By EMMA BURROWS, MATTHEW LEE and GEIR MOULSON, Associated Press

MUNICH (AP) — An annual gathering of top international security figures that last year set the tone for a growing rift between the United States and Europe opens Friday, bringing together many top European officials with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and others.

The Munich Security Conference opens with a speech by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, one of 15 heads of state or government from European Union countries expected to attend.

Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz arrives for the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany, Friday, Feb. 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)

The many other expected guests at the conference that runs until Sunday include Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. In keeping with the conference’s tradition, there will also be a large delegation of members of the U.S. Congress.

“Trans-Atlantic relations have been the backbone of this conference since it was founded in 1963 … and trans-Atlantic relations are currently in a significant crisis of confidence and credibility,” conference chairman Wolfgang Ischinger told reporters earlier this week. “So it is particularly welcome that the American side has such great interest in Munich.”

At last year’s conference, held a few weeks into U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term, Vice President JD Vance stunned European leaders by lecturing them about the state of democracy on the continent.

A series of statements and moves from the Trump administration targeting allies followed in the months after that, including Trump’s threat last month to impose new tariffs on several European countries in a bid to secure U.S. control of Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark. The president later dropped that threat.

With Rubio heading the U.S. delegation this year, European leaders can hope for a less contentious approach more focused on traditional global security concerns.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrives in Munich, Germany, Friday, Feb. 13, 2026, for the Munich Security Conference. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, Pool)

Rubio is expected to meet with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen on the sidelines of the conference, according to officials from both sides, one of many meetings going on in and around the hotel that hosts the event.

Rubio also met China’s Wang ahead of Trump’s planned visit to China in April. They shook hands in front of Chinese and U.S. flags before sitting down with their delegations, but neither of them spoke.

Related Articles

Today in History: February 13, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia found dead

Remote community grieves the 8 killed in Canada’s deadliest attack in years

Deaths in Iran’s crackdown on protests reach at least 7,000, activists say

Russia fires barrage at Ukrainian cities as next round of US-brokered talks is unclear

2 Mexican Navy ships laden with humanitarian aid dock in Cuba as US blockade sparks energy crisis

Before departing for Germany on Thursday, Rubio had some reassuring words as he described Europe as important for Americans.

“We’re very tightly linked together with Europe,” he told reporters. “Most people in this country can trace both, either their cultural or their personal heritage, back to Europe. So, we just have to talk about that.”

But Rubio made clear it wouldn’t be business as it used to be, saying: “We live in a new era in geopolitics, and it’s going to require all of us to reexamine what that looks like.”

Rubio arrived in Munich Friday and is due to address the conference on Saturday morning.

Since last year’s Munich conference, NATO allies have agreed under pressure from Trump to a large increase in their defense spending target.

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said there has been a “shift in mindset,” with “Europe really stepping up, Europe taking more of a leadership role within NATO, Europe also taking more care of its own defense.”

Moulson reported from Berlin.

ORANGEBURG, S.C. (AP) — Two people are dead and one person wounded after a shooting at a South Carolina State University residential complex, the university said, prompting a nearly eight-hour lockdown that was lifted early Friday.

Related Articles

Today in History: February 13, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia found dead

Anthropic hits a $380B valuation as it heightens competition with OpenAI

Virginia Supreme Court rules US Marine’s adoption of an Afghan war orphan will stand

Lawyers say access to Everglades detention center is still hard to get as a judge weighs the case

Everyday lifestyle choices can add up to significant climate change impact

The Thursday night shooting happened a little over four months after two shootings during homecoming celebrations on Oct. 4. One, which happened near the same residential complex, killed a 19-year-old woman. A man was injured in the other shooting. School officials announced new safety measures afterward.

University officials have not confirmed the identities of those who died in Thursday’s shooting or the condition of the person wounded, the school said in a news release.

The school put the campus in Orangeburg on lockdown at about 9:15 p.m. when a report of the shooting in an apartment at the Hugine Suites student residential complex came in. The lockdown was lifted about 5 a.m. Friday, the university said.

Kaya Mack had just finished making a food delivery on campus when she heard gunshots and saw lots of police officers coming through a gate.

She said she wasn’t sure where the shots were coming from.

“Their loud sirens kind of shook me,” she told WLTX-TV. “We were looking around, me and other people on campus, we’re all looking around like ‘What’s going on?’”

Investigators were on site and law enforcement was patrolling the campus and areas nearby. The university said it asked the State Law Enforcement Division to investigate the shooting. An email seeking comment was sent to an agency spokesperson.

The university canceled Friday classes and was making counselors available to students.

Several people have been arrested on gun-related charges in connection with the October shootings.

After the October shootings, university President Alexander Conyers announced the addition of new fencing along the campus perimeter and additional security patrols to better control pedestrian access, according to a news release at the time. Crews were also set to repair damaged perimeter barriers.

Ahead of the university’s annual Youth & ROTC Day set on Nov. 1, the university announced safety and security measures, including a second layer of fencing along the perimeter between Hugine Suites and Goff Street and repairs underway along the shared boundary between SC State and Claflin University.

By STEVE PEOPLES and LINLEY SANDERS, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans may be willing to stick with President Donald Trump through almost anything, but his recent push to seize control of Greenland has turned off many in his own party, according to a new AP-NORC poll.

The survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that about 7 in 10 U.S. adults disapprove of how Trump is handling the issue of Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark. That’s higher than the share who dislike how he’s handling foreign policy generally, suggesting that Trump’s Greenland approach has created a weak spot for the administration.

Even Republicans aren’t thrilled. About half disapprove of his attempt to turn the icebound landmass into American territory, something that Trump has insisted is critical for national security in the Arctic, while about half approve.

The poll was conducted Feb. 5-8, which is after Trump had made the decision to scrap tariffs designed to pressure European countries into supporting U.S. control of Greenland, but after his weeks-long push for American intervention over the island.

About half of Republicans disapprove of Trump on Greenland

Trump’s base is normally unwavering behind him, so Greenland stands out as an exception.

FILE – A Danish serviceman walks in front of Joint Arctic Command center in Nuuk, Greenland, Jan. 16, 2026. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka, File)

The marks represent Trump’s lowest ratings among Republicans on a list of key issues in the poll, including the economy and immigration — where about 8 in 10 approve — and foreign policy generally. About 7 in 10 Republicans approve of his overall foreign policy approach.

Trump has argued that the U.S. needs Greenland to counter threats from Russia and China in the Arctic region, despite America already having a military presence there.

Other recent polls, including a Pew Research Center survey conducted in January, found that Republicans were largely divided on whether the U.S. should take over Greenland, while Americans overall were opposed.

Ayman Amir, a 46-year-old Trump supporter from Houston, Texas, said he agrees that Greenland holds strategic importance for the United States’ military. But that doesn’t mean he thinks Trump should claim it.

“We can’t take it by force. We don’t have a right to do that,” Amir said. “You can’t blame Russia for what they do in Ukraine and then do the same thing. You can’t do this.”

Trump’s overall foreign policy approval remains steady

The president dropped his threats to seize the territory by force late last month after saying a framework for a deal over access to Greenland was reached with help from NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte.

Related Articles

Journalist Don Lemon set to be arraigned in St. Paul church protest case

Puerto Rico governor signs law to recognize fetus as human being as critics warn of consequences

House renames press gallery after Frederick Douglass in bipartisan recognition of Black history

Scientific studies calculate climate change as health danger, while Trump calls it a ‘scam’

Judge says US must help bring back a handful of Venezuelans deported to notorious prison

The clash represents just one of the moves Trump has made to strain relationships with key allies over the last year. Western leaders are focusing on trans-Atlantic tensions this week at the Munich Security Conference.

On Greenland, Trump has few vocal supporters at home or abroad.

Even as Trump made significant moves to obtain control of Greenland, his overall approval on the issue of foreign policy has remained steady. About 4 in 10 U.S. adults approve of Trump’s approach to foreign policy, a measure that’s been unchanged in recent months.

Young Republicans especially disapprove of Greenland approach

Younger Republicans are especially likely to disapprove of how Trump is handling the situation.

About 6 in 10 Republicans under 45 say they disapprove of his leadership on Greenland, compared to about 4 in 10 older Republicans.

That 4 in 10 who approve of Trump’s Greenland actions is much lower than young Republicans’ approval on issues of foreign policy, the economy, or immigration.

Independent voter Aaron Gunnoe, 29, an engineer from Marion, Ohio, was baffled by Trump’s aggressive posture on the NATO ally.

“It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” he said. “It’s owned by somebody else. That should be the end of it.”

The AP-NORC poll of 1,156 adults was conducted Feb. 5-8 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 3.9 percentage points. The margin of sampling error for Republicans overall is plus or minus 6.1 percentage points.

Republicans who minimize President Donald Trump’s sliding job approval ratings typically emphasize that his agenda contains many popular policies. Those arguments misunderstand what makes for successful political leadership.

Even though some White House policies are popular, policy is but one leg of the three-legged stool of political leadership. Rhetoric also matters. So, too, does implementation, especially at the executive level. Without its full complement of limbs, this three-legged stool is prone to tip over and shatter.

“Communication about public policy is as important as the public policy itself,” Jeffrey Brauer, a political scientist at Keystone College, near Scranton, Pennsylvania, told me. “This is something many political leaders in the U.S. on both sides of the aisle often forget or often don’t realize in the first place.” How a policy is carried out, Brauer added, impacts voters’ “perception of policy success.”

“This explains the wide gap between the initial, extensive support of the administration’s immigration policy and the current major downturn in the polls,” he said. “Most Americans don’t agree with the implementation, particularly with the tactics being used.”

About that. Trump’s most potent political asset has almost always been immigration. During the 2016 campaign, the president vowed to secure the Mexican border. He delivered. After illegal immigration spiked under President Joe Biden, voters turned to Trump (again) to address the problem. Aside from their frustration with inflation, voters picked the 45th president over Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, the sitting vice president, and made him the 47th president, because they saw border security as a serious problem and trusted him to stem illegal immigration and deport criminal aliens.

In the year since Trump’s return to the White House, his administration has overseen a dramatic drop in illegal border crossings from Mexico and undertaken a massive deportation program to repatriate criminal aliens. And yet as of this week, Trump’s job approval rating on immigration is 8 percentage points underwater in the RealClearPolitics average of recent surveys (44.4% positive, 52.4% negative). What happened? Rhetoric and tactics; that’s what happened. That’s what’s still happening.

The polling shows voters have soured on Trump’s immigration agenda, broadly speaking, because of the aggressive tactics wielded by the Department of Homeland Security. One example: American citizens who are Hispanic (and haven’t committed any crime, not that that should matter) have been forced to “ show their papers ” — in other words: produce proof of citizenship or risk arrest and detention by federal authorities. Another example: The constitutionally questionable and violently belligerent behavior of Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minneapolis, to say nothing of the shooting deaths of Twin Cities protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Then there’s the third leg of the stool: rhetoric.

Although the president belatedly called the Good and Pretti killings tragic and has now said so more than once, he continues to step on that message by denigrating these two dead Americans and subtly suggesting the shootings, though unfortunate, were understandable, if not justified. “He was not an angel, and she was not an angel,” Trump told NBC News in an interview. It’s this attitude that now has voters who supported the president’s immigration enforcement agenda reevaluating.

And to be clear: When Trump’s job approval ratings on immigration flip upside down in the course of a year, from plus-8 points in January of 2025 to negative-8 points today, that’s evidence of voters doing some major reevaluating.

Which is why it doesn’t really matter that, as Republicans point out, a majority of voters “ prefer Trump’s immigration policies over Biden’s.” Voters aren’t comparing Trump to Biden. The 2024 election is long since over. They’re judging the current president on his policy, his implementation and his rhetoric — and find him lacking on two out of three.

“A majority of Americans want to deport undocumented criminals, and they want to deport undocumented people who came here during the Biden years. But not if that means murdering American citizens; scenes that look like kidnappings, stories about children ripped away from parents; cars left running in the street as people are snatched away,” said Brian Rosenwald, a scholar in residence at the Partnership for Effective Public Administration and Leadership Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania. “The cost is too high and flips public opinion on the issue.”

Trump and the Republicans are hardly alone in failing to understand the importance of the three-legged leadership stool. Recall President Barack Obama saying all of the right things after Russia forcibly annexed Crimea in what amounted to the first phase of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, yet declining to provide Kyiv weapons and ammunition to guard against further aggression from Moscow. It’s an interesting case of a politician getting the rhetoric right but blowing the policy. (Guess who did greenlight U.S. weapons for Ukraine. Trump, during his first presidency.)

Republicans can soothe themselves all they want with issue polling that shows voters would choose Trump over Biden (and Harris) on a given policy, be it immigration, the economy or anything else. It’s unlikely to matter one whit unless they get Trump and his lieutenants in the administration to make necessary adjustments to tactics and rhetoric.

But Democrats beware, particularly those eyeing a 2028 White House bid: Getting the rhetoric right won’t trick voters into backing a candidate whose policies they find unacceptable or insufficient. Oh, and there’s no such thing as getting the tactics right if the policy is wrong.

David M. Drucker is a columnist covering politics and policy. He is also a senior writer for The Dispatch and the author of “In Trump’s Shadow: The Battle for 2024 and the Future of the GOP.”

Related Articles

Abby McCloskey: The Heritage Foundation sees the family crisis — but not the fix

Joe Palaggi: What ‘Star Trek’ understood about division — and why we keep falling for it

Nicholas Kristof: These 3 red states are the best hope in schooling

David French: A movie about America broke my heart

Elizabeth Shackelford: What history tells us about fighting the repression we are seeing here