This story originally appeared in Professor Glenn Diesen’s Substack on Feb. 16, 2026. This shortened, edited version is shared here with permission.
Europeans have finally woken up to the concern of being too dependent on America. I’ve often argued that if the Europeans want a good relationship with America, they need to have other partners as well. Otherwise, they’re in a position where the Americans can do whatever they want and Europe can do nothing. I think both the Europeans as well as the Chinese recognize that if they want to have a more balanced international system where rules are restored, everyone needs to diversify their ties and avoid excessive dependence on any one central power.
In an interview with Megyn Kelly at the beginning of the second Trump administration, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio seemed to recognize that global unipolarity had come to an end and that it was always a temporary construct. My reading then was that the US would have to adjust to multipolarity, and that this could entail a great bargain with the other great powers. (For example, ending the NATO expansion and efforts in the post-Cold War era to break Russia over the past 30-plus years, or finding a grand settlement with China to learn to live together as sovereign equals).
After watching Rubio’s Feb. 14 speech at the Munich Security Conference, however, that assumption is now pretty much dead in the water. Instead, we see that the goal of the US now is to revive empire. Rubio’s address, more or less, was a call not to embrace multipolarity or a global balance of power, but to restore dominance of the West. And of course, Rubio reached out a hand to the Europeans to join America and follow America’s lead; otherwise, they will do it on their own.
I recently spoke with Einar Tangen, a senior fellow at the Taihe Institute in Beijing as well as the Centre for International Governance Innovation, about the global implications of Rubio’s Munich speech. The following transcript of our conversation, which you can watch in full here, has been edited for length and clarity.
Einar Tangen: For the US, Europe is no longer useful. It’s broken. The Middle East has some utility in terms of the price of oil, which they’d like to make sure suits US interests. But China is the main target here. And what you see in this kind of total disregard for Europe and the Global South is that they’re resurrecting colonialism.
Obviously, Rubio’s trying to pander to the right-wing groups throughout Europe [and encourage them] to take control. This is not the first time it’s happened, but it’s interesting. There’s this blood-and-soil idea that is being pushed in the US that all the problems in the US are due to immigrants—you know, these hard-working people who are looking for an opportunity, even if they’re not given citizenship, who do the jobs that Americans won’t do on farms, factories, you name it. And here you have Rubio, somebody obviously from a Hispanic background who, in the US, would be regarded by these kinds of neo-fascist, right-wing, “white is right” groups as somebody they would not embrace, but he seems to be in full-throated support of them.
I’m sure 85% of the world, the leaders that were watching this speech, were kind of like, “You’re kidding me. You want to go back to the atrocities that were committed under colonialism? You think this is a good idea? You’re lamenting the fact that it went away?”
This is a situation where we don’t know what’s going to come next. And what’s curious is that Europe is really just being thrown into the garbage heap; the entire Global South is also being added to that dumpster fire by the United States. They’re abandoning it. We’ve seen what’s happened in South America. There’s no question that the US is saying, “OK, we’re going to impose our will where we cannot get you to accommodate it.”
Going back to Rubio’s interview with Megyn Kelly in January of 2025, it’s apparent that what he meant then is that the US would take no responsibility for the world. The days when the US would try to be the global policeman and enforce a world order that was trying to avoid a third world war—those days are over. The United States will be out for itself only, the global order has broken down, and it’s going to be the rule of the jungle. And Rubio’s Munich speech merely supports that.
Remember, this is not the first incendiary speech from the Trump administration. Last year, it was Vice President JD Vance who came to the Munich conference and just openly mocked and criticized the US’s European neighbors.
And what did the Europeans do in the last year in between these two speeches? Europe has been fully half-pregnant, which you cannot be, obviously: you either are or you aren’t. But Europe wants to stay that way.
You saw that no more clearly than in German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s speech, in which he talked about a rupture, he talked about the [new] realities, basically acknowledging what Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said earlier this year. Canada is a country completely dependent on the US, and their greatest hope is to only have 50% of their GDP dependent on the US. Alright, Europe isn’t quite that bad. But what you had Scholz saying is, “You can’t do this alone. You need us.” But where was the appeal to a better world? To the UN? To global structures… Scholz was just saying, “Hey, drag us along.” That was my take on it. Obviously, people could see it in different ways.
This is an extremely complex situation. And unfortunately, Europe sees itself at the center, but it is not. As I said, both Europe and the Global South are disposable to the US. They are just pawns in a game that will continue to be played with what the US sees as their main rival, with what Elbridge Colby—the architect of this idea of a “new American century”—believes is the main threat to the United States and its hegemony: China.
Glenn Diesen: This is why Rubio’s appeal to the Europeans is so strange to me. Europeans are really reluctant to accept that, after 80 years, they are now on the outside. There’s no collective hegemony with the US [anymore]. They don’t have that seat at the table anymore. As you said, they are also now pawns on the chessboard that can be moved around; they thought they were the ones sitting there moving the pieces, not being a piece themselves.
But also what’s being offered here is simply for Europe to be a henchman of US empire in its effort to subordinate the world and, in the process, likely plummeting us into a third world war—all for the benefit of being, essentially, an American asset. It is quite strange.
It just seems like the alternative would be better. If they accepted that there’s many centers of power, the Europeans could end this division of Europe by establishing what wasn’t done 35 years ago. There’s a mutually acceptable, post-Cold War settlement where we actually give a place for the Russians as well, which allows Europe to thrive instead of being a divided war zone.
And also, as you said, China is really the most important piece in this puzzle. China would allow the Europeans to have an alternative partner and not continue developing this excessive dependence on the United States.
I often quote from Adam Smith’s analysis of the discovery of the West Indies in America [and the age of European colonialism]. Because power was so skewed in the Europeans’ favor wherever the Europeans went, what could have led to the formation of peaceful economic ties promoting peace among mankind instead turned into one-sided exploitation, extraction, and devastation. So Smith’s argument was essentially that, in the future, when power was more balanced out—either because of the rest of the world becoming a bit stronger or the Europeans becoming a bit weaker—economic ties and international connectivity could have less of an imperial dominance framework.
Again, I thought we might be moving in that direction, and I thought that was a good deal for the Europeans. But now the United States, rather than make a great power deal and accept this new world order, has instead declared war on it.
What often surprises me, though, is whenever I try to advocate for why multipolarity should be embraced and recognized, in Europe it’s almost treated as treasonous, because it entails recognizing the interests of other great powers, be it China, Russia, or India.
But people often fail to understand that multipolarity is not a policy; it’s an actual international distribution of power. The ‘90s are gone. The economic power, the technologies, all of this military power—it’s not concentrated in the West anymore.
So if you want to translate this into policy, you can do one of two things: (1) You can reject reality as it is, which is what you do when you have this wishful thinking, pretend it’s the ’90s, try to restore unipolarity; or (2) you accept the actual distribution of power. This is usually when institutions or policies produce stability and peace. And, indeed, this is why I said I think the Europeans will find more prosperity and security in recognizing the world as it is, as opposed to how some of their leaders who grew up in the unipolar moment wish it was.
But that’s not even what the Americans are selling now. Now they’re saying, “We have to burn down the world. All the rules, the institutions—all of it has to go. Because the US can’t compete anymore.” This is seen as essentially managing America’s decline in Western civilization.
So the idea that we’re going back to the ‘90s, that’s not even what’s being sold here. It’s not on the table. As Rubio said, “We have to get our empires back,” more or less. That is very different.
But I think that, at least, Americans are selling this war on China in a clever way. That is, they’re saying, “China is helping Russia; therefore, we also have to bring down the Chinese.” If you listen to every speech by the Europeans in Munich, they only have one thought in their head. That is: “We have to defeat Russia.” No peace, no compromise, no settlement, no recognition of mutual security concerns. “We have to defeat the world’s largest nuclear power. And if China’s helping it, then perhaps China is also an enemy.”
But if you take a step back beyond this rhetoric of the liberal democracies versus the authoritarians, I think what makes this problematic for the United States is this is not the Cold War, even though they’re trying to sell it as such. It’s not World War II either. It’s not a bipolar world. If it were, that would be easy for the US. It’s like, “One side is good, the other side is evil.” But in a multipolar world, all of them are evil. The Russians are evil. The Chinese are evil. Even the Indians…
Einar Tangen: “Everyone except me.”
Glenn Diesen: And who is the “good side”? “Oh, that’s the Americans, who are trying to annex our territory and intensify our deindustrialization.” I mean, come on…
Einar Tangen: There’s a certain kind of… how to say this… karma here. I mean, the Europeans went around the world basically claiming stuff, colonizing areas, and saying, “This is ours.” And now, unfortunately for Europe, there’s an attempt to colonize parts of Europe. And all of a sudden, Europeans are saying, “No, no, no. You can’t do that. We did that in the past. We’re supposed to refrain from it now. But we’re not up for being colonized.” It’s amazing how perspectives have changed when the shoe is on the other foot.
This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Glenn Diesen.