Speaking at the Munich Security Conference over the weekend, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio encouraged European leaders to remember their shared Western heritage and assured them the U.S. would remain a steadfast ally, despite recent differences in policy.

“We gather here today as members of a historic alliance, an alliance that saved and changed the world,” Rubio began. He observed that when the Munich Security Conference began in 1963, Germany was divided by the Berlin Wall and the threat of nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union hung over the world. “We found ourselves staring down the barrel of a new global catastrophe, one with the potential for a new kind of destruction, more apocalyptic and final than anything before in the history of mankind,” Rubio recounted. Communism threatened to either dominate or destroy the world. At that time, “thousands of years of Western civilization hung in the balance.” What unified the Western world against the Soviet Union, Rubio suggested, was more than just a common enemy, but a common heritage. “We were unified by what we were fighting for, and together Europe and America prevailed, and a continent was rebuilt,” he declared.

The great nations of the West, however, became drunk on their victory, leading, Rubio said, to a “dangerous delusion that we had entered ‘the end of history.’” Western nations began to forget their nationhood, relying on trade and commercial partnerships instead of shared heritage and culture, emphasizing liberal democracy and “rules-based global order, an overused term,” at the expense of the national interest, and creating “a world without borders, where everyone became a citizen of the world.”

This naïve economic goodwill, Rubio noted, had wrought significant damage on nations and their people when dealing with entities that refused to play by fair trade rules, instead preying upon economic stability and allowing the factories and manufacturing plants of the West to shrivel up and die, favoring foreign corporate interests at the cost of Western livelihoods and families. The outsourcing of jobs and supply chains has crippled critical Western infrastructure, often placing greater power in the hands of enemies and rivals. Climate-centered energy policies have imposed heavy burdens on Western populations, while those chiefly responsible for polluting the world’s atmosphere, water, and earth continue doing so, practically with impunity. Western nations have invested untold sums in welfare programs, mostly benefitting third-world foreigners, while hostile nations have focused their time and money on rapidly increasing military might.

“This was a foolish idea that ignored both human nature, and it ignored the lessons of over 5,000 years of recorded human history, and it has cost us dearly in this delusion,” Rubio asserted. “We made these mistakes together and now, together, we owe it to our people to face those facts and to move forward, to rebuild.”

“Under President [Donald] Trump, the United States of America will once again take on the task of renewal and restoration, driven by a vision of a future as proud, as sovereign, and as vital as our civilization’s past,” the secretary of State announced. While Rubio added that the U.S. is prepared to affect this revitalization alone, he encouraged European leaders to join the U.S. in the endeavor. “We belong together. America was founded 250 years ago, but the roots began here on this continent, long before the men who settled and built the nation of my birth arrived on our shores, carrying the memories and the traditions and the Christian faith of their ancestors as a sacred inheritance, an unbreakable link between the Old World and the New,” Rubio reflected. “We 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.”

Rubio shared that he and Trump “care deeply” about Europe and the continent’s future, sometimes leading the Trump administration officials to be less-than-subtle in their exhortations for European leaders to lead their nations well. He pointed to the World Wars of the 20th century as evidence that the security and stability of Europe is linked to the security and stability of the U.S. While the American foreign policy chief acknowledged that questions of military spending and deployment are “important,” they are not the “fundamental” question of national defense. “The fundamental question we must answer at the outset is what exactly are we defending? Because armies do not fight for abstractions, armies fight for a people, armies fight for a nation, armies fight for a way of life,” he averred. “That is what we are defending, a great civilization that has every reason to be proud of its history, confident of its future, and aims to always be the master of its own economic and political destiny.”

Rubio called upon European leaders to act in their own national interests, to reshore wealth and jobs, to reclaim domestic manufacturing and critical supply chains, and to abandon the catastrophically failed experiment of mass immigration, reassuring the security chiefs gathered that the U.S. will not abandon Europe.

“What we have inherited together is something that is unique and distinctive and irreplaceable. Because this, after all, is the very foundation of the transatlantic bond acting together in this way, we will not just help recover a sane foreign policy, it will restore to us a clear sense of ourselves. It will restore a place in the world, and in so doing, it will rebuke and deter the forces of civilizational erasure that today menace both America and Europe alike,” Rubio stated. “So, in a time of headlines heralding the end of the transatlantic era, let it be known and clear to all that this is neither our goal nor our wish. Because for us Americans, our home may be in the Western Hemisphere, but we will always be a child of Europe.”

“Our story began with an Italian explorer whose adventure into the great unknown to discover a new world, brought Christianity to the Americas and became the legend that defined the imagination of our pioneer nation. Our first colonies were built by English settlers to whom we owe not just the language we speak, but the whole of our political and legal system,” Rubio recounted. “Our frontiers were shaped by Scots-Irish, that proud, hardy clan from the hills of Ulster that gave us Davy Crockett and Mark Twain and Teddy Roosevelt and Neil Armstrong. Our great Midwestern heartland was built by German farmers and craftsmen who transformed empty plains into a global agricultural powerhouse — and by the way, dramatically upgraded the quality of American beer. Our expansion into the interior followed the footsteps of French fur traders and explorers, whose names, by the way, still adorn the street signs and towns names all across the Mississippi Valley. Our horses, our ranches, our rodeos, the entire romance of the cowboy archetype that became synonymous with the American West, these were born in Spain. And our largest and most iconic city was named New Amsterdam before it was named New York.”

“I am here today to leave it clear that America is charting the path for a new century of prosperity, and that once again, we want to do it together with you, our cherished allies, and our oldest friends,” Rubio told European leaders. “We want to do it together with you, with a Europe that is proud of its heritage and of its history, with a Europe that has the spirit of creation and liberty that sent ships out into uncharted seas and birthed our civilization, with a Europe that has the means to defend itself and the will to survive,” he continued. “We should be proud of what we achieved together in the last century, but now we must confront and embrace the opportunities of a new one, because yesterday is over. The future is inevitable and our destiny together awaits.”

The secretary of State received a standing ovation as he sat down for a question-and-answer session with Munich Security Conference chairman Wolfgang Ischinger, who quipped, “I’m not sure you heard the sigh of relief through this hall when we were just listening to what I would interpret as a message of reassurance, of partnership.” He added, “Thank you for offering this message of reassurance about our partnership.”