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“We live in a new era in geopolitics and it is going to require all of us to sort of re-examine what that looks like and what our role is going to be,” Marco Rubio, U.S. Secretary of State, said in Washington on February 13 before heading to attend the Munich Security Conference. “The old world is gone,” he said.
The old world Mr. Rubio referred to was one in which Western dominance prevailed unchallenged. On February 14, while addressing the conference, he hailed the colonial period as a phase of the West’s “expansion”.
“For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding — its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe,” he said, with no reference to the crimes and loot of colonialism. “But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, it was contracting. Europe was in ruins… The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world,” added Mr. Rubio, just a few months ahead of the 250th anniversary of the United States’ independence from Britain.
Also Read | Rubio strikes constructive tone but persists in U.S. criticism of European allies
‘Managed decline’
This “managed decline”, in Mr. Rubio’s views, was accelerated by two things. First, “waves of mass migration” to the West from the rest that “threatens the cohesion of our societies and the continuity of our culture and the future of our people”. Second, the West embraced “a dogmatic vision” of free trade, which benefited its adversaries who protected their economies and took control of critical supply chains.
In other words, Mr. Rubio was reiterating what U.S. Vice-President J.D. Vance said in Munich last year. The liberal, free trade, pro-immigration policies of Western democracies have accelerated the decline of the West, while America’s adversaries (read China) kept growing, altering the balance in the global order. The change in the balance of power led to the collapse of the old order. Mr. Rubio did not stop there.
The system of international cooperation and institutions “must be reformed” and “rebuilt”, he said. The U.N. could not resolve the war in Gaza, Mr. Rubio said, without mentioning the fact that both the Trump and Biden administrations had repeatedly vetoed resolutions in the U.N. Security Council that were critical of Israel. It was the American leadership “that freed captives from barbarians and brought about a fragile truce”, said Mr. Rubio, without touching upon Israel’s continued bombings in Gaza or its devastation of the enclave where at least 75,000 people, mostly women and children, were killed in two years. Mr. Rubio’s answer to the apparent inability of the U.N. in resolving global conflicts is American unilateralism.
He credited the Trump administration with bringing Russia and Ukraine to tables and “constraining” (not “obliterating” as Mr. Trump has claimed) the nuclear programme of “radical Shia clerics” of Iran. He also claimed that U.S. Special Forces brought Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s President, “to justice”, referring to the January 3 American attack of the South American country and the abduction of its president. In Mr. Rubio’s worldview, international law is an “abstraction”, unilateralism is effective leadership and sovereignty of weaker powers such as Iran and Venezuela, is non-existent and the rights of the Palestinians exist only on the fringes of the old world.
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Civilisational alliance
If Mr. Vance disparaged the European model of governance and defence, Mr. Rubio offered a window for Europe to join hands with America. “We are part of one civilization — Western civilization. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir,” he said in Munich.
But the new alliance, according to him, should be rooted in common civilisational heritage, rather than geopolitical commonalities. “We in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline. We do not seek to separate, but to revitalise an old friendship and renew the greatest civilization in human history,” he added. Mr. Rubio said America is “charting a path for a new century of prosperity”. And he wants Europe with the U.S. in this civilisation revitalisation mission. The crowd in Munich applauded when Mr. Rubio ended his speech.
Published – February 18, 2026 01:39 pm IST
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The world according to Marco Rubio
