Marco Rubio’s Athens speech presented American global dominance as the noble defence of Western civilization, but behind the historical scenery lies a cruder political order — restore Western supremacy and make Europe follow Washington.
But remove the theatrical scenery and the message becomes remarkably crude. Rubio declared that the West must maintain its place “at the head of the world” and celebrated the “unapologetic pursuit of national power” under Donald Trump. This was not principally a philosophical reflection on civilization, history or shared values. It was a political argument for restoring American-led Western dominance.
The irony is that Rubio appears to believe that dressing an imperial ambition in the language of civilization makes it intellectually sophisticated. It does not. His speech revived an old geopolitical strategy: portray the interests of a dominant power as the universal interests of an entire civilization, then present resistance to that dominance as a threat to its culture, values and historical survival.
The question is not whether Western societies possess important intellectual, scientific and cultural traditions. Of course, they do. The question is why these achievements should entitle Washington to lead the world indefinitely—and why other societies should accept a subordinate position.
The Imperial Ambition Behind the Civilizational Rhetoric
Rubio’s speech belongs to a familiar tradition of geopolitical thinking associated with Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations, although he had academic sophistication in his arguments – Rubio, none. In the post-Cold War era, Huntington argued that cultural and civilizational identities would become major sources of international conflict. The Trump administration is reviving this framework, presenting Western Christendom as a political bloc threatened by China, Russia and the Muslim world.
Yet, Rubio’s own language exposes the real objective. He warned that the West risked losing its position at the head of the world and called for renewed national power. The concern is not simply that Western traditions might disappear. It is that Western governments – Rubio has above all the United States in mind — might lose their ability to determine international outcomes.
There is a considerable difference between defending cultural heritage and defending geopolitical supremacy. The former is a legitimate objective for any society. The latter is a claim to power that other countries have every right to challenge.
China’s economic and technological rise, Russia’s resistance to Western strategic pressure, and the growing international ambitions of countries such as India, Pakistan, Turkey, Iran, Brazil, South Africa, and Indonesia reflect a world in which power is distributed less exclusively than before. These developments do not automatically constitute an assault on Western civilization. They challenge the assumption that Washington and its allies should remain the principal architects of the international order.
Rubio’s civilizational narrative turns that challenge into an existential struggle, bringing in Christianity to justify a supposedly moral superiority of the West. Economic competition, disputes over resources, access to markets and technological rivalry become secondary to an alleged confrontation between fundamentally different civilizations. Such framing is politically convenient: it makes compromise look like weakness and strategic competition look like a moral crusade.
The pretended sophistication is largely theatrical. Under it lies a blunt proposition: the West should dominate because it is the West and Christian.
Ancient Greece Was Not Born Christian
The historical foundations of Rubio’s argument are deeply problematic. In Athens, he traced European Christendom back to Ancient Greece, presenting Greek philosophy, science and religion as foundations that ultimately gave rise to Christian civilization.
But Ancient Greece was polytheistic, not Christian. Its intellectual traditions developed centuries before Christianity emerged. Greek philosophy subsequently influenced Christian theology through the tradition kept by the Muslims, but intellectual influence is not the same as civilizational identity. To collapse these distinct historical periods into a single Christian Western tradition is to replace history with mythology.
Rubio’s treatment of science reveals another contradiction. He celebrated the achievements of Galileo, Copernicus and Newton as expressions of the Western intellectual inheritance while presenting Christianity as a central source of scientific progress. However, Galileo was tried by the Roman Inquisition in 1633 and forced to deny his support for heliocentrism. The history of science includes profound contributions from religious thinkers, but it also includes conflicts between scientific inquiry and religious authority. A serious historical account must acknowledge both.
Civilisation Did Not Begin and End in the West
During Galileo’s lifetime (1564–1642) there was a continuation of intellectual and scientific work in the Muslim world, China preserved a highly developed system of bureaucratic administration, and the Mughal Empire in the Indian subcontinent established refined structures of imperial administration. India’s intellectual traditions go back much further: Kautilya’s Arthashastra, an influential treatise on statecraft, diplomacy, economics and the organisation of government, is part of the political thought tradition which flourished in ancient India long before Galileo was born.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the Aztec Empire had built a powerful state centred on Tenochtitlan (today’s Mexico City), a major urban centre with extensive markets, organised government and impressive infrastructure. When Hernán Cortés arrived in 1519, he did not step onto a continent that had no civilization – according to Rubio; instead, he entered a world which already had established societies, political institutions and cultural achievements. The Spanish conquest, which was achieved through warfare, partnerships with Indigenous peoples and the siege of Tenochtitlan in 1521, led to the establishment of a colonial system; it was not an attempt to bring civilisation to an uncivilised world.
What we should not do is to idealise these societies or overlook the conflicts, inequalities and conquests that existed within them. Instead, we must oppose the historical view that presents the expansion of Europe as automatically amounting to the spread of civilisation while ignoring or downplaying the achievements of other societies. When Rubio refers in Athens to Cortés as a carrier of civilisation, the question that arises is: whose civilisation is it, and at what cost to whom?
The omissions extend beyond Europe. During the Islamic Golden Age, scholars working in Arabic helped preserve, translate, develop and transmit important works of ancient Greek philosophy and science. Muslim intellectual traditions contributed to mathematics, astronomy, medicine and philosophy. In any case, the history of European intellectual development cannot be understood without these Muslim contributions.
None of this diminishes the achievements of Ancient Greece, Christian thinkers or European science. It simply rejects the childish notion that Rubio wanted to pass on that one civilization independently generated the intellectual achievements of the whole of humanity.
Rubio’s narrative needs a seamless inheritance from Athens to Christian Europe to modern America because that lineage gives Washington a prestigious historical pedigree. But civilizations are not genealogical certificates granting permanent rights to global leadership. They develop through exchange, conflict, borrowing and reinvention. Anyone serious about history should know better.
Heroes for Us, Barbarians for Them
The most revealing contradiction in Rubio’s speech is its double standard on conquest.
He praised the imperial ambitions of Alexander the Great and celebrated European expansion through figures including Christopher Columbus and Hernán Cortés. He presented the colonisation of the Americas as an expression of exploration, ambition and the expansion of Western civilization. The lands conquered by Europeans became an “open and wild land” awaiting transformation.
What happened to the peoples who already lived there? Their societies, political institutions, knowledge systems and cultures largely disappear from this heroic narrative. So do the violence, dispossession, human slaughter and destruction that accompanied European conquest. The historical experience of Indigenous peoples becomes an inconvenient detail in a story about Western greatness.
Now consider Rubio’s account of the Persian invasion of Greece. The campaigns of Xerxes are presented as aggression against the foundations of Western civilization to justify present day American-Israeli war against Iran. Persian imperial expansion is condemned, while the imperial expansion of Alexander, European conquistadors and their successors becomes an admirable expression of historical ambition.
Why should conquest acquire a different moral meaning depending on who conducts it?
The same question applies to contemporary geopolitics. Rubio’s language portrays Iran as a civilizational threat while placing Western power within a narrative of historical defence. But no government acquires moral immunity by invoking Christianity, democracy or a supposedly superior civilization. The legitimacy of military action must be judged by its circumstances, conduct and consequences—not by the identity of the power undertaking it.
The point is not that every empire or historical conflict is identical. It is that the standards used to evaluate them should not change according to geopolitical convenience.
This is precisely where the civilizational narrative becomes propaganda. Western conquest is transformed into historical achievement; non-Western resistance is portrayed as barbarism. The result is not a serious account of history, but a hierarchy of moral legitimacy explicitly constructed to excuse the powerful.
Europe’s Choice: Intellectual Honesty or American Vassalage?
Rubio’s speech in Athens is directed not only at America’s rivals but above all at Europe. Washington wants European governments to renew their commitment to a common Western bloc, increase military spending and support a more confrontational international posture. European countries are constantly warned (by Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance and Donald Trump) that immigration, particularly Muslim immigration, threatens their civilizational identity.
The implication is unmistakable: Europe must defend a narrowly defined vision of Western civilization while aligning itself more closely with American strategic priorities.
This is where the narrative becomes especially contradictory. Latin America is geographically part of the Western Hemisphere, and Christianity is deeply rooted across the region, yet Latin American societies are not placed within the political concept of the West. Their exclusion exposes the limits of the claim that the West is simply a cultural or religious community, but above all a political category, shaped by power and strategic alignment.
Rubio’s emphasis on his European ancestry, rather than the broader complexity of his Cuban-Latin American background, reinforces the symbolic appeal of a transatlantic identity. But ancestry cannot settle the question of who belongs to a civilization. Nor should European governments accept a definition of their identity that makes loyalty to Washington the ultimate test of belonging.
Europe should also be wary of the consequences of this political script. If defending civilization becomes synonymous with permanent confrontation, escalating military expenditure and hostility towards entire populations, the result may be greater insecurity rather than greater strength. A Europe that simply repeats Washington’s rhetoric risks surrendering its capacity for independent strategic judgment.
The irony is that Europe’s own history should make it particularly suspicious of grand narratives that sanctify power. European empires justified conquest and slaughter of indigenous populations in the language of religion, progress and civilization. The twentieth century then witnessed European powers devastating one another in two world wars. The idea of a unified West with an unbroken historical mission is not an eternal truth; it is a political construction that has served different purposes at different times.
Rubio is now attempting to mobilise that narrative for a new era of strategic rivalry. The language has changed, but the hierarchy remains: Washington leads, Europe follows, and the rest of the world is expected to accept the arrangement.
The answer is not to replace Western chauvinism with an equally simplistic celebration of other civilizations. It is to reject the premise that international order should be organised around civilizational superiority in the first place.
The world does not need another crusade dressed up as philosophy. It needs international relations grounded in sovereignty, historical honesty, mutual respect and the recognition that no country possesses a permanent entitlement to supremacy.
In sum, Rubio’s speech in Athens was presented as a defence of Western civilization. Its most revealing feature was its insistence that the West must remain at the head of the world. That is not a defence of civilization. It is a defence of hierarchy—and no amount of historical theatre can make the distinction disappear.
Ricardo Martins – Doctor of Sociology, specialist in European and international politics as well as geopolitics
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