He cast Trump as reflecting the West’s once unapologetic belief in its own righteousness while managing to take the man out of it.
Much has been written about Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speech in Greece on Wednesday, but I want to highlight a few passages that stood out to me.
As I listened, Rubio’s remarks struck me as some of the most skillfully articulated justifications not just for the Trump administration’s worldview and its approach to governance but for how the Western world once conceived of itself.
The first passage pertains to the West’s crisis of civilizational insecurity:
The ideal of many ideologies in our time has, frankly, become a world of perfect safety, devoid of risk or failure, with neither the glory of victory nor the shame of defeat. Too often these days, we build downwards. We design our standards to ensure no one will lose; we preoccupy ourselves more with the comfort of the worst than the potential of the best. We hold the most exceptional things among us hostage to the average, the ordinary, the mediocre.
“Over time, we in the West came to feel ashamed of the very things that made us exceptional,” he said. He continued:
We felt embarrassed that our achievements set us apart from the rest of the world. Our prosperity somehow became a source of guilt. We no longer believed we deserved and had earned our greatness.
The word “nationalism” became a dirty word. And so we tore down our monuments; we condemned our own history. And in too many places, we taught our children to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit. In the process, we opened our borders and outsourced our industry, and allowed our militaries to wither and to decay.
And with every passing year, we seemed to outsource more of our sovereignty, transferring our decisions to global bureaucracies far beyond the reach of our control.
From there, the secretary itemized the forms that the Western guilt complex he’d outlined takes. By contrast, he added, the West’s enemies are not similarly guilt-ridden. They seek to fill the vacuum we leave as the West cedes its inheritance, built over centuries of industry and sacrifice, to the world abroad.
“We will either choose to act now or lose the choice to act at all,” Rubio continued. “Under President Trump, the United States has made its choice.”
We choose the unapologetic pursuit of national power: to take back control of our critical supply chains, to reindustrialize our economy, to rebuild our defense, to fight for dominance of the technologies and industries of the future.
We choose to reach for new frontiers: in advanced manufacturing and superintelligence; in drones, weapons, and warfare; in chips, minerals, cyber, and every other domain of human possibility. To unleash our energy, to rebuild our factories, to return our astronauts to the moon and launch a new age of exploration in space.
Many political observers have evaluated Rubio’s speech in a political context, speculating that the remarks presage a presidential bid. Who knows? More relevant in the near term is Rubio’s contribution to the enterprise he presently serves.
Few have more persuasively argued for the Trump administration’s approach to governance, and fewer have placed Trump within the continuum of Western political philosophy. He’s not an aberration, the subtext of Rubio’s speech unmistakably read. Rather, he reflects the West’s once unapologetic belief in its own righteousness and legitimacy.
Whether or not you (or, for that matter, Rubio himself) believe that is immaterial. The speech was a mission statement one can grapple with independently of Donald Trump’s manifest character defects and flights of fancy. Rubio took the man out of it. Instead, we’re left to wrestle with the ideas that animated the generations of Western strivers who came before us.
If for that alone, Rubio’s contribution to the discourse is more than welcome.