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SPECIAL SERIES:America Turns 250

Within Trump world, Western civilization is making a comeback. The fateful question is whether Western civilization will make a comeback within Western civilization.

At the 2025 Munich Security conference, Vice President JD Vance stridently criticized Europe for betraying free-speech principles central to Western civilization. Two weeks ago at the 2026 Munich National Security conference, Secretary of State Marco Rubio warmly reaffirmed that the U.S.-Europe alliance is rooted in, and must remain dedicated to, Western civilization.

In well-received Feb. 14 remarks, Rubio asserted that national security “is not merely a series of technical questions – how much we spend on defense or where, how we deploy it.” Those “are important questions” but “they are not the fundamental ones,” he stressed.

The fundamental question we must answer at the outset is, what exactly are we defending? Because armies do not fight for abstractions. Armies fight for a people. Armies fight for a nation. Armies fight for a way of life. And that is what we are defending: a great civilization that has every reason to be proud of its history, confident of its future, and aims to always be the master of its own economic and political destiny.

Western civilization grew out of the encounter between classical Greece and Rome and biblical faith. It is conventionally divided into monumental eras: the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the Information Revolution. It has produced breathtaking works of art, extraordinary advances in science and technology, and globe-encompassing commerce. And it has championed democracy and political and economic freedom.

Embedded in Rubio’s summons to defend Western civilization is a perplexity. Armies, he maintained, do not fight for abstractions. But the idea of the dignity of the person is both trans-political and a hallmark of Western civilization. Within the West, peoples and nations – with their distinctive languages, characteristic traditions, and shared histories and hopes – have been bound by certain universal principles that languages, traditions, and shared histories and hopes weave into their sensibilities. These universal principles, which give political expression to the dignity of the person, include individual freedom, equality of rights........

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