Rubio Declared a Return to Brutal Western Colonialism - and Europe Applauded

lewrockwell.com · Feb 21, 2026 · Collected from GDELT

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US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speech at the Munich Security Conference last weekend was another troubling declaration of intent by the Trump administration. The explicit goal of US foreign policy, according to Rubio, is to resurrect the western colonial order that persisted for some five centuries until the Second World War. Old-school, white-man’s-burden colonialism is unapologetically back. In Rubio’s preposterous retelling, Europe’s colonisation of much of the planet, and the rape and pillage of its resources, was a glorious era of western exploration, innovation and creativity. The West brought a “superior” civilisation to backward peoples while maintaining global order. The Law Best Price: $0.99 Buy New $3.25 (as of 06:25 UTC - Details) Reflecting on the era before 1945, he observed: “The West had been expanding – its 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.” That course went into reverse 80 years ago: “The great western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come.” Rubio neglected to mention that the purpose of international law was to prevent a return to the horrors of the Second World War: the extermination of civilians in death camps and the firebombing of European and Japanese cities. During his speech, Rubio offered Europe the chance to join the Trump administration in reviving “The West’s age of dominance” to “Renew the greatest civilisation in human history.” “What we want is a reinvigorated alliance that recognises that what has ailed our societies is not just a set of bad policies but a malaise of hopelessness and complacency. An alliance – the alliance that we want is one that is not paralysed into inaction by fear – fear of climate change, fear of war, fear of technology,” he said. No peace, no order Quite astonishingly, Rubio was greeted with enthusiastic applause throughout his speech from an audience comprising heads of state, politicians, diplomats and military officials. He is reported to have received a standing ovation from half of the attendees. They seemed swept up in Rubio’s triumphalist account of empire, one utterly oblivious to the well-documented realities of “western domination” – not least its brutal colonial tyrannies, its industrial-scale genocides and the mass enslavement of native populations. These were not unfortunate episodes or mistakes in the West’s imperial past. They were integral to it. They were the coercive means by which colonised peoples were stripped of their assets and labour to finance empire. He also appeared blind to another downside of the colonial West, which was all too evident over those five centuries. Ruthless competition between European states, vying to be first to pillage resources in the Global South, led to endless wars in which Europeans, as well as the people they colonised, were killed. Empire did not ensure order, let alone peace. Colonialism was about systematised theft – and, as the saying goes, there is rarely honour among thieves. In the dog-eat-dog world that preceded international law, each colonial power was out for its own advancement against rivals. That culminated in two terrible wars in the first half of the 20th century that decimated Europe itself. The Assault on Truth Masson, Jeffrey Check Amazon for Pricing. Because Rubio does not understand the past, his vision of the future is inevitably defective as well. Any attempt by the Trump administration to restore overt western colonial rule will prove suicidal. As we shall see, such a venture would spell doom for us all. In fact, we may already be well advanced on that path. Imperial muscles There are a number of glaring flaws in Rubio and the Trump administration’s thinking. First, Rubio’s assertion that the West gave up colonialism some 80 years ago is flatly wrong. At the end of the Second World War, Europe’s physically battered and economically exhausted colonial powers passed the baton of empire to the US. Washington did not end colonialism. It rationalised and streamlined it. Washington continued the European tradition of overthrowing nationalist leaders and installing weak, obedient clients in their stead. It also seeded the globe with hundreds of US military bases to project hard power, while exploiting new globalising technologies to project soft power. Economic carrots and sticks, wielded largely out of view through the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, incentivised submission to its diktats by non-western leaders. Washington’s freedom of manoeuvre was limited chiefly by a rival power in the form of the Soviet Union, which armed and subsidised its own clients. The Cold War kept the US empire in relative check. That was not “decline”, as Rubio claims. It was simple pragmatism: avoiding confrontation in a nuclear age that could, through a misstep, lead to global annihilation. Over the past 30 years, since the fall of the Soviet Union, the US has flexed its imperial muscles ever more aggressively: in the former Yugoslavia, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Iraq again, in Libya, in Syria, and now – assisted by its ultimate client state, Israel – more widely across the oil-rich Middle East, in Palestine, Lebanon and Iran. Long before Trump’s first term as president, Washington’s core bipartisan foreign policy aims involved boxing in Russia, chiefly through creeping colonisation of former Soviet states, and threatening China over Taiwan. In typical Trumpian fashion, Rubio has simply made explicit what was already implicit. The US has been an imperial superpower since the 1940s and has become an ever more confrontational one in a world of diminishing resources, where it enjoys the advantage of being the sole military superpower. Rubio is simply more honest than his predecessors about the decades-long trajectory of US foreign policy. 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