When one of my acquaintances expressed his enthusiasm for Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s October 7 speech from the Acropolis in Athens, Greece—seeing it as the de facto launching of a presidential campaign—I thought to watch the talk in its entirety.
It was worth the viewing, if only for the craftsmanship involved. It was set in the golden hour, with the Parthenon beautifully framed behind Rubio, bathed in the soft light of the setting sun.
It was as well written as it was visually staged, although it had none of the eloquence of a Ronald Reagan address. (“These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.”) Soaring oratory like that is generally the joint effort of the speaker and the speechwriter, and while Rubio is a capable extemporaneous speaker, he doesn’t have the Gipper’s oratorical gifts.
In my friend’s view it was a defense of Western civilization, which we agree can stand some defending, especially while it is burning in France. The speech’s emphasis on the civilizational virtues of strength, duty, and ambition was designed to give it a Teddy Roosevelt flavor, as though Rubio wished to dawn the pince-nez of that robust imperialist. But qualities like ambition are themselves neutral. They are subject to human intention and can be put to uses fair or foul. Ambition to learn or create can be laudatory, but ambition to conquer others is another matter. As imperialist polemics do, it revealed the speaker’s psychological blind spots. The irony is rich that on the very day that Rubio invoked Iran’s “cult of death,” his cabinet co-equal at the Pentagon announced that a forthcoming execution would be livestreamed for public consumption.
Rubio neglected to account for President Donald Trump’s continuous death-wielding threats of Iranian annihilation: “A whole civilization will die tonight”; “You’ll be living in Hell”; “Back to the stone ages where they belong.”
In September at the United Nations, Trump said that if Iran doesn’t accede to a deal, “they won’t exist any longer.” The man can’t help himself. He is the consummate deal breaker himself, most notably the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear agreement as well as his own June 17 ceasefire’s Memorandum of Understanding. Within days of signing that ceasefire, Trump was back to threatening an invasion, despite the agreement’s no-threats clause.
“Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival?” he pondered. It all sounds like a death cult centered in Washington, but as happens so often among warmongers, Rubio’s projection of these shadow outbursts onto the adversary wins the day.
What was missing, the dog that didn’t bark, made Rubio’s speech something that only a neocon could love. The throughline was all about war, about risk and glory, the pursuit of national power, and skyrocketing war spending. Yet conspicuously absent was the centrality of the individual and the evolving preeminence of freedom in the flowering of Western Civilization. No speech can cover everything, but in a narrative that stretched from Athens through Rome and from Christendom to America, there was only a paltry reference to the “English genius for liberty” (now, alas, mostly forgotten there), and something about “fierce individuality.”
The liberal tradition that is central to Western civilization sees the individual as the bearer of rights, the locus in which conscience manifests itself. It is in the individual that freedom is experienced. Yet these jewels in the crown of Western civilization were crowded out by the speech’s undisguised imperial core: national power, relentless ambition, adventure, risk and glory, skyrocketing defense spending, historic defense commitments.
Nor did the sweep of his survey acknowledge that the failure of the West’s will to survive is an inevitable and sorrowful compensation for the vitality drained by its imperial overextension.
The overstretch syndrome to which late-stage empires fall prey reads challenges on every front—cultural dynamism, intellectual achievement, economic competition—as military challenges. Thus they summon military solutions that further drain them of their financial vitality, hastening their decline.
The conquerors that Rubio celebrates—Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and Cortes—all demand examination through the lens of imperial overstretch.
“Where others looked inward, the Greeks were the first to direct their focus outward,” Rubio continued. It’s hard to know exactly what he means. For all their remarkable achievements, the Greeks borrowed geometry and astronomy from those who went before, while Herodotus tells us that the Phoenicians circumnavigated Africa. Surely these required outward focus. As for the venture inward, the maxim “Know thyself” was central to the Greek ethos when the Parthenon was built. It meant a profound philosophical self-knowledge that was entirely inwardly directed. Its twin maxim was “Nothing in excess”; moderation is all things. Rubio missed that too, as he was busy gushing about “the unapologetic pursuit of national power” and the West’s place as “the head of the world.”
Although Rubio noted that the Parthenon in the background had been raised by Pericles, he failed to mention that even Pericles warned the Athenian empire to avoid new conquests.
If only Rubio had made a similar objection before Donald Trump attacked Iran. But that is not to be expected from one who has championed every neoconservative regime change and elective war from Iraq and Afghanistan to Libya and Syria. None of which did Western civilization any favors.
In a May 2014 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Rubio urged the creation of a currency board that would prop up or guarantee the market value of the hryvnia, Ukraine’s failing currency. Rubio explained that Americans must extend to Ukrainians the benefits of having “a trustworthy sovereign currency.” Such machinations routinely depend American taxpayers as guarantors, often laundered through the IMF, while the unseen beneficiaries are funds managers and banks sitting on huge losses from their foolish investments in the kleptocracy’s bonds. Rubio’s plan, proposed shortly after the toppling of President Viktor Yanukovych, would have drawn Washington ever deeper into Ukraine’s affairs, which was undoubtedly intended. Rubio inevitably voted for the $40 billion Ukraine aid package in 2022, a windfall for U.S. arms merchants and which provided a variety of mechanisms for new arms purchases.
Then Rubio was on to Venezuela. CNBC headlined the financial outcome this way: “Venezuela bond bets pay off as Maduro’s overthrow brings 30% gain.” Long-time Rubio backer Paul Singer’s Elliot Management is described by Fortune magazine as one of “big winners” in the toppling of Nicolás Maduro.
Now Rubio has his eye on Cuba.
Just last month Trump upgraded Rubio from interim to permanent National Security Advisor, along with his existing portfolio as Secretary of State. Before him only Henry Kissinger held both positions simultaneously.
It all makes Marco Rubio someone to watch.
Warily.
