2 hours ago
1
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 world war. He decried the “godless communist revolutions” and “anti-colonial uprisings” which, for the record, helped free 750 million people across 80 former colonies since the founding of the United Nations in 1945.
And the response to his remarks? Europe’s elites gave him a standing ovation, as if he’d just announced a cure for cancer rather than the literal return of empire. And in doing so, they made themselves shamefully complicit in the Trump administration’s rewriting not just of US history, but European and world history too.
Here are the facts that the US secretary of state chose to conveniently ignore as he extolled the “great Western empires”. European colonization of the Americas is estimated to have killed more than 50 million people – around 10% of the world’s population at the time – and even led to a period of global cooling. The British Raj in India may have caused the deaths of 100 million people in the space of just 40 years. The German and Spanish empires were responsible for genocides against the Herero, Nama and the Taino, respectively.
Yet, today, the Trump administration wants all of this memory-holed. “We do not want our allies to be shackled by guilt and shame,” Rubio told his audience in Munich. “We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization, and who, together with us, are willing and able to defend it.”
The gaslighting from Rubio was a sight to behold: the son of Cuban immigrants, whose grandfather was once deported from the United States, pushing far-right, white-nationalist talking points about “civilizational erasure”. The one-time Republican party presidential candidate, who used to denounce Trump as a “con artist” and a “lunatic,” now urging European governments to get behind the belligerent US president. A former US senator, who spent years pushing votes and bills to undermine the United Nations, now chastising the UN for having failed to prevent the bloodbath in Gaza.
Imagine if the Chinese foreign minister had given a speech attacking the UN and the “abstractions of international law”. Imagine if the Russian foreign minister had delivered an address defending imperial pillage and plunder. European elites would have gone into a meltdown. But when Rubio finished his prepared remarks, in which he also bragged about (illegally) bombing “radical Shia clerics” in Iran and (illegally) abducting a “narco-terrorist dictator” in Venezuela, more than half the room in Munich stood to applaud him.
Did they not realize that they may have been clapping for their own demise? That despite Rubio’s gentler tone and polished language, despite all his talk of transatlantic comity and unity, he was advocating for a geopolitics of vicious authoritarianism. That Rubio may be good cop to Trump’s bad, but their goal is one and the same: to make empire great again.
And it wasn’t just what Rubio said. It’s what he didn’t say. His 3,000-word speech contained not one word about Russia, not one word about China, and, perhaps crucially for his audience in western Europe, not one word about… Greenland.
Yes, Greenland. The world’s largest island which, despite being a territory of the kingdom of Denmark, an EU member state, is coveted by the president of the United States. The Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, said on Saturday that Trump is still intent on acquiring Greenland. “I think the desire from the US president is exactly the same,” Frederiksen told reporters in Munich, on the same day Rubio gave his speech at the conference. “He’s very serious about this.”
Yes, he is. Astonishingly, Trump has refused to rule out the use of military force against Denmark, a Nato ally. He has dismissed concerns about international borders and national sovereignty. And, this weekend, he sent his secretary of state to a conference in Europe that was supposed to be about collective security to deliver a speech that amounted to: America must dominate. Trump must lead. And Europe must get onboard – or else.
Again, I cannot emphasize this enough: European officials actually stood up in Munich and applauded a US official praising empire, while serving a US administration whose stated foreign policy goals include the imperial seizure of European territory.
Have they lost their minds?
The Europeans in that audience may have told themselves that they were applauding a return to stability and even friendship with the United States.
In reality, they were offering a standing ovation for the return of something much uglier, bloodier, and more dangerous.
Empire.
And this time, it may not stop at Europe’s own borders.
-
Mehdi Hasan is the editor-in-chief and CEO of Zeteo
