Fresh from toppling the president of Venezuela and taking control of the world’s largest oil reserves, the Trump administration’s top diplomat arrived at the Munich security conference on Saturday with a rather new and very disturbing message for European governments.

Empire is great. Empire is back. Empire is American.

The US secretary of state delivered what can only be described as a 22-minute ode to empire. A love letter to conquest and colonialism. A proud defense of the West’s territorial expansion.

That secretary of state was, of course, Marco Rubio – the long-time foreign-policy hawk who is now one of the most influential voices in a Maga-dominated Republican party that once pretended it wanted to end “forever wars”.

In his speech, Rubio went way beyond offering the typical defense of US “leadership” or a muscular foreign policy, as so many of his predecessors, both Republican and Democratic, have done before him. Rather, he issued a full-throated endorsement of empire – and he did it at exactly the moment the United States, under his boss Donald Trump, is openly engaging in the kind of territorial and extractive imperialism that most western European governments spent the last 80 years renouncing.

In Munich, in Germany of all places, Rubio delivered an encomium to five centuries of the West’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”. He lamented the “contracting” of the “great Western empires” in the wake of the second........

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