Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood at the birthplace of Western Civilization in Athens, Greece, and delivered the kind of speech that makes conservatives proud and makes the guilt-ridden left reach for a fainting couch. With ancient ruins as his backdrop, Rubio told the world that the era of apologizing for American and Western greatness is over.
Rubio didn’t mince words about how the West got into this mess. “Over time, we in the West came to feel ashamed of the very things that made us exceptional,” he said. “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.” Nothing says “thriving civilization” like tearing down your own monuments and teaching your kids your country is the villain, which is exactly what progressives have been doing for decades.
He laid out exactly how that self-loathing played out in policy. “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,” Rubio said. In the process, we opened our borders, and outsourced our industry and allowed our militaries to wither and to decay.” Democrats really did run that playbook, and they called it progress. You can’t make it up.
Rubio explained that while the West was busy flagellating itself, its adversaries were not exactly sitting around feeling bad about their own success. “Others were all too happy to fill the vacuum that we left,” he said. “As the West’s confidence faltered, its adversaries and its rivals only grew more assertive, building up their own wealth and their own power in our stead.” Weakness invites predators. That’s not a bumper sticker, that’s history, and Rubio understands it better than anyone currently running a left-wing think tank in Washington.
He made clear the stakes couldn’t be higher. “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,” Rubio warned. We will either choose to act now, or lose the choice to act at all.” That’s the kind of clarity that used to be common in American foreign policy before it got replaced with strongly worded letters and United Nations press releases.
Then came the good part. “Under President Trump, the United States has made its choice,” Rubio declared, going on to describe Rubio’s defense of Western Civilization as choosing “the unapologetic pursuit of national power,” reindustrializing the economy, rebuilding the military, dominating future technologies, returning astronauts to the moon, and launching a new era of space exploration. That’s not a foreign policy speech. That’s a highlight reel.
This isn’t the first time Rubio has delivered a barn-burner. In a previous speech, he went after communism directly, calling it a vision of a world “without courage, without creativity, or ambition, a world without heroes or glory or great causes to strive towards” and, most importantly, “a world without God.” Somehow the left still thinks communism just hasn’t been tried correctly yet.
Rubio is expected to continue making the case for American strength on the world stage. And if Democrats want to keep running against pride, patriotism, and prosperity, they’re welcome to. It’s working out great for them so far.
