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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 under law, and just government’s grounding in the consent of the governed.

Large swaths of the modern West came to understand the rights and responsibilities of citizenship in terms of these universal principles. The entwinement of nationhood and dedication to universal principles is especially true of the United States, the most powerful and prosperous nation within Western civilization and among all the world’s civilizations.

With the publication in 1776 – 250 years ago this coming July 4 – of the Declaration of Independence, the United States became the first nation in the West and beyond to come into existence in dedication to individual freedom, equality of rights under law, and just government’s grounding in the consent of the governed.

America’s distinctive and dynamic tradition of equal rights under law represents the merging of three other distinctive traditions within Western civilization. The faith of early America’s largely Protestant denominations, with deep roots in the Hebrew Bible, taught that human beings are created in God’s image and therefore are equal in a decisive respect. Republican Rome provided models of public-spirited citizens who embrace the duty to engage in self-government and to defend the homeland on the battlefield. And the modern tradition of freedom, represented in the founding era above all by Locke and Montesquieu, instilled the conviction that government’s first task is to secure citizens’ universal rights.

Rubio’s invidious contrast between the abstract or universal and the concrete or particular conflicts with the spirit of America’s founding principles and the nation’s form of constitutional government. The Declaration’s signers and the Constitution’s framers understood that government’s primary responsibility was to safeguard American citizens’ universal rights. For the founders, however, the universality of rights neither mandated a universal mission for America nor denied that the nation was in part constituted by a rich heritage of beliefs, practices, and associations. At the same time, America’s founding dedication to unalienable rights – the rights that all human beings share – disposed the nation to seek friends and partners who also cherished liberty under law, and to connect the defense of freedom at home with the shaping of an international order favorable to freedom.

Rubio’s real complaint was directed against America’s and Europe’s reframing of freedom and foreign affairs in the early 1990s. To counter Soviet communism’s conquest of half of Europe following World War II, Europe and the United States formed an “historic alliance” in defense of freedom that “saved and changed the world.” However, Americans and Europeans took a wrong turn following the American-led victory in the Cold War, according to Rubio:

[T]he euphoria of this triumph led us to a dangerous delusion: that we had entered “the end of history”; that every nation would now be a liberal democracy; that the ties formed by trade and by commerce alone would now replace nationhood; that the rules-based global order – an overused term – would now replace the national interest; and that we would now live in a world without borders where everyone became a citizen of the world.

The widespread delusion of an emergent left-liberal global paradise, argued Rubio, generated a slew of damaging policies. The United States and Europe embraced free trade despite other nations’ protectionist and predatory practices, compromised national sovereignty by submitting to the dictates of international organizations, built massive welfare states while neglecting defense, imposed restrictions on fossil fuels and nuclear energy at the behest of what Rubio labels “a climate cult,” and opened borders. Consequently, Rubio contended, Europe and the United States deindustrialized and lost working- and middle-class jobs, diminished self-government, and neglected rising authoritarian powers while encouraging mass migration that eroded social and political cohesion.

Cooperating with “our friends here in Europe” to recover a shared commitment to Western civilization is crucial to President Trump’s efforts to reverse the decline, underscored Rubio. In calling for that recovery, however, the secretary of state overemphasized the religious dimension of Western civilization while underplaying basic rights and fundamental freedoms. As a result, he obscured the common ground available for reunifying the West.

“America was founded 250 years ago, but the roots began here on this continent long before,” observed Rubio. “The men who settled and built the nation of my birth arrived on our shores carrying the memories and the traditions and the Christian faith of their ancestors as a sacred inheritance, an unbreakable link between the old world and the new.” Those memories, traditions, and faith, Rubio contended, unite us still: “We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.”

Rubio is right about Christianity’s singular importance to Western civilization, but he is mistaken about its potential role in reconstituting relations between the United States and Europe. His mistake derives in part from a failure to understand the significance of the term “Western civilization.”

As James Kurth, professor emeritus at Swarthmore College, observed more than 30 years ago in “The Real Clash,” in contrast to the names of most other great civilizations – Confucian, Hindu, Islamic, Slavic Orthodox – the West indicates not a religion but a direction. Moreover, Western civilization is a relatively new term. Until about 300 years ago, those who belonged to what is now called the West thought of themselves as living amid Christendom. However, modernity in general and the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution in particular secularized society in Europe and the United States. Churches continued to minister to the faithful, but Europeans and Americans decreasingly saw Christianity as defining their societies. The term Western civilization came into vogue at the beginning of the 20th century just as did suspicions that the West was in crisis. Oswald Spengler, who was born in Germany and spent most of his life in Munich, gave seminal expression to such forebodings in 1918 in “The Decline of the West.”

A century later, Secretary of State Rubio traveled to Munich to express his own forebodings about the West.

To avert a crisis, Rubio maintained, the United States must encourage an economically and militarily strong Europe. In addition, he argued, the West must reindustrialize, reshape alliances to meet 21st-century challenges, regain control over national borders, and reform international order so that it serves free and democratic nations. And, he emphasized, America and Europe must cooperate based on a renewed dedication to the Western civilization they share.

Renewed dedication to Western civilization in multi-religious, multi-ethnic, and transcontinental America and among Europe’s diverse nation-states depends on putting freedom first. This does not deny Western civilization’s biblical roots and faith’s sustaining role. Nor does it disparage the wisdom and moral sustenance embedded in national traditions. Rather, it recognizes that in our secular age basic rights and fundamental freedoms, rooted in religion and reason, provide the common denominator binding the peoples and nations of the West.

Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. From 2019 to 2021, he served as director of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. State Department. His writings are posted at PeterBerkowitz.com and he can be followed on X @BerkowitzPeter. His new book is "Explaining Israel: The Jewish State, the Middle East, and America."

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