Marco Rubio’s Earnest, Flawed Defense of the West

S ecretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking on Wednesday in Athens, Greece, delivered perhaps the most robust defense of Western civilization since Ronald Reagan’s 1982 Westminster speech, during the throes of the Cold War. In explaining America’s political and cultural debt to ancient Greece, however, Rubio overlooked the tragedy of Athenian democracy — its descent into hubris and tyrannical rule — to support a narrative of political power unrestrained by moral principle.

“We choose the unapologetic pursuit of national power,” Rubio told his audience. Toward what end? Remarkably, the ultimate purpose of American national power was never explained.

Rubio (and his speechwriter) deserve much credit for reminding Americans that the history of the United States “is covered with the fingerprints of antiquity.” He is right to criticize those who belittle the achievements of our civilization. Our debt to ancient Greece is real and profound: the emphasis on reason, on the individual, on self-government. Rubio is not far off the mark to praise Greek philosophy as “the foundation of the Western mind.”

Nevertheless, Rubio’s narrative is hobbled by both historical and conceptual errors that create, at best, a misleading (and MAGA-friendly) account of the American story.

“Here, in Athens,” Rubio said, “we found the first full realization of all the essential traits that would come to define the West.” They include “fierce individuality,” “relentless ambition,” “daring exploration,” and “a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory.” Here is a secular account of Western civilization that might have come from the pen of Voltaire on the eve of the French Revolution.

Left off the list were the transformational concepts of the Jewish and Christian traditions: the biblical teachings about men and women bearing the image of God, about man’s alienation from the Creator, and about God’s redemptive vision for humankind. Without these beliefs, there would be no Western civilization.

There are also important factual errors in the speech: the claim that the Greeks offered us a model of republican government (Greek democracy was decidedly not a republic, a fact that terrified the American founders about the prospects of direct democracy); that “the Greeks gave us history itself” (the Jews were writing narrative history roughly a thousand years before Herodotus); or that the Greeks invented the idea that “there is a rational order to the cosmos” (the opening chapters of the book of Genesis in the Bible establish the rationality of God and his created order).

Given his audience in Athens, Rubio can be forgiven for failing to draw attention to the implosion of Greek democracy. It, of course, ended in the most brutal and protracted war of the classical world: a 25-year bloodbath between the Athenian empire and Sparta and its allies. In their two-volume defense of Western civilization, The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, co-authors Allen C. Guelzo and James Hankins underscore the moral damage resulting from Athenian self-interest, the appetite to dominate others, and the inordinate love of honor. As they summarize it: “The Greeks, so proud of their superiority over the Persians, had turned themselves into barbarians.”

The Greek historian Thucydides, the most reliable contemporary chronicler of the Peloponnesian War, was relentlessly honest about the catastrophe. Greeks committed atrocities against fellow Greeks; women and children were enslaved; prisoners were slaughtered; cannibalism occurred during the sieges. “Love of power operating through greed and through personal ambition,” he wrote, “was the cause of all these evils.”

Yet Rubio sidesteps this dreary history and comes very close to turning the vices of the ancient world into virtues. The architects of the Parthenon, representative of the Greek spirit, “held that the highest and most noble aspiration in life was to surpass all others” and to be engaged in “that constant struggle for distinction.”

The greatest of the Greek philosophers would take issue with this view of human flourishing. “Justice in the life and conduct of the State,” wrote Plato, “is possible only as it first resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens.” Aristotle, in his Politics, also viewed the character of a political society as dependent on the character of its citizens. “For man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all,” he wrote. And the aim of political life? “Justice is the bond of men in states, for the administration of justice, which is the determination of what is just, is the principle of order in political society.”

The concepts of virtue and justice, however, appear nowhere in Rubio’s account of the achievements of the West and of the American political order. There are references to “heroism, honor, duty,” but they are extracted from any moral or religious context. There is a nod to Christianity and “the empire of Christendom,” but no hint of the civilizing impact of the Christian gospel on the Greco-Roman world. Rubio thus praises Achilles for his “pursuit of eternal glory” but seems unaware that it was Achilles’s cruelty, uncontrolled rage, and ego — his hubris — that led to his undoing. Maybe the reason for Rubio’s silence about these vices is that they match too closely with those of the president he serves.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Rubio’s speech is the total lack of any democratic purpose to American foreign policy. Instead, the nation’s great aims are to “reindustrialize our economy,” “rebuild our factories,” and “fight for dominance of the technologies and industries of the future.” Again, the unanswered question recurs: toward what end?

In Reagan’s Westminster speech, he made the defense and promotion of democracy the moral lodestar of America’s engagement on the world stage. “So let us ask ourselves: What kind of people do we think we are?” Reagan said. “And let us answer: free people, worthy of freedom, and determined not only to remain so but to help others gain their freedom as well.” On display was Reagan’s profound belief in American exceptionalism, the idea that America’s national interests must be framed — and constrained — by its democratic and religious ideals.

It was this belief, rooted not in Greek philosophy but in the Judeo-Christian moral tradition, that helped the United States to defeat imperialistic Japan and Nazi Germany in the Second World War; create the Nuremberg Trials to bring to justice the Nazis for their human rights atrocities; launch the Berlin Airlift to rescue West Germany from Soviet tyranny; design the Marshall Plan to provide an economic lifeline to Western Europe; and support the democratic Solidarity movement in Poland, which set off a series of democratic revolutions that ultimately brought down the Soviet Union.

These facts seem to be lost on the Trump administration. Rubio’s answer to Reagan’s question — “What kind of people do we think we are?” — will do little to restore America’s self-identity as an indispensable defender of human freedom. Quite the opposite. The “moral imagination” of America and the West, as described by the secretary of state, lacks the moral ballast of biblical religion: the true source of both American greatness and national renewal.

Without it, American exceptionalism — like Greek exceptionalism — will lie buried under the ruins of a once-great civilization.