Rubio's Munich Address: A Full-Throated Defense of Western Empire
At the prestigious Munich Security Conference, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered what can only be described as a twenty-two minute ode to empire. The speech marked a dramatic departure from traditional diplomatic rhetoric, openly celebrating Western colonialism and territorial expansion before an audience of European political and security elites.
From MAGA to MEGA: Make Empire Great Again
Rubio, a longtime foreign policy hawk who has become one of the most influential voices in today's MAGA-dominated Republican Party, arrived in Munich fresh from the Trump administration's recent actions in Venezuela. His message to European governments was both novel and disturbing: empire is great, empire is back, and empire is fundamentally American.
In his prepared remarks, Rubio went far beyond the typical defense of US leadership or muscular foreign policy that has characterized previous administrations. Instead, he issued what amounted to a full-throated endorsement of imperialism at precisely the moment when the United States under President Donald Trump is openly engaging in territorial and extractive policies that most Western European governments have spent the last eight decades renouncing.
Historical Revisionism in Germany
Speaking in Germany of all places, Rubio delivered an encomium to five centuries of Western expansion. He praised "missionaries, pilgrims, soldiers, and explorers" who crossed oceans to "settle new continents and build vast empires extending across the globe." The secretary lamented what he called the "contracting" of great Western empires following World War II and decried "godless communist revolutions" and "anti-colonial uprisings" that have liberated approximately 750 million people across eighty former colonies since the United Nations' founding in 1945.
Perhaps most astonishing was the European response to these remarks. Rather than challenging Rubio's historical revisionism, the assembled elites gave him a standing ovation, as if he had announced a medical breakthrough rather than advocating for the literal return of empire. In doing so, they made themselves complicit in the Trump administration's rewriting of not just American history, but European and world history as well.
Convenient Historical Omissions
Rubio's speech conveniently ignored the devastating human costs of the empires he praised. European colonization of the Americas is estimated to have killed more than fifty million people, approximately ten percent of the world's population at the time, and even contributed to a period of global cooling. The British Raj in India may have caused one hundred million deaths within just forty years. The German and Spanish empires were responsible for genocides against the Herero, Nama, and Taino peoples respectively.
"We do not want our allies to be shackled by guilt and shame," Rubio told his Munich audience. "We want allies who are proud of their culture and heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization, and who, together with us, are willing and able to defend it."
The Gaslighting of Empire
The cognitive dissonance was striking. Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants whose grandfather was once deported from the United States, pushed far-right, white-nationalist talking points about "civilizational erasure." The former presidential candidate who once denounced Trump as a "con artist" and "lunatic" now urged European governments to support the belligerent US president. The former senator who spent years undermining the United Nations now chastised the UN for failing to prevent violence in Gaza.
Imagine the European reaction if the Chinese foreign minister had attacked the UN and "abstractions of international law," or if the Russian foreign minister had defended imperial pillage and plunder. Yet when Rubio finished his prepared remarks, which included boasts about illegally bombing targets in Iran and illegally abducting a Venezuelan official, more than half the Munich audience stood to applaud.
What Wasn't Said Speaks Volumes
Rubio's three-thousand-word address contained not one mention of Russia, China, or, perhaps most crucially for his European audience, Greenland. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen confirmed on the same day that Trump remains intent on acquiring Greenland, despite it being territory of Denmark, an EU member state and NATO ally.
"I think the desire from the US president is exactly the same," Frederiksen told reporters in Munich. "He's very serious about this." Astonishingly, Trump has refused to rule out military force against Denmark and has dismissed concerns about international borders and national sovereignty.
European Complicity in Imperial Ambitions
European officials stood and applauded a US official praising empire while serving an administration whose stated foreign policy goals include the imperial seizure of European territory. The Europeans in that audience may have told themselves they were applauding a return to stability and friendship with the United States. In reality, they offered a standing ovation for the return of something much uglier, bloodier, and more dangerous.
Despite Rubio's gentler tone and polished language, despite all his talk of transatlantic comity and unity, he was advocating for a geopolitics of vicious authoritarianism. Rubio may be good cop to Trump's bad, but their goal remains identical: to make empire great again. This time, that empire may not stop at Europe's own borders.
