The second-most powerful official in the US government, foreign-policy chief Marco Rubio, delivered a speech that openly praised colonialism, engaged in egregious erasures of history, and demanded a return to Western domination of the world.
Rubio asserted that the West must use military force to “maintain its place at the head of the world”.
The West is “the greatest civilization in the world”, he declared, emphasizing that it is a “civilization that we must fight to defend today with the same passion as our forefathers did”.
Rubio warned that “Western civilization” must “choose to act now or lose the choice to act at all”.
“Under President Trump, the United States has made its choice: We choose the unapologetic pursuit of national power”, he added.
Rubio is simultaneously serving as both the secretary of state, overseeing US foreign policy, and the national security advisor, crafting national-security policy. He is only the second person in US history to hold both roles at the same time, after notorious imperial strategist Henry Kissinger.
Rubio delivered his pro-colonialist diatribe in front of the Acropolis in Athens, the capital of Greece, on 7 October.
Marco Rubio erases Native Americans, praises European colonizers, claims North America was an “open and wild land”
The US secretary of state’s speech in Greece was a veritable paean to empire.
Marco Rubio proudly referred to the United States as a “continental empire”.
“The civilization of Athens and Rome transformed an infant seaboard republic into a continental empire”, he stated.
Rubio glorified the European conquistadores who violently colonized the Americas, specifically naming Hernán Cortés and Christopher Columbus.
At the same time, the US foreign-policy chief completely ignored the existence of Native Americans. He erased the American Holocaust of Indigenous peoples, which was by far the largest genocide in human history.
Rubio praised the “American frontier spirit”, claiming North America was an “open and wild land” when European settlers arrived and (through genocide and ethnic cleansing) transformed it into what he called a “great revival of Western imagination and ambition”.
Marco Rubio combines warmongering neoconservative foreign policy with MAGA’s Western chauvinism, white supremacy, and Christian nationalism
Marco Rubio is a lifelong neoconservative hawk. However, during Trump’s first administration, he began to cynically rebrand himself as a MAGA-compatible right-wing “populist”.
What Rubio has done is use MAGA’s racist-coded rhetoric about “defending Western civilization” (from Muslims and non-white peoples) in order to justify neoconservative foreign policy, including the war of aggression against Iran, steadfast support for Israeli colonialism, invasion of Venezuela, and bombing of fishermen in the Caribbean Sea.
He has effectively combined the warmongering neoconservative foreign policy of the old-school Republican Party with the MAGA GOP’s overt Western chauvinism, white supremacy, and Christian nationalism.
In his speech in Greece, Rubio glorified what he called “the empire of Christendom” and the colonialist “architects of European Christendom” who spread Christianity throughout the world (at the barrel of a gun).
At the same time, he demonized “the radical mullahs of Iran”, claiming they constitute a “cult of death”.
While he spoke in front of the Acropolis in Athens, Rubio lamented that Western global dominance has declined in recent decades, as Global South countries (namely China and Iran) have grown in influence.
He stated (all emphasis added):
[In recent decades] others were all too happy to fill the vacuum that we left – the vacuum left behind by our weakness. And as the West’s confidence faltered, its adversaries and its rivals only grew more assertive, building up their own wealth and their own power in our stead.
And now, today, we find ourselves at a crossroads. Because the next decade and the decisions we make will write the story of the next century. The course we take will determine whether the West maintains its place at the head of the world or resigns itself to a future of atrophy and servitude and decline. We will either choose to act now or lose the choice to act at all.
Under President Trump, the United States has made its choice: We choose the unapologetic pursuit of national power.
Marco Rubio praises European countries for re-militarizing
Rubio also praised European countries for pursuing rearmament and massively expanding their military budgets, in order to prepare for more war.
He declared:
We believe that Europe can awaken from its long slumber and rekindle the fire that was lit here millennia ago.
There are already signs.
Across this continent, we are witnessing what we hope will be the beginnings of a generational shift: skyrocketing defense spending, a flurry of new partnerships and programs, expanded manufacturing and production, following on the historic defense commitments made last year in The Hague.
Marco Rubio’s Fox News op-ed asserts the West “must fight”
Following his speech in Greece, Rubio published an op-ed at Fox News in which he regurgitated the same talking points.
“The West is at a crossroads”, Rubio wrote. “The decisions we make in the next decade will define the next century – and determine whether our civilization maintains its place at the head of the world, or resigns itself to a future of servitude and decline”.
He lamented that “too much of the West has come to feel ashamed of the very things that made us exceptional”.
While erasing the historical crimes of Western colonialism, Rubio complained that “we began to view our achievements as an embarrassment; our power and prosperity became a source of guilt”.
“The story of our civilization is the greatest story ever known to man. But we must fight to defend it”, he maintained.
In another speech, Marco Rubio called for the West to reverse decolonization
This is not the first time that Rubio has delivered explicitly pro-colonialist remarks like this.
At the 2026 Munich Security Conference this February, Rubio made very similar remarks, praising “the great Western empires” that “settle[d] new continents” as part of “the greatest civilization in human history”.
The US foreign-policy chief insisted that North America and Europe must unite to “build a new Western century”.
Rubio openly called on the West to reverse the decolonization of the Global South, which he portrayed as a nefarious communist plot.
In this previous speech, he said:
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.
But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, it was contracting. Europe was in ruins. Half of it lived behind an Iron Curtain and the rest looked like it would soon follow. The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come.
Against that backdrop, then, as now, many came to believe that the West’s age of dominance had come to an end and that our future was destined to be a faint and feeble echo of our past. But together, our predecessors recognized that decline was a choice, and it was a choice they refused to make. This is what we did together once before, and this is what President Trump and the United States want to do again now, together with you.
And this is why we do not want our allies to be weak, because that makes us weaker. We want allies who can defend themselves so that no adversary will ever be tempted to test our collective strength. This is why we do not want our allies to be shackled by guilt and shame. We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their 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.
And this is why we do not want allies to rationalize the broken status quo rather than reckon with what is necessary to fix it, for 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 revitalize an old friendship and renew the greatest civilization in human history. What we want is a reinvigorated alliance that recognizes that what has ailed our societies is not just a set of bad policies but a malaise of hopelessness and complacency. An alliance – the alliance that we want is one that is not paralyzed into inaction by fear – fear of climate change, fear of war, fear of technology. Instead, we want an alliance that boldly races into the future. And the only fear we have is the fear of the shame of not leaving our nations prouder, stronger, and wealthier for our children.
Why Marco Rubio and right-wing elites in Latin America love Western colonialism
Some people do not understand why Marco Rubio is so extremely pro-colonialist, given that he is technically of Cuban descent. But it is important to understand that Rubio does not see himself principally as Cuban.
In his speeches, Rubio constantly emphasizes that he is of European descent, tracing his heritage back to Spain and Italy.
In his October speech in Greece, Rubio proudly described himself as “a great-grandson of settlers who arrived in the new world from Spain”.
In his February remarks in Germany, Rubio mentioned his ancestors in Spain and Italy, stating:
And do you know that in the year that my country was founded, Lorenzo and Catalina Geroldi lived in Casale Monferrato in the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. And Jose and Manuela Reina lived in Sevilla, Spain. I don’t know what, if anything, they knew about the 13 colonies which had gained their independence from the British empire, but here’s what I am certain of: They could have never imagined that 250 years later, one of their direct descendants would be back here today on this continent as the chief diplomat of that infant nation. And yet here I am, reminded by my own story that both our histories and our fates will always be linked.
At the Munich Security Conference, Rubio also stressed, “for us Americans, our home may be in the Western Hemisphere, but we will always be a child of Europe”.
These remarks make it clear that he does not identify with the vast majority of Cubans and Latinos, who are of Indigenous and African descent.
Instead, Rubio sees his family as European settlers who temporarily lived in Cuba — as light-skinned elites who supported the right-wing US puppet dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista — before re-settling in Florida.
This, in fact, is exactly how many conservative elites in Latin America see themselves. This is a major reason why they so strongly support imperialism: In addition to the fact that they receive bribes, investments, and other economic benefits from large US corporations, they also culturally identify with the United States and Western Europe, not with the Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples of Latin America.
