Talk of a stronger, independent Europe was the dominant mood in Munich amid bitter disagreement on Ukraine

If JD Vance’s thuggish speech to last year’s Munich Security Conference, directed at the solar plexus of Europe, marked the moment when a transatlantic breakup started, this weekend’s conference, in a rainy and cold Bavaria, was where the debate about the terms of the divorce settlement got under way.

Marco Rubio, the chosen Washington representative this year, is a diplomat, so he softened the Trumpian tone with references to German beer, the Beatles, Dante and the Mayflower. But his speech was a stern warning that if Europe wanted to continue on its path of civilisational decline, as this US administration sees it, America would not be interested and has different hemispheres on which to focus.

“Yesterday is over,” he said, and then he spelled out what yesterday meant. Mass migration threatening civilisational erasure and the continuity of Christian culture, unfettered trade, massive welfare states, weak defences, climate cults, the outsourcing of sovereignty to international institutions, the rationalisation of a broken status quo by people “shackled with guilt and shame”. Unlike Vance, he did not laud rightwing European populist parties, but he nonetheless wrapped himself in their ideology. His next stop after Munich was Budapest, where Viktor Orbán faces a battle in April to remain in power.