Dalibor Rohac, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who bridges Europe and Washington, reflects on fraying transatlantic trust. He dissects reactions at the Munich Security Conference. He explores mixed U.S. messaging, the rise of informal backchannels, and whether recent American shifts signal a temporary blip or deeper systemic change.
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insights INSIGHT
Reassuring Tone, Same Skepticism
Marco Rubio's Munich speech was reassuring in tone but kept Trump-era skepticism about Europe intact.
Dr Dalibor Rohac says it signalled a U.S. outlook focused on culture wars and parochial lenses rather than strategic alignment.
insights INSIGHT
Speech Was Damage Control
The speech aimed to calm Europeans after the Greenland episode and prevent rash responses.
Rohac argues the reassurance is weak given the administration's track record and prior patterns.
insights INSIGHT
Push-Pull Is A Pattern
The administration repeatedly uses maximalist threats then retreats across policy domains.
Rohac attributes this to Trump's lack of strategic thinking and headline-driven instincts.
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This is a conversation with Dalibor Rohac - a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a long-time observer of European and transatlantic politics, and someone who is living intellectually and professionally between the United States and Europe. He’s originally from Europe, specifically Slovakia but he has worked in Washington for well over a decade - and so he has a unique view into a relationship in which the two sides are increasingly failing to understand each other.
We recorded this a few days after the Munich Security Conference, where this year the crisis in transatlantic relations became by far the most dominant topic even as we have the war in Ukraine still going on right here in Europe. And so we talk about what did the conference tell us about where we are - what was the point of Marco Rubio’s speech and his visit to Hungary right after, why did Europeans give him a standing ovation and whether Europe now believes that everything is fine again - or to what extent does it actually even matter what the US Secretary of State says in an administration where everything is decided by Donald Trump anyway.
And we take a step back and talk about the bigger picture as well - whether Donald Trump is more a historical aberration and in 2028 everything will go back to normal or whether he is the start of a bigger systemic change in America - and why this question is fundamentally important to Europe and the rest of the democratic world. About whether the US is now trying to dismantle the European Union and how Europe should react or about the fundamental contradictions at the center of US foreign policy - and much more.
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