U.S. Secretary of State/National Security Advisor Marco Rubio delivered a culturally confused address to the Munich Security Conference today that while posing as a defense of Western Civilization, was really a call for the continued domination of the dying, decaying system of European colonialism. It was the European continent “that produced the genius of Mozart and Beethoven, of Dante and Shakespeare, of Michelangelo and Da Vinci, of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones,” Rubio said. “And this is the place where the vaulted ceilings of the Sistine Chapel and the towering spires of the great cathedral in Cologne, they testify not just to the greatness of our past or to a faith in God that inspired these marvels.”
Rubio complained of the deindustrialization of the trans-Atlantic economies without once mentioning the cancer of financial speculation which is only growing larger under the reign of Dnald Trump.
At the center of Rubio’s speech was the nightmare of the Hobbesian might makes right ideology. “For example, the United Nations still has tremendous potential to be a tool for good in the world,” he said. “But we cannot ignore that today, on the most pressing matters before us, it has no answers and has played virtually no role. It could not solve the war in Gaza. Instead, it was American leadership that freed captives from barbarians and brought about a fragile truce. It had not solved the war in Ukraine. It took American leadership and partnership with many of the countries here today just to bring the two sides to the table in search of a still-elusive peace.” American sabotage of the UN Security Council in these cases doesn’t rate a mention in Rubio’s remarks.
Furthemore, “It was powerless to constrain the nuclear program of radical Shia clerics in Tehran. That required 14 bombs dropped with precision from American B-2 bombers. And it was unable to address the threat to our security from a narcoterrorist dictator in Venezuela. Instead, it took American Special Forces to bring this fugitive to justice.”
Then came his defense of 500 years of colonialism. “For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding—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,” he said, not including slave traders, the opium trade, the vast looting of wealth and other crimes of the imperialists.
“But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, it was contracting. Europe was in ruins. Half of it lived behind an Iron Curtain and the rest looked like it would soon follow. The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come.”
What the U.S. wants instead is an alliance “ready to defend our people, to safeguard our interests, and to preserve the freedom of action that allows us to shape our own destiny—not one that exists to operate a global welfare state and atone for the purported sins of past generations. An alliance that does not allow its power to be outsourced, constrained, or subordinated to systems beyond its control; one that does not depend on others for the critical necessities of its national life; and one that does not maintain the polite pretense that our way of life is just one among many and that asks for permission before it acts. And above all, an alliance based on the recognition that we, the West, have inherited together—what we have inherited together is something that is unique and distinctive and irreplaceable, because this, after all, is the very foundation of the transatlantic bond.”
