Secretary of State Marco Rubio went on a three-day tour of Europe this week. On Wednesday, he visited Athens, Greece. At sunset on the Pnyx, where Athenians once held their assemblies — largely regarded as the birthplace of democracy — and with the Parthenon in the background, Rubio made an eloquent plea to the West to stop apologizing for being great.
Rubio masterfully gave listeners a brief history lesson, starting with Athens as the inflection point for Western civilization. He said:
Here, in Athens, we found the first full realization of all the essential traits that would come to define the West: fierce individuality and relentless ambition; daring exploration and invention; a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory. An insatiable curiosity about the world and the principles by which it operates, a hunger to know the mysteries of nature and grasp the secrets of the cosmos. An impatience with the notion of impossibility, chafing at all boundaries and limits, straining to peer into the depths of the unknown.
That drive, that outward and upward push that is the inheritance of the West, is what made this civilization great. It brought us out of the Stone Age and ushered us into a world of curiosity. As Rubio put it:
It is not just the ambition to explore the unknown that we inherit from the Greeks; it is the conviction that the unknown can be known. The confidence that the world can be charted and measured and mapped and understood — and that there is a rational order to the cosmos, governed by certain fundamental laws, laws that men can observe and the mind can come to understand.
Rubio then argued that Europe has grown complacent about its cultural heritage, embracing the nonsense that Western culture is bad and that people should feel guilty and apologize for its greatness.
I know that to modern ears, what I just described, this way of life, may sound odd; it may even sound cruel. The ideal of many ideologies in our time has, frankly, become a world of perfect safety, devoid of risk or failure, with neither the glory of victory nor the shame of defeat. Too often these days, we build downwards. We design our standards to ensure no one will lose; we preoccupy ourselves more with the comfort of the worst than the potential of the best. We hold the most exceptional things among us hostage to the average, the ordinary, the mediocre.
The men who made the Parthenon, they built upwards. They held that the highest and most noble aspiration in life was to surpass all others, to strive to be the best in all things.
We have lost that thumos, Rubio pointed out — “the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride.” We have become a culture that is ruled by women’s values. The West is a victim of its own misplaced mothering and participation trophy mentality. It rests in the safety of known evils and doesn’t strive for the greatness of possibility or the possibility of greatness.
Under President Donald Trump, America has chosen differently. As Rubio stated, “We choose the unapologetic pursuit of national power: to take back control of our critical supply chains, to reindustrialize our economy, to rebuild our defense, to fight for dominance of the technologies and industries of the future.”
Most critically, Rubio asked Europe to wake up from its stupor, to fight while it still has a chance. “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,” he said. “We will either choose to act now or lose the choice to act at all.”
America wants an equal partnership with its European allies, not a welfare system in which the U.S. pays the lion’s share. It wants to see Europe address the barbarians that are marching on its cities. Here, we are battling those same barbarians: socialism and radical Islam. These ideologies are like vultures — they feast on a dying and decaying society and bring them to utter ruin. We want the Europeans to defend themselves, to not be afraid to reclaim their national identities.
Conflict will come. It’s already happening with socialists and Islamists controlling the streets of Paris. And recall Britain’s decades-long problem with immigrant rape gangs, and police letting an innocent young man bleed out in handcuffs while pampering his immigrant stabber/killer.
Rubio is absolutely right to push them to strive for something better, to be builders instead of hobos living in cultural ruins.
The Leftmedia outlet CBS News, of course, was quick to splash the “pursuit of national power” on its headline to insinuate that Rubio has ill intentions. But once you get into the meat of the article, even CBS couldn’t find much to criticize from his speech. It was that powerful and pointed. It was one for the history books.
