allies.… We want strength and peace, but we don’t want to be extorting and bullying our friends. We want to be a force for good.” “We need a national security and foreign policy that looks like America and has the experiences of the American people [with] partnerships that are rooted in fairness and that deliver for working-class folks everywhere.”
LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
