Last year, Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech in Munich’s annual Security Conference, which brings together world leaders in national security, was widely panned. Vance’s general demeanor as a charismatic void wasn’t helped when he adopted the Trump administration’s characteristic bluster, upbraiding our German allies for allegedly censoring their neo-Nazi party. Rubio’s speech, leavened with odes to shared Western civilizational greatness, went down easier than Vance’s, but it is a more dangerous poison. Style often outshines substance, so although Rubio hit many of the same white supremacist beats, his performance was met with a standing ovation.
Praise for the speech overflowed the conference hall. In The Atlantic, Elliott Cohen lauded Rubio’s rhetorical force and saw the seeds of a future presidential run in Rubio potentially outmatching Vance in 2028. Elliott claims that Rubio deftly navigated the right’s competing political factions, pleasing MAGA's erratic chest thumpers while speaking in a tone that didn’t directly insult European leaders.
But where Elliot sees the future in Rubio’s vision of a united Western civilization, I see the bloody past. Rubio’s speech indulged in a kind of brain-dead nostalgia for an imperialism that, as the sociologist W.E.B Du Bois warned over a century ago, brought the world to the brink of ruin. Rubio’s mythologized history of western expansion glosses over colonialism’s horrors and the costs that expansion wrought upon Europe and the world.
Watching the reaction to the speech brought to mind Du Bois' words in Souls of White Folk, written right after the First World War, in which he predicted where the doctrine of Western cultural superiority, with the American racial state claiming moral righteousness, would lead. He wrote, “Whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!” DuBois, who added that the “White Man is always right and a Black Man has no rights which a white man is bound to respect,” saw the embrace of a blood-and-soil notion of “Western Civilization”—the central motif of Rubio’s speech—as essentially debasing. Behind the invocations of high culture and endless progress lurked a thin justification for foreign policy: “lust of blood.”
In his speech, Rubio did not obfuscate this intention, glorifying the imperial pillaging of much of the world by European powers. He said, “For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, 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.”
This white supremacist mythologizing of our shared history erases the religious traditions that missionaries banned, the diseases settlers spread, the innocent soldiers enslaved and massacred, the landscapes explorers desecrated, and the greed, plunder, and exploitation that fueled the expansions. As Mathias Risse writes, in Rubio’s imaginative history, “Conquest becomes exploration, empire-building becomes civilizational flowering, and the victims of that process simply vanish from the story.”Rubio’s thuggish view of the past valorizes grifters, murderers, and brutes as a prelude to contemporary justifications for grift, murder, and brutality.
Cohen recognizes that Rubio’s yearning for a new imperialist age “may not play well with the descendants of enslaved peoples, Native Americans, and Asian American immigrants.” But it is unclear why such a vision would please Americans or White Europeans who think, correctly, that the crimes of their imperialist ancestors are reprehensible. Anyone who recognizes that the last age of imperialism ended with Europe destroyed (as Du Bois presciently warned in 1920) should be wary of calls for “civilizational” expansion from an administration whose foreign policy belligerence includes threatening allies in Canada and Greenland, kidnapping foreign heads of state, and undermining the trans-Atlantic alliance.
Rubio’s speech situates World War II as a turning point for the Continent: “in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, it was contracting. Europe was in ruins.” He evaded addressing why Europe lay in ruin following World War II. I assume this evasion stems from his party’s alliance with the ideological heirs of ruination. Rubio’s rhetorical jump-cut elides that destruction was visited on Europe when, as Césaire claimed, fascists brought colonialism’s brutality home to the continent. America’s shiny-new concentration camps and murderous mobs of secret police are evidence of this imperial boomerang, and show its folly. Rubio asks Europe to join a U.S. policy platform that is destabilizing the country at home and sowing chaotic uncertainty abroad.
As Annika Brockschmidt notes, Rubio’s affinity for the heirs of 20th-century fascism shows up in the far-right and white supremacist dog-whistles that littered his speech. Calls to reject historic guilt are standard fare for German far-right activists hoping to minimize the Holocaust. To American ears, this latter complaint sounds familiar, as GOP leaders—including JD Vance—echo white nationalists when claiming that “In the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.” This cross-national convergence in language rejecting guilt is consistent with the Trump administration’s ideological alliance with European fascists.
Rubio’s hoped-for white nationalist international—with the United States standing first among unequals, of course—also came through his condemnation of migration and migrants. He decried “an unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture and the future of our people.” Rubio’s construction is more than 14 words, but his concern for cultural purity and the belief that social cohesion can only spring from homogeneity bubble from the same well.
Du Bois was writing between the World Wars but presciently saw exactly where the doctrine of Western cultural superiority, with the American racial state claiming moral righteousness, would lead. Du Bois should also have the last word on Rubio’s renewed call for American imperialism.
“It is curious to see America, the United States, looking on herself, first, as a sort of natural peacemaker, then as a moral protagonist in this terrible time. No nation is less fitted for this role. For two or more centuries America has marched proudly in the van of human hatred—making bonfires of human flesh and laughing at them hideously, and making the insulting of millions more than a matter of dislike—rather a great religion, a world war-cry: Up white, down black; to your tents, a white folk, and world war with black and parti-colored mongrel beasts!”
Photo: Battey, C. M., photographer. (ca. 1919) W.E.B. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, -1963. , ca. 1919. May 31. [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2003681451/.