“We Americans may come off as a little direct and urgent in our counsel,” Marco Rubio said in an apparent effort to calm the nerves of European leaders gathered at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof for the Munich Security Conference on Saturday. Everyone in the room likely knew what he was referring to: The year before, Vice-President J.D. Vance had used the same annual convening to deliver a shocking harangue against U.S. allies, including Sweden and the U.K., accusing them of censoring right-wing speech and oppressing Christians; at least one German diplomat, according to Le Monde, had been reduced to tears. Rubio came this year to make nice, and he called for renewed diplomacy between the U.S. and Europe by appealing to the “sacred inheritance” they supposedly share — “the deepest of bonds,” as he put it, “forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage.” In the wake of President Trump’s retreat from NATO and the Paris Agreement, this “reassuring” posture, as conference chairman Wolfgang Ischinger characterized it, earned Rubio a standing ovation.

But there was a catch — “mistakes” needed to be rectified first, Rubio said: “In a pursuit of a world without borders, we opened our doors to an unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people.” At the same time, he went on, countries across Europe “invested in massive welfare states at the cost of maintaining the ability to defend themselves” and now rely on the U.S. to deter threats posed by nuclear powers like Russia. These were familiar diagnoses — the MAGA right generally sees U.S. allies in Europe as hapless freeloaders — but what set Rubio apart was his proposal of a cure. In Rubio’s telling, the foundational sin afflicting the modern U.S. and Europe was their decision to surrender the pre-1945 era of empire expansion under the pretense “that our way of life is just one among many and that asks for permission before it acts.”

Rubio wants to revive imperialism. His call to arms in Munich was, at its core, a glowing reappraisal of the ugliest ramifications of decades of American and European primacy — a world divided into colonizers convinced of their own superiority and colonial subjects to be plundered by them. “We do not want our allies to be shackled by guilt and shame,” Rubio said. “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.”

It is a dynamic Rubio hopes will form the basis of U.S.-European relations moving forward — one the Trump administration is already modeling. Each of its signature foreign-policy accomplishments since Trump reassumed office, from the in-name-only cease-fire in Gaza to the ouster of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, doubles as a grim echo of the U.S. and Europe’s imperial heyday. Trump and his allies are openly plotting to transmute their investments in the Israeli military campaign responsible for the flattening of Gaza into a lucrative real-estate venture — $25 billion of gleaming skyscrapers built atop the remains of more than 70,000 Palestinians. The administration’s abduction of President Maduro likewise follows a tradition of U.S.-backed regime change justified on the basis of fighting socialism. Rubio has not even tried to hide the fact that the removal of Maduro was a pretense for taking control of the country’s oil, much as the CIA-backed coup against Jacobo Árbenz in 1954 was motivated by a desire to keep Guatemalan fruit plantations under U.S. corporate control.

So often these days, the disintegration of the Atlanticist status quo — in which the U.S. and its allies in Europe fancied themselves arbiters of the postwar economic and military order — is treated with nostalgic regret, and indeed, there are clear merits to a “rules-based” order devoted to preventing the exploitation of the weak by the strong. But as Rubio made clear in Munich, that is not the order the U.S. and Europe have actually presided over, nor do they appear to view such an order as nonnegotiable if it threatens their lofty perch.

Essential to keeping this vision alive are the racist myths that Rubio proffered. His speech in Munich was, if nothing else, a florid and dishonest celebration of Europe’s “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” — in contrast to the teeming hordes of migrants from many of those same continents, who now pose a supposedly “urgent threat to the fabric of our societies.” The fact that these western adventures required countless denizens of Africa, Asia, and Latin America to be slaughtered and otherwise robbed of their self-determination is apparently incidental to the “great and noble civilization” their annihilation permitted to flourish. In fact, it was efforts to liberate these people that, in Rubio’s assessment, are to blame for our modern-day doldrums. “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,” he lamented.

In the secretary’s telling, the west is not in decline today because it was built on a foundation of imperial plunder by which the vast majority of the world did not wish to be ruled. It is in decline because the U.S. and Europe became convinced that this legacy of plunder was something to be ashamed of and backed away from it.

And now, tragically for the prospects for the future of self-determination in the Global South, Rubio has ensconced himself as the ideological compass for repudiating this so-called shame. His speech in Munich and designs on toppling the socialist government of his family’s native Cuba, which is currently being choked by a U.S. oil blockade, suggest that abducting the president of Venezuela is only the beginning. “Cuba is ready to fall,” Trump gloated last month. But if resurrecting colonialism is to be the basis of a “new western century” in which the U.S. and Europe reign supreme over the world’s developing economies, it would also reaffirm the truly “sacred inheritance” (to borrow Rubio’s phrase) that fueled those very decolonization movements that arrested the last period of imperial ascendancy — the determination of the colonized to fight back.

© Daily Intelligencer