Last month’s Western-civilization-themed address by Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference was timely in more ways than one. Rubio’s speech was at once a source of inspiration and an occasion for cynicism. Its themes are being tested now in the Persian Gulf and in our state legislatures, with the outcome uncertain and the fate of the West in the balance.

Rubio’s speech was a call for Western unity and revival in the face of challenges, not only from outside but also from what Rubio called our shared “delusion”: that national sovereignty and civilizational identity can be transcended in a borderless world — a world where international institutions rule, mass immigration poses no cultural challenge, a chastened West is merely one culture among many, and we are all “global citizens.” Against this fashionable globalist delusion, Rubio wants a revived pride in the West’s unique heritage to serve as a wellspring of joint European and American action in the international arena.

Will Rubio get his way, or has his call already failed? Our European allies waiver in the Gulf, as the images of Churchill and other British greats are removed from U.K. banknotes. Perhaps worst of all — and virtually unknown even to conservatives — the study of Western civilization has largely disappeared not only from higher education but also from America’s K–12 schools. Rubio boasted that America, at least, had abandoned the globalist delusion, after which he invited Europeans to join our Western revival. Yet even as Rubio spoke, America’s K–12 schools were busy undermining his efforts.

The cynical reading of Rubio’s address is that he gave Europeans more credit than they deserved for loyalty to the West’s glorious heritage, hoping they would rise to his expectations. The still more cynical reading of Rubio’s address is that, knowingly or not, he gave Americans far more credit than we deserve for breaking with our own globalist delusions.

All is not lost, however. Although even America’s red states have largely purged the study of Western civilization from K–12, two states, Idaho and Texas, are pushing back against this trend. Rubio’s faith in our rejection of the globalist delusion is by no means sheer imagination, even if the countermovement he celebrates is still in its early stages.

Consider Idaho. You might think this ruby-red state would have preserved the study of Western civilization in its schools. Sadly, that is far from the case — and in no way unusual among red states. Until only very recently, the education bureaucracy and teacher corps of even the reddest states have been determinedly leftist and globalist in perspective.

This is reflected in Idaho’s current social studies standards. Most state social studies standards contain four basic subject bands: history, geography, economics, and civics/government. Idaho’s standards add a fifth basic subject in every grade: “global perspectives.” Idaho’s global perspectives subject band is overwhelmingly weighted toward a multiculturalist and globalist outlook, containing nothing on the importance of cultural assimilation, the dangers of relativism, the risks of dependence on adversaries for strategic goods, or the need to preserve national sovereignty. In short, the Idaho social studies standards purvey the very same globalist delusion that Secretary Rubio rightly deplores, while failing to teach his core concerns. Who would have guessed that Idaho, of all places, would be so very European.

And as in most other states, Idaho’s current social studies standards render it virtually impossible for students to gain any but the most superficial understanding of the role of the Judeo-Christian tradition in the development of the West — another theme that Rubio wants us to return to. This is first of all........

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