Rubio at the Acropolis: The West Is at a Crossroads, and America Will Not Manage Its Decline (Video)

Secretary of State Marco Rubio used the hillside above the Acropolis on Wednesday to tell Europe that the West is at an inflection point and that the Trump administration intends to reclaim what he called the classical understanding of politics and statecraft.

The speech was delivered from the Pnyx, the ancient assembly place overlooking the Parthenon, during a short trip that also included Iceland and Portugal. Rubio opened by tying the site to the American inheritance. “For thousands of years, the civilizations that built what stands behind me have captivated the imagination of the Western world,” he said. “The things we owe to this place as Americans — and as Westerners — are actually far, far deeper. What blossomed here in this place was the Western desire to uncover all that ignorance, darkness, and distance had kept hidden from the mind of man.”

He said Greece supplied the traits that later defined the West: individuality, ambition, exploration, and an impatience with the idea that anything is impossible. He then turned to what he said the West had done with that inheritance. “We opened our borders and outsourced our industry and allowed our militaries to wither and to decay,” he said. “The word nationalism became a dirty word. And so we tore down our monuments, we condemned our own history, and in too many places we taught our children to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit.”

The remedy he offered was older than the institutions he was criticizing. “For all their lofty ideals, the ancient Greeks were not naive,” he said. “They understood that nations have interests. They understood that statecraft requires prudence and diplomacy. But they also understood that it requires the ability to wield force with prudence when diplomacy fails.” Power, he said, is not only the means to defend yourself. “It requires the credibility that you are willing to use it.” That, he said, is “the classical understanding of politics and of statecraft that the Trump administration hopes to reclaim, reclaim not just for our country, but for the whole of our civilization.”

He told the audience Europe can “awaken from its long slumber and rekindle the fire that was lit here millennia ago.” National interests, he said, “did not vanish in the face of international institutions.” The task is to rebuild those institutions on the understanding that their purpose “is not to abolish the sovereignty of the nations that constitute them, but is to defend them,” and that nations “need not abandon their distinct identities in order to recognize their common interests.”

The stakes, in his telling, are the next century. “Today, we find ourselves at a crossroads,” he said. “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, servitude, and decline.” The next decade, he said, will write that story. “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.”

He closed the American line by pointing at the architecture. “Greece is literally carved into the architecture of our government,” he said, and noted that Philadelphia carries a Greek name.