For Scottish rugby or football fans – (and here I mean me) – there’s an old family saying. “It’s not the despair that gets you,” one of my uncles used to say when Scotland performed badly on the pitch. “It’s the hope.”
He meant that in sport when your favourite team does well, it ignites the hope that their winning ways will continue. And then they don’t.
His wise words came to mind last weekend when the Scotland rugby team thrashed the England team to win the Calcutta Cup. Scotland – this is the hope – could keep winning and therefore win the Six Nations Championship. Yes, it’s possible – but so are defeat and despair.
This sense of optimism tempered by reality infects international relations profoundly right now. The visit of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to the Munich Security Conference on Saturday is a case in point.
As CNN’s reporting put it, Mr Rubio delivered a “Valentine’s Day Message” to America’s European partners and that was for Europe to “change or get dumped”. Well, combining tough love with ultimate rejection is one interpretation. It certainly echoes the despair across Europe from last year’s Munich conference when US Vice President JD Vance led the US delegation.
Mr Vance delivered a caustic speech trumpeting the supposed decline of Europe as a bunch of weak losers. He offered offensive claims that Europe was suppressing freedom of speech and democracy and also facing civilisational decline.
Europe has plenty of problems, but European nations generally are happier and healthier than their friends in the US, according to endless research papers on happiness and well-being. At the time, the Vance speech told us more about Mr Vance than it did about Europe.
This year, however, Mr Rubio was mostly well-received. His criticisms were delivered much more diplomatically, although the sugar coating still contained a bitter pill.
The sugar was Mr Rubio’s remark about the US being Europe’s “child” and their fates would always be “intertwined”. Cue applause from the Europeans. But the supposed “child” has definitely grown up and Mr Rubio treated the European “family” to a lecture.
He insisted that the US was rebuilding the world according to its values. These he said included Christianity and a shared cultural heritage, closing borders and dropping climate crisis policies. The implication was that Europeans needed to change their ways or else … although it was not entirely clear what the “or else” concept might mean. Perhaps it means that Mr Vance will be back with another harangue at Munich next year.
The simple fact is that there is much common ground and also some very significant differences between Europe and US President Donald Trump’s America.
Germany is re-arming and re-invigorating Nato, but Chancellor Friedrich Merz clearly distanced himself from the Trump administration’s “culture wars”. The same was true of French President Emmanuel Macron.
In their big speeches, the European leaders also tended to avoid publicly expressing their enormous disappointment over Mr Trump’s attitude towards Denmark and its government of Greenland.
When I have talked to British and European national security experts, they all agree that the Trump White House has reasonable and extremely important security concerns about the Arctic. But they also all agree that the way these concerns have been handled is the worst of megaphone diplomacy. Bullying friends and allies is generally counterproductive.
Moreover, the Arctic is strategically important to all of Nato, not just America. Ask Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney or the British or Scandinavians. Denmark and Greenlanders want an amicable settlement and a secure Arctic with America deeply involved.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes as the key figures at the Munich conference return home, the biggest and most immediately dangerous security question remained unresolved – Ukraine.
One of the defence experts attending the conference pointed out to me that Russia’s casualty rate is now estimated at about 1.2 million of dead and wounded. This is an astonishing figure even for a large country. Ukraine has suffered horrendously, too, but Russia has not “won the war” and most European nations do not want Russia to win the peace either.
Ukraine insists it will not cede unoccupied territory, and all this behind-the-scenes diplomacy comes as western intelligence agencies publicly revealed that Alexander Navalny, the Russian opposition leader jailed by the Kremlin, was murdered while in a Russian penal colony.
British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said in Munich that “only the Russian government had the means, motive and opportunity” to use the poison administered to Navalny in his top-security jail. The poison is known as epibatidine and is only found in a rare species of dart frog.
Ms Cooper said that “by using this form of poison, the Russian state demonstrated the despicable tools it has at its disposal and the overwhelming fear it has of political opposition”.
Scanning international relations, war and peace right now, you can see that my uncle was correct. Just as in sport, it’s not the despair that can be so difficult to deal with. It’s the hope that good things might happen, a hope dashed when the real world intervenes.
