Hello, and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Julia Ioffe, just
returned from an eventful Munich Security Conference.
The flight back to Dulles was packed with D.C. machers: Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, Trump’s ambassador for combatting antisemitism; Sarah Rogers, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy; Christine Wormuth, the secretary of the Army under Biden (rocking a bright red track suit); Council on Foreign Relations president Michael
Froman; Center for American Progress chief Neera Tanden; Anduril’s Chris Brose; NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly; CEPA chair Alina Polyakova; Jeremy Bash of Beacon Global Strategies; as well as various congressional staffers. Toria Nuland joked to NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, while waiting in line to board, that if our plane went down, it would take half of Washington with it. (More
accurately, it meant that the Wi-Fi was terminally overloaded.)
Tonight, behind-the-scenes reporting on all the drama in Munich, where Sen. Lindsey Graham seemed hell-bent on blowing up his colleagues’ efforts to reassure a very jittery Europe. I’ll get into why Graham was at the center of all the Munich gossip, below. Plus, notes on Rubio’s big speech, Navalny’s poisoning, Nancy Pelosi’s cold, and more.
Also
mentioned in this issue: Wolfgang Ischinger, Richard Blumenthal, Constanze Stelzenmüller, Radmila Shekerinska, Kaja Kallas, Mike Johnson, Thom Tillis, Peter Welch, Mark Kelly, Sarah McBride, Andy Kim, Mike Baumgartner, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, Jacky
Rosen, Ruben Gallego, John McCain, Mark Warner, Mette Frederiksen, Elissa Slotkin, and more…
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- Rubio’s
diet Vance speech: European attendees at the Munich Security Conference—still smarting from J.D. Vance’s throttling last year and the shocks to the transatlantic alliance that followed (tariffs, Greenland, attempts to feed Ukraine to Putin)—were anxious for any kind of salve. So when Secretary of State Marco Rubio took the dais on Saturday and was just a bit more polite than Vance, the hall gave him a standing ovation. M.S.C. chair Wolfgang
Ischinger thanked Rubio for the “reassurance” and the “sigh of relief” he elicited from the audience.
I found myself scratching my head and wondering if they heard the same speech I did. Rubio was just as tough as Vance: He chastised Europe for deindustrializing, spending less on defense, and allowing in migrants who were changing European culture. In some cases, Rubio’s speech went even further, constantly praising Christianity and Western civilization, which in right-wing
circles has become code for whiteness. He even lamented the end of the era of European colonization and imperialism. (“For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding,” Rubio said. “Its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its
shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe.”)
The speech also told a very specific story of America’s founding, extolling white, Christian immigrants from Europe who settled, in Rubio’s telling, “empty plains.” What about every other kind of immigrant, I wondered? “That occurred to me too,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who is Jewish, confided after. “I’m not a part of this?” Similarly, Brookings scholar Constanze
Stelzenmüller picked up on Rubio’s exhortation that Europeans let go of their feelings of “guilt and shame” for their history—a deeply terrifying thing to say on German soil. (It was also, she posited, a nod at the far-right AfD party, an ideological ally of Vance and the American right.)
But it seemed the right-wing substance went over a lot of European heads. Radmila Shekerinska, the deputy head of NATO, appeared genuinely puzzled when I asked her about it on
Saturday night. Kaja Kallas, the E.U.’s foreign minister, looked like the only one in the audience whose face and body language indicated she did not feel the same “reassurance” that Ischinger described. She hit back at Rubio with a speech on Sunday, rejecting the notion that Europe was facing
“civilizational erasure,” another right-wing, white nationalist talking point. By that point, though, most everyone had left the conference.
To American ears at Munich, however, the dog whistles were unmistakable, another salvo in the Trump administration’s constant culture war. “I love that we’ve embraced colonialism,” one American in the audience texted me afterward. “And that Judeo-Christian values have finally become Christian ones.” Another American attendee noted, “Last year was
Vance saying Europeans are idiots who are losing their whiteness, and this year was Rubio saying, Remember it’s whiteness that unites us. One mean, one friendly, both white nationalism.”
- Nancy Pelosi has a cold: There’s one name I didn’t mention last week in my reporting on which members of Congress would be
traveling to Munich: Nancy Pelosi. The former House speaker is on the M.S.C. board, and was dead set on being at the conference this year despite Mike Johnson’s shutting down the House CODEL. Like the other House members who attended despite Johnson’s diktat, she found her own way to get to Munich, on her own dime, at the last minute. She told me she flew Aer Lingus economy, with carry-on luggage and a stopover in Dublin. And because members weren’t allowed to use government
resources for the trip, Pelosi traveled without her mandated security. She rolled up on Saturday morning to the Bayerischer Hof in a hot pink pantsuit and heels, with a terrible cold and one very tired staffer.
- On Navalny’s poisoning: Today marks two years since Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny died in a Siberian penal colony. The Kremlin had long insisted that this was due to “a combination of illnesses,” while Navalny’s allies
argued he had been killed on Putin’s orders. On Saturday, the second day of the Munich Security Conference, the governments of the U.K., Sweden, France, Germany, and the Netherlands unanimously concluded that Navalny had been “poisoned with a lethal toxin”—specifically epibatidine, a toxin
found on the skin of dart frogs in Latin America. (The poison can be synthesized, a finding that had been written up in a scientific journal by Russia’s Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology, the very lab that made the Novichok with which Navalny was poisoned in 2020.)
Glaringly absent from the joint statement was the United States. “God, it’s so embarrassing to be an American right
now,” one former U.S. official groaned when I asked them why this was. Secretary of State Rubio did weigh in on Sunday, when most everyone was on the way home, saying he found the report “troubling” and that “we don’t have any reason to question it.”
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Plus, a quick word from my colleague Ian on the Pentagon’s war with Anthropic…
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Ian Krietzberg
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- Hegseth vs. Anthropic:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is “close” to cutting ties with Anthropic, Axios reported Monday, over disagreements about how the company’s A.I. models can be used. Anthropic, which is famous among its frontier-lab peers for its greater focus on safety, has apparently refused to let the military use its technology for autonomous
weapons or mass surveillance of U.S. citizens. A senior Pentagon official told Axios that Anthropic would “pay a price for forcing our hand like this.”
The threat would imperil not only the $200 million contract that Anthropic won from the Department of Defense over the summer, but potentially much more of its business: The Pentagon is reportedly considering blacklisting the company by declaring it a “supply chain risk”—a designation, typically reserved for foreign actors, that
would prevent any military contractors and subcontractors from using Anthropic’s models. “The Department of War’s relationship with Anthropic is being reviewed,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell told me in an emailed statement. “Our nation requires that our partners be willing to help our warfighters win in any fight. Ultimately, this is about our troops and the safety of the American people.”
The dispute has been percolating for months, with both sides clashing over
Anthropic’s terms and conditions, which state that its models can’t be used for the sort of domestic surveillance currently being practiced by ICE and D.H.S. More recently, C.E.O. Dario Amodei has said he is worried about Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights and whether autonomous weapons could violate constitutional protections. An Anthropic spokesperson told me they are “having productive conversations, in good faith, with DoW on how to continue that work and get these complex
issues right.”
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At the Munich Security Conference, American lawmakers struggled to reassure European allies
who are still traumatized by Trump’s threats to invade Greenland. Lindsey Graham’s F-bombs didn’t help.
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On Saturday morning, Sen. Thom Tillis burst into the CODEL control room in the Bayerischer
Hof hotel in Munich, where, every February, the grandees of the transatlantic world gather to determine the pressing security matters of the day. He was pissed. “Some people have been going around saying, Who gives a shit about who owns Greenland,” Tillis said, bouncing on his toes and browsing the selection of available snacks. “Well, you know who gives a shit? The Indigenous people of Greenland—and the Indigenous people of North Carolina, whom we’ve been fighting to have recognized
for over 130 years!” And that, he said, “is why I’m wearing my YOLO bolo”—a massive, sparkly medallion with blue and pink beading around a Senate seal at its center. The Lumbee Indians of North Carolina had given it to Tillis after the senator secured full federal recognition of their tribe in December.
Tillis was clearly talking about Sen.
Lindsey Graham, who had made the offending remark to Politico on Friday—declaring, specifically, “Who gives a shit who owns Greenland. I don’t.” The comment landed like a bomb in the middle of a delicate family therapy session, and on Saturday, many of his colleagues were on clean-up duty once again. It
wasn’t just Tillis who was furious. The CODEL had arrived in Munich with the goal of reassuring America’s European partners that the U.S. still cared about their alliance. And while President Trump seemed to have publicly moved on from his comments that he wouldn’t rule out military force to take Greenland, the Europeans very much had not.
In fact, the episode hung like a dark cloud over every meeting the senators and House members had with European leaders. The Danes and
Greenlanders were particularly sore. “They went through a lot,” said Vermont Sen. Peter Welch, still indignant on their behalf. “It’s real and it’s raw. I mean, they thought that when their electricity went down”—in what turned out to be a weather-related incident in late January—“that was the
predicate to an [American] attack.” “It has affected them profoundly,” Sen. Mark Kelly told me, his face pained. “Kids are scared. They’re opening up their windows to look out for airplanes and ships coming. That’s horrible—and it’s coming from the United States.”
For lawmakers like Tillis, who was also part of last month’s CODEL to Denmark and Greenland, the sentiment was not new. Even senators who had been to war zones and refugee camps were traumatized
by that trip, according to staffers who accompanied them, because of the obvious pain their country was inflicting on such a close ally. (The largest Fourth of July celebration outside of the U.S. is held every year in Denmark.) “What was so startling was how dehumanizing, insulting, and
painful this was,” Rep. Sarah McBride recalled of that trip. “There were people coming up to us in the street, grown adults pleading with us like they would with a hostage taker.”
January’s trip to Denmark had been an effort to reassure the Danes and Greenlanders that, regardless of what the president was saying, the American people and their representatives in Congress weren’t going to stand for it. (During that trip, Tillis gave Jens-Frederik Nielsen,
the prime minister of Greenland, one of the Lumbee-made YOLO bolos from his personal collection as a sign of solidarity.)
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A month later, American members of Congress discovered, it became clear how much repair work still needed to
be done. In Munich, McBride said, the Greenland crisis—which is what the Europeans were calling it—was still very much “the elephant in the room.” Rep. Mike Baumgartner, the sole Republican House member who went to the conference after Mike Johnson canceled the House CODEL, told me he was taken aback by just how much Greenland had changed things. “I think the Greenland episode was probably more jarring to the Europeans than some people back on the Hill knew,” he
told me.
Convincing European partners that they could still count on the U.S., however, proved hard going. “The trust just isn’t there after Greenland,” said Senator Jacky Rosen. Senator Andy Kim agreed. “The damage has been done,” he told me. “And some of it is irreparable.” Meanwhile, it wasn’t lost on European leaders that promises meant little coming from a neutered legislative branch. “The reassurances don’t work when you don’t have that power
anymore. It worked in Trump I, but not anymore,” Senator Ruben Gallego told me. He added that it wasn’t just about Greenland. Trump had also infuriated allies by insulting the NATO soldiers who’d fought and died alongside U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan—something Gallego, a former Marine, experienced firsthand. “I tell them we have elections coming up, but they say the proof is in the pudding,” he said. I asked him whether he would believe vows of congressional support if
he were in the Europeans’ shoes. “No,” Gallego responded, shaking his head.
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The only member of the CODEL completely unwilling to engage in the makeup session, however, was Graham. The
South Carolina senator, who used to lead a delegation to Munich with his old friend Sen. John McCain, was once Mr. Transatlantic Alliance; and, after McCain’s death, he was the foreign policy graybeard in the Senate. But Graham, once a gold-standard neocon, has revealed himself to be an ideologically flexible careerist, consistently siding with Trump, who ran as an isolationist and governs as an imperialist.
Even as other senators with foreign policy chops have
risen through the ranks, Graham has continued to position himself as America’s elder statesman at Munich, holding on to his power over the Senate CODEL as if it were a magic amulet. Senator Kelly told me that Graham refused for weeks to respond to his request to join the group this year—perhaps because Kelly had made fun of Graham on The Daily Show. In the end, Kelly tagged along
with the sidecar Senate CODEL, led by Sen. Jeanne Shaheen and Tillis. (Graham’s spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.)
But Graham’s Senate colleagues have grown increasingly exasperated with him. When I asked Mark Warner about Graham’s comments, he said, “Never a dull moment!” then rolled his eyes in frustration and walked away. “It used to be charming,” said another senator, who didn’t want to be quoted. “Was it charming this time? No,
because there’s raw sensitivity. I think a number of us would suggest to Lindsey that he might want to dial back the Lindsey-isms.”
And that was before the meeting. On Saturday afternoon, after a good half-day of American lawmakers trying to calm jittery European nerves, Graham and a number of other senators and members of Congress met with Nielsen and the Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen. According to several sources who were in the room, as well as
others who were briefed on what happened, Graham completely unloaded on both prime ministers. The gist, according to two people in the room, was that if President Trump wanted Greenland, he’d take it, and there wasn’t much they could do about it. They would just have to hand over the Arctic island and deal with it. “Lots of F-bombs,” said one person in attendance. “Picture Graham on his worst TV day,” said one source familiar. According to a third source, he was quite “combative.” Sen.
Elissa Slotkin, who was in the meeting, was so offended that she got up and left. People told me she looked visibly shaken afterward. (Slotkin’s office declined to comment.)
If anything, what Graham’s CODEL achieved in Munich was not reassurance, but a reminder that the Greenland crisis could be revived at any moment, and perhaps hadn’t even passed at all. Frederiksen said as much to the BBC on Saturday afternoon, as news of this meeting tore through the CODEL room. “I
think the desire from the U.S. president is exactly the same,” she said. “He’s very serious about this.” On the other hand, the trip did accomplish Lindsey Graham’s primary and perennial
mission of keeping Lindsey Graham relevant.
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That’s all from me, friends. I’ll see you back here next week. Until then, good night. Tomorrow will be
worse.
Julia
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