At this year’s Munich Security Conference, Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered a clarion call that should resonate on both sides of the Atlantic. Speaking to the European leaders in attendance, Rubio reminded them of the civilizational bonds that unite the West and the urgent need to defend the freedom and prosperity that made our alliance strong in the first place.

“We in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline,” Rubio declared. His message about reclaiming sovereignty, resisting censorship, and rekindling economic vigor wasn’t just diplomatic rhetoric; it was a lifeline thrown to a continent drowning in its own regulatory excess.

Europe is collapsing under the weight of its own bureaucracy. And unless we act, it’s coming for us next.

The evidence is everywhere. In Berlin earlier this month, a court ordered Elon Musk’s X platform to hand over data related to Hungarian elections, yet another example of European governments wielding “disinformation” enforcement as a bludgeon against free expression. This court order follows the recent EU €120 million fine against X under its Digital Services Act, a vague regulatory framework that gives Brussels unprecedented power to police online speech. President Donald Trump called out the fine, stating, “That’s a nasty one…I don’t think it’s right,” and he’s not alone. American lawmakers are waking up to what Europe has become: not a partner in defending freedom, but an exporter of authoritarianism dressed up as consumer protection.

Secretary Rubio and the Trump administration understand what’s at stake. In Munich, Rubio spoke of a “new Western century.” But there can be no Western Renaissance if half the West has regulated itself into irrelevance. Europe’s overbearing regulatory agenda, a tangle of acronyms like CS3D, CSRD, DMA, and DSA, is strangling innovation, crushing businesses, and censoring speech in the EU and across the globe. These aren’t guardrails for a free market. They’re barriers to entry designed to punish American innovators.

Take the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CS3D), which forces any business operating in Europe to conduct exhaustive audits of their entire supply chains for what Brussels calls “environmental and human rights violations.” The reality is a compliance nightmare that only the largest corporations can afford to navigate. Small and medium-sized enterprises, the backbone of any healthy economy, are buried in paperwork and compliance. The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) compounds the problem by mandating complex ESG disclosures that require armies of consultants and lawyers. The result is less capital for America’s businesses, more money for bureaucrats in Europe.

Then there’s the Digital Markets Act (DMA), a protectionist weapon that disproportionately targets American companies. According to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, the DMA costs U.S. tech firms over $1 billion annually in compliance fees alone. That’s $1 billion not spent on research and development, not spent hiring workers, not spent building the next generation of technology. In early 2025, the EU hit Apple with a €500 million penalty using the DMA. Also, through the DMA, the EU Commission launched a cloud computing services investigation to assess whether the EU should further weaponize the DMA against American cloud companies like Amazon Web Services. These actions merely give European regulators more leverage over American companies whose success threatens Brussels bureaucrats.

The Digital Services Act (DSA) may be the most dangerous of all. Under the guise of fighting illegal content and disinformation, the DSA gives the European Commission sweeping authority to investigate, fine, and ultimately censor online platforms. The €120 million fine against X is just the beginning. In 2024 alone, EU fines on U.S. tech companies exceeded the total tax revenue Brussels collected from its own tech sector. Translation: Europe has given up on building competitive companies and instead profits by shaking down America’s tech leaders.

This isn’t just bad economics. It’s a civilizational threat. The same European bureaucrats who lecture Americans about “democratic values” are systematically dismantling free speech. They’re not just censoring content within their borders; they’re demanding global platforms enforce their speech codes everywhere. This is precisely why the U.S. State Department’s Freedom.gov, a portal with VPN access that helps Europeans bypass their own government’s censorship, is so important. When our own allies abandon free speech, America’s role as its defender becomes more vital than ever.

Secretary Rubio is right, the West needs a new century of strength, prosperity, and freedom. But that will require Europe to abandon its regulatory addiction and rediscover the principles that made it a powerhouse in the first place. It needs to liberate businesses across the globe from Brussels’ compliance hell. It needs to stop fining American companies to subsidize its own failures. And it needs to remember that free speech, not just carefully curated speech Brussels prefers, is the foundation of everything else.

Thanks to President Trump’s firm stance, the message is getting through. Europe is taking notice, and conversations that were once impossible are now happening at the highest levels. As Rubio reminded his audience in Munich, we share a civilization worth defending, and America’s leadership is helping remind Europe what that means.

The path forward is clear: either we defend free markets and free speech together, or we watch Europe regulate itself into irrelevance.

Joe Grogan is a board member of the EU-US Forum, a nonprofit organization that shines a light on the harmful policies coming out of the EU in order to stop them from spreading to the US, and former director of the Domestic Policy Council in the first Trump administration. 

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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