When Barack Obama went to Athens in mid-November, 2016, on his last state visit as President, he celebrated democracy. The speech he delivered in the Greek capital, at a ritzy opera hall perched next to the Saronic Gulf, came only eight days after Hillary Clinton lost the Presidential election to Donald Trump; Obama, an era-defining leader, now mulled the likely unravelling of his legacy. His remarks evoked a world on edge, beset by growing social and economic divides and the uneven effects of globalization. But he clung to an optimistic theme, hailing the “rocky hills” of Athens as the birthplace of democracy, the incubator of such concepts as citizenship and equality before the law. He acknowledged that democracy in the Athens of antiquity was “far from perfect,” not unlike that of his own nation at its founding, but said that democracy was a “flame first lit here” that had “never died.” And, he insisted, the yearning for democracy reflected a universal dream. “We’ve been told that these are Western ideals,” Obama said. “We’ve been told that some cultures are not equipped for democratic governance and actually prefer authoritarian rule.” But, he said, his travels around the world during eight years in office showed him that that was not the case, that the “basic longing to live with dignity, the fundamental desire to have control of our lives and our future . . . burn in every human heart.”
When Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, went to Athens last week and gave a speech, he mentioned the word “democracy” just twice in almost thirty minutes. Instead, standing upon the Pnyx, a hilly outcrop that overlooks the Acropolis, he tub-thumped for the West. He declared ancient Greek city-states as“the birthplace of the greatest civilization in the world,” the font not of universal value but of an exceptional cultural legacy that belonged to Europe and the United States—and not many others. Rubio turned to Plato and invoked the ancient idea of thymos—“the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride,” as he put it, that gives life to a civilization—and placed the Greek hoplites who resisted the advances of the Persian empire at Thermopylae (never mind that they were Spartans, not Athenians) in a line of great men that included Christian martyrs and the defiant Texans who perished at the Alamo. Their bravery, sacrifice, and loyalty to a greater cause, Rubio argued, were distinctly Western characteristics, rooted in an ennobling spirit that he claimed was under threat from those who have made nationalism “a dirty word” and taught children to be “ashamed” of their countries. “Now we take the West’s conception of these things—heroism, honor, duty—we take these things for granted,” he said, before offering a riposte to Obama’s idealism of a decade before. “We assume that these somehow are universal to all people in all times and in all places. They are not.” In his telling, European nations, gripped by mass migration and the torpor of liberalism, faced a civilizational “inflection point” and had to “awaken” from their “long slumber”; the West had to maintain“its place “at the head of the world” and resist a “future of atrophy and servitude and decline.”
In all this, Rubio is doing his best to inhabit the Zeitgeist of right-wing politics in the United States. He no longer has time for the neoconservative internationalism of John McCain or George W. Bush, and instead walks a path paved by conservatives such as by James Burnham, who in the nineteen-sixties saw liberal élites as complicit in the “suicide of the West,” and Pat Buchanan, who wrote, in the twilight of his career, at the beginning of this century, of “the death of the West” by immigration and demographic replacement. Of course, the West itself is a nebulous concept, one that was wholly absent from the ancient Greek and Roman luminaries who ground its canon. It entered political parlance in the nineteenth century, as Europeans sought ways to create distance between themselves and Russians, while also gesturing to bonds across the Atlantic. It took a more concrete geopolitical form in the Cold War, undergirded by the NATO military alliance. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the West, for a time, became more capacious, linked to principles of liberal democracy that could take root anywhere.
Rubio’s idea of the West is both messier and simpler, populated by muscular explorers and conquerors, from Alexander the Great and the Frankish king Charlemagne to the conquistador Hernán Cortés and the frontiersmen of the American West. Rubio doesn’t seem interested in the Athenian legacy of civic institutions and models for self-governance that appealed to the Founding Fathers. In his speech, the West is more defined by whom it does not encompass—chiefly, tyrannical Persians who tried to absorb Greece’s stubborn city-states, and their modern-day descendants in Iran, described by Rubio as “radical mullahs” who propagate a “cult of death.” There is no space in Rubio’s narrative for any more sophisticated reading of the past, any recognition of the profound interconnections between societies that already existed in the age of Pericles, or of the pivotal roles that the medieval philosophers and scientists of the Islamic world played in helping proliferate the knowledge of the ancient Greeks into European Christendom. Paul Betts, a professor of modern European history at the University of Oxford, said Rubio seemed to instrumentalize Athens as “a justification for adventurism, national power, and even imperial expansion.” Forget Obama’s visions of democracy—here was Trump’s deferred annexation of Greenland and his deepening vassalage of Venezuela. “It’s a Trump-era rereading that somehow ancient Greece is recast as the political foundation for a new American mission in the world,” Betts told me. Tom Malinowski, a former U.S. diplomat and congressman, was more blunt. The text of Rubio’s speech “belongs on the syllabus of every class on the intellectual foundations of fascism,” he wrote.
For those following the Washington horse race, Rubio’s speech was seen as a soft launch for a potential Presidential challenge in 2028, a statement to the MAGA base at home that he can carry Trump’s banner in the years to come. He reminded his audience of the American ambition to rebalance trade relationships, reassert control over global supply chains, bolster military spending, and “fight for dominance” over the industries and technologies of the future. “We choose the unapologetic pursuit of national power,” he said in Athens. But onlookers abroad already know that. The Trump Administration offers constant reminders to the rest of the planet—and, especially, to erstwhile allies in the West—of both the narrowness of its world view and the vastness of its sense of primacy. For months, it bullied and scolded other countries not to purchase Russian oil, even slapping tariffs on some that did, before turning around, this past week, and announcing its own plan to import hundreds of thousands of tons of Russian diesel, infuriated top European diplomats, who see this as another blow to their collective efforts to buttress Ukraine.
Trump’s conspicuous rapport with the Kremlin undermines the unity of the archetypal geopolitical West. So do other moves: just a day after his Athens speech, Rubio announced sweeping sanctions on the International Criminal Court, an institution stoically defended by many European governments. The White House, in its stated national-security strategy, is sour on the whole project of the European Union and sees itself as being in league with anti-establishment, far-right factions. Although they are ascendant in some countries, these “patriotic” parties don’t yet reflect dominant majorities in Europe, where Trump, on the whole, is hopelessly unpopular. Michael Kimmage, the director of the Kennan Institute, in Washington, D.C., and the author of “The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy,” saw Rubio’s speech as taking place in “a remarkably ironic set of circumstances.” The U.S.’s top diplomat conjured “a cardboard notion of the West, taken from a very selective set of references,” Kimmage told me, which “doesn’t really speak to Europeans,” doesn’t “resonate in any meaningful way within the United States”—where pan-Hellenism isn’t exactly a feature of mass culture—and which belies “a transatlantic relationship that is deteriorating.” (Rubio’s grandiose oratory was also undercut by the apparent tawdry self-dealing of the Trump Administration; allegations surrounding an inappropriate payment request by Kimberly Guilfoyle, the Trump-appointed U.S. Ambassador to Greece, shadowed Rubio’s visit last week and compelled Guilfoyle to resign her post on Tuesday. Guilfoyle has denied wrongdoing.)
Still, Rubio is not an outlier. His speech in Athens is part of a wider phenomenon in global politics that scholars have dubbed “civilizationism,” in which great powers engage with one another as “civilization”-states, marked by distinct cultural identities and political styles. They don’t have to clash, as the late political philosopher Samuel Huntington famously envisioned after the end of the Cold War, but the divergence of their interests and the difference of their cultures suggest a world shaped by competing spheres of influence. The Chinese President, Xi Jinping, has already launched a formal Global Civilizations Initiative that pads this world view with reams of Communist Party jargon; India, too, sees itself as a civilization-state, with commensurate weight on the world stage. Even the centrist French President Emmanuel Macron, who wants a more united, empowered Europe to hold its own, is wont to speak about the Continent in civilizational terms. Hans Kundnani, a visiting professor at the European Institute of the London School of Economics, argues that civilizationism reflects a retreat from universalist ideas not only in the United States and its allies but also in countries in the Global South that found their freedom in the twentieth century. In the more overtly illiberal moment in which we find ourselves today, with international law proving tougher to enforce and human rights more difficult to protect, talk of civilizations is rising. “There’s a blurring of the distinction between democracies and authoritarian states,” Kundnani told me. “At a time of democratic backsliding, thinking in civilizational terms is an alternative way of legitimating the actions of states.” In a Foreign Affairs essay, Leonard A. Schuette, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, anticipated Rubio’s speech. The new right’s idea of civilization “is not based on a creedal understanding of Western identity as rooted in a shared set of principles that anyone, regardless of origin, can espouse, such as constitutional democracy, liberty, and equality,” he wrote. “Instead, for thinkers on the New Right, the West is defined by a specific geographic territory, a shared ancestry, and Christianity.”
Rubio advocated a gentler version of this blood-and-soil, identitarian vision of the West, which, most of the time, gets voiced by conservatives in baldly dehumanizing terms—for example, through calls for the deportation of illegal immigrants, or the depopulation of unwanted brown kids from college football stadiums. At the same time that Rubio was in the Greek capital, a coterie of far-right Western leaders had convened across the sea, in Jerusalem, for the annual National Conservatism conference, which included a motley cast of followers of Vice-President J. D. Vance, Trump’s heir apparent. There, the nationalist instincts driving Rubio’s speech found more vociferous expression. Amichai Chikli, Israel’s diaspora minister—who, out of a shared antipathy toward Muslims and liberals, has made controversial overtures to the same European far-right parties whose ideological forebears participated in the Holocaust—urged his compatriots “to smash political correctness, unite around our national movements, the only natural order in which our freedom has any meaning, and destroy once again the Tower of Babylon.”
“Civilization” is one of the favorite words of these sorts of politicians, more committed to supremacy than to democracy. But, as a rallying cry of the American right, it’s language that rings more hollow by the day, given the excesses of the past two years, the brutalization of migrants and protesters, the bullying of weaker countries, the repeated turns to unprovoked war and displays of force, and the garishness of an Administration that plans to live-stream a public execution later this year. Sebastian Gorka, a White House official focussed on counterterrorism, told the audience in Jerusalem that right-wing forces find themselves “in a war between civilization and barbarity.” He may not be on the side he thinks he is. ♦