“We are living in a new era in geopolitics and we all need to re-examine what that looks like and what our role is going to be,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in Washington on February 13 before attending the Munich Security Conference. “The old world is gone,” he said.
The old world Western hegemony to which Mr. Rubio referred went unchallenged. On February 14, addressing the conference, he described the colonial period as a phase of the “expansion” of the West.
“For five centuries, before the end of World War II, the West was expanding – its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers from its shores to cross the seas, to establish new continents, to build vast empires that stretched across the globe,” he said, not to mention colonial crimes and plunder. “But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, it contracted. Europe was in shambles… the great Western empires were entering a final collapse, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and world-changing anti-colonial insurgencies,” Mr. Rubio said.
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‘Managed decline’
Mr. This “managed decline” in Rubio’s views has been accelerated by two things. First, “waves of mass migration” from the rest of the region to the West “threaten the unity of our societies and the continuity of our culture and the future of our people”. Second, the West adopted a “dogmatic vision” of free trade that benefited its adversaries, who protected their economies and controlled critical supply chains.
In other words, what US Vice President JD Vance said in Munich last year, Mr. Rubio reiterated. The liberal, free trade, pro-immigration policies of Western democracies have accelerated the decline of the West, while America’s adversaries (read China) continue to rise, shifting the balance of the world order. A shift in the balance of power led to the collapse of the old order. Mr. Rubio didn’t stop there.
He said the system of international cooperation and institutions must be “reformed” and “rebuilt”. The UN cannot resolve the war in Gaza, Mr. Rubio said, without referring to resolutions that the Trump and Biden administrations have repeatedly vetoed in the UN Security Council that criticize Israel. It was American leadership that “freed the hostages from the barbarians and brought about a fragile truce,” Mr. Rubio said, without touching on Israel’s continued bombardment of Gaza or the destruction of the enclave that has killed at least 75,000 people, mostly women and children, in two years. Mr. The apparent inability of the UN to resolve global conflicts. Rubio’s answer is American unilateralism.
He credited the Trump administration with bringing Russia and Ukraine to the table and “restraining” (not “eliminating,” as Mr. Trump claimed) Iran’s “radical Shiite clerics” nuclear program. He also noted that US special forces had brought Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro “to justice”, referring to the January 3 US attack on the South American country and the kidnapping of its president. Mr. In Rubio’s worldview, international law is an “abstraction,” authoritarianism is the effective leadership and sovereignty of weak powers like Iran and Venezuela, which does not exist, and Palestinian rights exist only on the fringes of the old world.
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Alliance of Civilizations
While Mr. Vance insulted the European governance and defense model, Mr. Rubio offered Europe a window to join hands with America. “We are part of one civilization – Western civilization. We are bound to each other by the deep bonds that nations can share with centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for a common civilization,” he said in Munich.
But the new alliance, according to him, should be rooted in common civilizational heritage rather than geopolitical similarities. “We in America are not interested in being polite and orderly guardians of the West’s managed decline. We do not want to break up, but to restore old friendships and restore the greatest civilization in human history,” he added. Mr Rubio said America was “paving a path to a new century of prosperity”. And he wants Europe to join the US in this civilizational revival mission. The crowd in Munich erupted in applause as Mr. Rubio concluded his speech.
