Marco Rubio’s recent speech at the Munich Security Conference (telling Europeans that the US and Europe “belong together”) triggered immediate controversy, especially on social media platforms. While many commentators have been denouncing it, several European officials reportedly offered a standing ovation.

Social media commentators aside, Western specialists however did not pay much attention to the deeper implication of the US Secretary of State’s rhetoric: an enthusiastic defense of colonialism and an implicit call to recolonize the Global South. Albeit underreported, this may be the most consequential aspect of the address.

Rubio’s speech, delivered on February 14, framed world politics as a kind of civilizational struggle. He praised five centuries of Western expansion, lauding those who settled “new continents” and built “vast empires extending out across the globe.”

Tellingly, he then portrayed decolonization as a tragedy, accelerated by “godless communist revolutions” and anti-colonial uprisings that, according to him (in a very Cold War-like tone), spread the “red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map”.

For Rubio, the West’s decline was imposed, and it must now be reversed to “renew the greatest civilization in human history.” This blunt nostalgia for empire was applauded in the hall, the audience being overwhelmingly Western (with a few Global South representatives present).

The speech in fact echoed earlier interventions, as........

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