Marco Rubio Marks the Path to a Western Revival

Listening to Marco Rubio’s speech in Athens, I felt as if I was hearing something out of another era of politics. The remarks of the secretary of state were stirring. They were morally and intellectual serious.

Secretary Rubio observed: “The men who made the Parthenon, they built upwards.” Rubio’s rhetoric built upwards as well — calling America and Europe to aspire to be the best versions of themselves.

Rubio gave the speech last Wednesday as part of a diplomatic tour through Europe. He reminded us of the debt the West owes to Athens:

Here, in Athens, we found the first full realization of all the essential traits that would come to define the West: fierce individuality and relentless ambition; daring exploration and invention; a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory. An insatiable curiosity about the world and the principles by which it operates, a hunger to know the mysteries of nature and grasp the secrets of the cosmos. An impatience with the notion of impossibility, chafing at all boundaries and limits, straining to peer into the depths of the unknown.

Rubio argued that the ancient Greeks gave the West the confidence that the unknown could become known. And that confidence “gave birth to a civilization marked not just by a common culture.” He continued:

It was marked by a common anthropology — a common view of man and his place in the universe. Its descendants would share not just the idea of a natural order, but a distinctive understanding of virtue; of destiny and fate; of truth, goodness, and beauty; of a code that dictates how men ought to live; of objective standards and ideals to strive towards.

For the Greeks of antiquity, the pursuit of excellence was the very principle of man’s existence. They organized all of civic life around contest, ambition, competition: in philosophy and poetry, in sculpture and drama, in athletics and art, in war and statecraft. The classical Greek city was an arena for great men to test and prove themselves, to hone their potential through perpetual struggle — to be the best, the strongest, the most beautiful, straining to inch ever closer to perfection.

Secretary Rubio marks the path to a Western revival https://t.co/MosGL7Olh1

— Michael R. Strain (@MichaelRStrain) October 11, 2026

Rubio moved on to diagnose some of the problems facing the West:

Now I know that to modern ears, what I just described, this way of life, may sound odd; it may even sound cruel. 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.

And:

Over time, we in the West came to feel ashamed of the very things that made us exceptional. 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.

The secretary of state asserted that the West is at a “crossroads”:

Because the next decade and the decisions we make will write the story of the next century. The course we take will determine whether the West maintains its place at the head of the world or resigns itself to a future of atrophy and servitude and decline. We will either choose to act now or lose the choice to act at all.

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 super intelligence; 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.

Three observations from me. First, I agree completely with Noah Rothman, who wrote here last week: “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.”

Second, Rubio was right to encourage and to enlist Europe as a partner in any effort to revive the West: “We believe,” he said, “that Europe can awaken from its long slumber and rekindle the fire that was lit here millennia ago. There are already signs.” He argued: “We do not believe the transatlantic friendship should be zero sum.” And: “We want to win together. We must win together.”

Finally, while I don’t agree with every specific argument Rubio made, I do agree with his broader goals — and his articulation of those goals. At a time when Americans are thirsting for genuine political leadership, I am grateful to see Rubio providing it.

And I agree with the secretary of state that Americans should stop walking down the street staring at their shoes. We should look up, with pride in our achievements and confidence in our future. In his words:

We should be proud — that we should be intensely proud — of where we come from. We should marvel at what our forefathers carved out of this countryside. The story of our civilization is the greatest story ever known to man. And it began here, with the first men and women of the West. From them — from them — we can rediscover the virtues, the courage, and the strength to confront the dangers that we face in our time.