Obama's Athens, 2016

Barack Obama visited Athens in mid-November 2016 on his last state visit as President. He celebrated democracy as a universal flame first lit in ancient Greece, arguing that the yearning for it burned in every…

“We've been told that these are Western ideals. We've been told that some cultures are not equipped for democratic governance and actually prefer authoritarian rule.”

Rubio's Athens, 2025

Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, went to Athens last week and gave a speech mentioning democracy just twice in almost thirty minutes. Standing on the Pnyx, he tub-thumped for the West instead.

Ancient Greece as Western birthright

Rubio declared ancient Greek city-states the birthplace of the greatest civilization in the world, a font of exceptional cultural legacy belonging to Europe and the United States, not many others.

Thymos and Western heroes

Rubio invoked the ancient idea of thymos, the fire of passion, strength, courage and pride that gives life to a civilization. He placed Greek hoplites at Thermopylae alongside Christian martyrs and Texans at the Alamo.

Western values are not universal

Rubio argued that heroism, honor and duty are distinctly Western characteristics under threat from those who made nationalism a dirty word and taught children to be ashamed of their countries.

“We assume that these somehow are universal to all people in all times and in all places. They are not.”

Europe's civilizational crisis

Rubio warned that European nations, gripped by mass migration and the torpor of liberalism, faced a civilizational inflection point and had to awaken from their long slumber to maintain the West's place at the head…

Breaking with neoconservatism

Rubio no longer has time for the neoconservative internationalism of John McCain or George W. Bush. He walks a path paved by conservatives like James Burnham and Pat Buchanan, who warned of the West's decline.

The West as historical concept

The West itself is a nebulous concept absent from ancient Greek and Roman thinkers. It entered political parlance in the nineteenth century as Europeans created distance from Russians while gesturing to Atlantic bonds.

Rubio's West: conquest and power

Rubio's West is populated by muscular explorers and conquerors from Alexander the Great to Hernán Cortés and American frontiersmen. He shows no interest in Athenian civic institutions that appealed to the Founding Fathers.

The West defined by enemies

In Rubio's narrative, the West is defined by whom it does not encompass: tyrannical Persians who tried to absorb Greece's city-states and their modern descendants in Iran, described as radical mullahs propagating a cult of…

Scholars see imperial justification

Paul Betts, a professor of modern European history at the University of Oxford, said Rubio seemed to instrumentalize Athens as a justification for adventurism, national power and even imperial expansion.

Fascism's intellectual foundations

Tom Malinowski, a former U.S. diplomat and congressman, was more blunt about Rubio's speech. He said the text belongs on the syllabus of every class on the intellectual foundations of fascism.

A soft launch for 2028

For those following the Washington horse race, Rubio's speech was seen as a soft launch for a potential Presidential challenge in 2028, a statement to the MAGA base that he can carry Trump's banner.

“We choose the unapologetic pursuit of national power.”

Trump's contradictions on Russia

The Trump Administration bullied countries not to purchase Russian oil and slapped tariffs on some that did.

Civilizationism as global trend

Rubio's speech is part of a wider phenomenon scholars call civilizationism, in which great powers engage as civilization-states marked by distinct cultural identities.

Civilizationism replaces universalism

Hans Kundnani, a visiting professor at the European Institute of the London School of Economics, argues that civilizationism reflects a retreat from universalist ideas.

“There's a blurring of the distinction between democracies and authoritarian states.”

Blood and soil identity politics

Leonard A. Schuette, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, noted that the new right's idea of civilization is not based on shared principles like constitutional democracy but on geographic territory, shared ancestry…

Civilization rhetoric rings hollow

Civilization is a favorite word of politicians more committed to supremacy than democracy. But as a rallying cry of the American right, it rings more hollow given the brutalization of migrants and protesters and repeated…