“I’m happy to report that the death of the Transatlantic alliance is grossly exaggerated. The West is winning, we are collectively winning and we’re doing it together,” Mike Pompeo said at the Munich Security Conference this Saturday, making a veiled swipe at French President Emmanuel Macron’s famous “brain death” of NATO remarks.

“Free” nations “are simply more successful than any other model that’s been tried in the history of civilizations,” he said, noting that migrants flee to Europe, not Cuba, and that people go to study “in Cambridge and not Caracas” while businesses are opened in Silicon Valley and not in St. Petersburg. 

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Speaking shortly after Pompeo, Macron used his time to shred the glossy picture of the world painted by the American diplomat.

Europe is “becoming a continent that doesn’t believe in its future,” he maintained, before offering a much less optimistic vision of the Western world.

There is indeed a weakening of the West. 15 years ago, we thought our values were universal values, they will always rule the world, and we are dominant in terms of military technology and so on.