🚨 HOLY SMOKES. The greatest Secretary of State Marco Rubio just dropped STRAIGHT FIRE to European leaders’ faces
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) February 14, 2026
“We in America have NO INTEREST in being polite and orderly caretakers of the west’s MANAGED DECLINE!”
🫳🏻🎤🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/0hhNu3HIpj
For five centuries before the end of the second World War, the West had been expanding. It's missionaries, it's pilgrims, it's soldiers, it's explorers, pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires, extending out across the globe. But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, was contracting. Europe was in ruins. Half of it lived behind an Iron Curtain, and the rest looked like it would soon follow. The great Western empires entered into terminal decline, accelerated by Godless communist revolutions, and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come. Against that backdrop, then as now, many came to believe that the West's age of dominance had come to an end and that our future was destined to be a faint and feeble echo of our past. But together, our predecessors, recognized that decline was a choice, and it was a choice that they refused to make. This is what we did together once before and this is what President Trump and the United States want to do again. Now. Together. With you. And this is why we do not want our allies to be weak because that makes us weaker. We want allies who can defend themselves so that no adversary will ever be tempted to test our collective strength. This is why we do not want our allies to be shackled by guilt and shame. We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization and who together with us are willing and able to defend it. And this is why we do not want allies to rationalize the broken status quo rather than reckon with what is necessary to fix it, for we in America have no interests in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West's managed decline. We do not seek to separate but to revitalize an old friendship and renew the greatest civilization in human history. What we want is a reinvigorated alliance that recognizes that what has ailed our societies is not just a set of bad policies but I'm malaise of hopelessness and complacency. The alliance that we want is one that is not paralyzed to inaction by fear, fear of climate change, fear of war, fear of technology; instead, we want an alliance that boldly races into the future and the only fear we have is the fear of the shame of not leaving our nation's prouder, stronger, and wealthier for our children, an alliance ready to defend our people, to safeguard our interests, and to preserve the freedom of action that allows us to shape our own destiny not one that exists to operate a global welfare state and atone for the purported sins of past generations, an alliance that does not allow its power to be outsourced, constrained, or subordinated to systems beyond its control, one that does not depend on others for the critical necessities of its national life and one that does not maintain the polite pretense that our way of life is just one among many and that asks for permission before it acts. And above all, an alliance based on the recognition that we, the West, have inherited together, 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.
