As in abusive relationships, in which the abuser blames the victim while oscillating between violence and nice words, to let his guard down again, Marco Rubio has come to Europe this weekend to revitalize the relationship with the United States. Trump’s Secretary of State was much more polite in Munich than Vice President Vance was last year. This time he didn’t insult us. He came to reassure after the latest transatlantic quarrels.
One day I humiliate you, insult you and threaten to invade Greenland, another I tell you smiling that we have to recover our relationship. A textbook toxic, wow. “We are not seeking to separate,” Marco Rubio told the European audience at the Munich Security Conference. The most diplomatic Trumpist says that the US believes that Europe must survive and “renew the greatest civilization in history.”
Reconciliation or manipulation? The list of damages against Europe is long. Donald Trump has threatened to annex Greenland by force, imposed tariffs on allies who have resisted, insulted the EU in a thousand ways, accusing it of having been created to ‘screw them’ (presidential word). And he has reduced American aid to Ukraine to practically zero, with nods to Putin included; in addition to the constant attacks against the EU for the regulation of its friends of the digital giants.
In psychology they call it intermittent reinforcement. Alternate insults and attacks with affection, apologies and promises. This keeps the victim confused and emotionally dependent, because they never know what to expect. And, when he lets his guard down, he starts again.
And Trumpism insists that if we do not obey them we run the risk of the supposed ‘erasure of civilization’. That which Kaja Kallas, the head of European diplomacy, criticized yesterday as the ‘fashionable Euroattack’. Helping Putin win in Ukraine or threatening to invade Greenland doesn’t seem very civilized.
Rubio came to Munich to say that he wants a strong Europe. It’s not a change. It’s more of the same. In the Trumpist dictionary, strong means that he wants it white, Christian and nationalist. He does not want a democratic, independent and plural Europe. He wants, above all, obedience to Trumpism.
Moral?
A civilization that does not defend democracy
It is not reconciliation, it is a fallacy
