During a press conference on Friday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio sent a stark warning to governments in the European Union, as well as the UK, over increasingly authoritarian crackdowns on freedom of expression. Rubio cautioned that the current trajectory could alter the “shared culture” between the United States and Europe.
During Friday’s press conference, Rubio doubled down on goals laid out in the White House’s National Security Strategy memo, which stated that Europe faces “civilizational” if it continues policies of mass migration and restrictions on civil liberties, Breitbart News reported.
“You go to these NATO meetings and you meet with people, what they will tell you [is] our shared history, our shared legacy, our shared values, our shared priorities. That’s what they talk about as the reason for this alliance. Well, if you erase your shared history, your shared culture, your shared ideology, your shared priorities, your shared principles, then what – then you just have a straight-up defense agreement. That’s all you have,” he said.
“The fact that we do have a shared culture, civilization, a shared experience and shared values and principles on things like human rights, on freedom, on liberty, on democracy,” he added.
The secretary further warned that further deviation of these shared values could jeopardize longstanding relations between the U.S. and European governments. “If that’s wiped out, because, for whatever reason, it’s no longer a priority, I do think it puts a strain and threatens the alliance in the long term and in the big picture.”
Rubio specifically mentioned mass migration and erosion of civil liberties as key sticking points.
The strategic memo, titled “The Need for Civilizational Allies in Europe” and published on the State Department Substack in May 2025, outlines the U.S.-Europe relationship as rooted in a shared Western civilizational heritage, including values from Athens, Rome, Christianity, and English common law.
It warns of risks from Europe’s retreat from these values through digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom, and assaults on democracy, such as the EU’s Digital Services Act enforcing content moderation and leading to arrests for online speech. “Achieving peace in Europe and around the world requires not a rejection of our shared cultural heritage, but a renewal of it,” the strategy reads.
The memo further calls for protecting political and religious speech, noting that suppression “threatens the very foundation of the transatlantic partnership.”
Rubio’s statements come as European Union nations and the United Kingdom have launched massive crackdowns on freedom of expression.
In Germany, anywhere between 3,500 to 3,800 people were arrested for “hate speech” or online speech offenses since 2023. German authorities have also documented more than 8,000 social media posts under “hate speech” laws. In the UK, around 12,000 arrests occurred for online speech crimes, with police making about 30 arrests per day under laws like the Communications Act, consistent with prior years’ figures of over 12,000 annually.
These numbers dwarf those of some of the world’s more authoritarian countries, including Russia, which made 173 politically-motivated speech arrests in the first half of 2025, according to OVD research.
