What I wrote below may be controversial – and it is – but I have been thinking about this in security terms for a long time and have my own, specific view of what Marco Rubio and today’s American administration under his leadership mean when they speak about Europe’s decline, and how this connects to the American understanding of security as the power that provides that security.
Marco Rubio’s recent address at the Munich Security Conference was not just another routine political statement – it was a “wake‑up call” for the whole of Western civilization and an admission of the existential crisis Europe faces today. When we talk about Europe’s “fall,” the problem is not only small defense budgets or technological lag; it is much deeper. We have entered an era in which, despite digital hyper‑connectivity, the individual has become more lonely and atomized than ever. The post‑truth environment and social networks have further expelled the individual from traditional communities such as the family, church, and local community, dealing a direct blow to their sense of a security “homeland,” to identity, and so on.[
In this context, I recall the 2024 and earlier RAND Corporation studies on the will to fight, which argue that the Will to Fight is the single most important factor in war. Even the best technology is useless without the will and resilience to use it.[reddit]
These studies list many factors, among which the following are essential here:
Motivations: factors that create an individual disposition to fight.
Ideology: a belief system that justifies fighting.
Economics: material gain or financial stability.
Revenge: personal or collective motive against an enemy.
Desperation: the feeling that there is no alternative to fighting.
Quality: the level of individual preparedness and personal traits.
Culture.
Behavioral norms and mechanisms of control.
Control: coercion, discipline, and persuasion.
Cohesion: social ties (vertical and horizontal) and a shared mission.
Esprit de corps: the feeling of belonging to, and pride in, one’s unit.
Expectation: belief in victory and realistic expectations.
Integrity/Trust: leaders’ character, honesty, and the absence of corruption.
This model shows that when identity, trust, and historical memory are lost in a society, the system that sustains the will to fight collapses, no matter how strong its material “capabilities” may be.
In today’s digital society, the very question of what is worth dying for becomes blurred. If the state is perceived merely as a hub providing socio‑economic services, the bond between citizen and country becomes purely transactional. This is why militarization and defense issues become extremely unpopular in societies that believe peace is a natural condition and not a resource gained through constant struggle. This phenomenon was already visible in studies from the 2010s: the farther west one goes on the European continent, the fewer men say they are prepared to take up arms to defend their country.
This value vacuum has been further deepened by the migration crisis and cultural disorientation, which have turned the Western way of life into a vague and fragile concept in recent years. When individuals’ ties to their own roots weaken, defense policy automatically moves to the background, because a society focused only on “here and now” comfort sees no point in long‑term sacrifice. Postmodernism and the present era, in all their content, have stripped the global West of the metaphysical foundation that historically turned nations and states into entities capable of fighting. Where religion – and later the nation‑state – once held primacy, societies were also more integrated into militaristic rhetoric. The project of a united Europe was, naturally, built on completely different value orientations after the end of the Cold War. For that reason, compulsory universal conscription was quickly abolished in an absolute majority of countries. The understanding and perception of threats became ephemeral. The perceived need to maintain large standing armies disappeared.
And what do we see on the other side? Today democracy is under attack from so‑called conservative actors obsessed with values and historicity, for whom history is not over and who seek to rewrite what they see as its unjust outcomes in their own terms.
At this point I must recall Dimitri Uznadze’s philosophy of war. In a society where citizenship is limited to economic benefits, Uznadze calls this “practical cognition.” In a mode of existence where material concerns dominate, our everyday mind merely skims the surface of things and evaluates them by their utility. In such conditions, death is nothing but “evil,” because it is the end of practical enjoyment. This explains why defense is “unpopular” – for the practical mind, self‑sacrifice is illogical. Uznadze writes that our entire social life is dictated by fear of death. When a human being no longer has a metaphysical support, he becomes a slave to this “fear of death.” In such a society, the person thinks only about how to “slip from the skeleton of death,” not about what is worth dying for. The “lonely person” is precisely the one left alone with the fear of death, who has lost faith that there is anything higher than life itself.
Uznadze argues that the weakening of national spirit (through assimilation or atomization) means the loss of creative power. If a nation no longer builds its own “historical edifice,” it will have no will to defend it either.
From the perspective of defense, Uznadze notes: “When a war is defensive in character, the strength of each individual is directed toward protecting national identity and existence, that is, toward realizing the meaning of life; in such a case everyone gladly and enthusiastically brings his life as an offering to the altar of war… In such a war, there is no longer room for the person’s ordinary fear in the face of death, and everyone becomes a knight and a hero. Thus, a remarkable unanimity is always born during a defensive war between different parts of the nation, and even those who are absolutely against war suddenly change, take the sword in hand, and march against the enemy.” Draw a parallel with Ukraine and we see all this clearly. Uznadze says directly: “We must seek the meaning of our existence not within the bounds of life, but beyond it and above it.” Death becomes “knighthood” only when a person believes that his life is a means for a higher, objective goal. In his view, the meaning of our existence lies not in life itself, but in objective purposes that stand beyond and above it. It is precisely because of such values that death becomes “knighthood” and killing becomes “heroism.” In Ukraine, every fighter has seen this objective purpose. This is the warrior’s path, what Bushido formulates as: live as if you have already died.
In Uznadze’s words, war and danger “shatter the ice of practical life” and force people to return to those fundamental values that stand above life. He points out that the subject of cultural creation is the nation, not the individual. The conservative wave is trying to re‑establish the “social thread” that unites people into a single national organism.
There is a well‑known TED Talk by American veteran Sebastian Junger titled “Our lonely society makes it hard to come home from war.” He says that, psychologically, the main thing he lacked after leaving the military – as did most of his fellow soldiers – can be summed up as a sense of brotherhood, which compensated for his personal feeling of loneliness and made him part of something larger than himself.[youtube]artofcommunityncw+1
Thus the socio‑cultural condition of a society directly affects the will to fight and, more broadly, the sense of security, the individual’s attitude toward and role within the security system, and the soldier’s psychological and mental state before war and after returning from it.
In bourgeois peace, when a citizen sees no threat in front of his nose, his primary objective purposes of existence lie entirely in the material world. Therefore, from a conservative standpoint, foregrounding national identity and increasing homogeneity is important.
The security crisis, the search for identity, and the need for economic re‑industrialization, which Rubio also discussed, clearly create fertile ground for this renaissance of conservatism and for right‑wing populism, along with all the risks that may accompany such processes.
All this means that Europe’s salvation is possible, among other things, through a kind of “awakening” and a return from purely practical economic interests to metaphysical/national values and to prioritizing them in national security policy. From this, all other sectoral policies would then follow through the prism of national security, including migration issues. Naturally, the forces that attack global democracy will try – and already do try – to exploit this for their own purposes.
It is precisely this reality that Rubio responds to, and his vision is essentially an attempt to bring back a Europe that is industrial, traditional, and responsible for itself. Re‑industrialization here is not just an economic parameter – it means the restoration of a strong middle class, which is the backbone of any state and of its resilience. The renaissance of traditional values is directly connected to the instinct to protect hearth and home, which ultimately translates into readiness to defend the common homeland. Rubio’s message and the broader MAGA ideology ask Europe to go beyond postmodern illusions, return to its own identity, and understand that civilization cannot be saved by a purely materialist social contract – it requires faith, tradition, and the possession of values that are worth more than life itself. America is, of course, civilizationally Europe’s child, and this was stated explicitly in Munich.nytimes+1youtube+1
For America’s founding fathers, the connection with Europe was civilizational but not structural. They believed America’s survival depended on its ability to maintain its own will to fight and identity so that it would not become a mere pawn in Europe’s geopolitical games.
The founders also acknowledged America’s European roots. Thomas Paine (an English‑born American Enlightenment thinker, revolutionary, and publicist whose ideas played a major role in ideologically preparing American independence and the French Revolution) wrote in his famous pamphlet “Common Sense” that Europe, not only England, was America’s “parent.” However, their main goal was to shield American society from European despotism, class hierarchies, and constant wars – from the miseries that plagued the European continent at the time.
For the founders, America was the best version of European values (liberty, rationalism), which had to develop at a remove from Europe’s “fallen” political system. In his Farewell Address, Washington warned the nation against firm political alliances with Europe. In his view, Europe had its own “primary interests” that did not concern America. His testament became, for a time, the foundation of American isolationism. Yet history ultimately assigned to America the role of standard‑bearer of Western civilization and forced it into political‑structural integration with Europe – above all through NATO. Rubio also noted that America does not want this structural unity to be endangered, but rather strengthened. What he today calls “reciprocity” is the idea that an alliance is justified only if it equally serves both sides’ national interests and their will to fight.
If Europe loses its identity and will to fight, it will also lose the values on which America itself arose. That is why Europe’s “awakening” is critically important for Rubio and for American conservatism more broadly.
Today, democracy and human rights alone are not enough in a world where wolves roam. Europe must find a balance between the “re‑Westernization” that America is asking for and its security needs. Democracy needs its own “arsenal” – both material and value‑based. Europe’s survival is possible through a return, beyond practical interests, to metaphysical/national values, so that internal fragmentation does not turn into capitulation in the face of external threats.
15.02.2026
https://www.rand.org/ard/projects/will-to-fight.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9DNWK6WfQw
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