What a difference a year makes.
Last year at the Munch Security Conference Vice President Vance delivered a feisty feast of words very much in the political style of the Vice President: Democratic
Demons and Family Drama, A Valentine's Day Text From the United States
for their European Soulmates--Vice President JD Vance's Remarks
Delivered at the 2025 Munich Security Conference. For his European hosts, however, the textual delights he proffered might have left a bad taste.
This year Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered a brief, honest, but much better received statement that raised the same issues, but perhaps in a considerably different way. In the Secretary's Remarks Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference.
By now, given the speed of news "cycles"--that is of the relevance of text and performance by officials in the contemporary era (and thus the need for constant if repetitive reproduction)--most any one who has something to say about Secretary of State Rubio's Address at the Munich Security Council and the proceedings themselves has already had a go. And, indeed, it may be worth a moment to consider the way that the cognitive processes of contemporary governance systems and the fundamental operational logic of tech based or enhanced decision making (including its own self regeneration). Both are increasingly iterative and mimetic, though the mimesis, as is its fundamental character not identically repetitive. The intensity, rates of iteration, and character of mimesis (measuring δ) between interactions, produces the data necessary and from out of which it may be possible to understand the principles, premises, and cognitive structures of the collectives engaged in these Luhmannesque system, sub-systems, and their structural coupling,
Time is up. Back to the iterative matter at hand.
In the usual half a week given to these event data blips Secretary Rubio's remarks have been consumed. And, and like most consumable, it has provided a certain amount of "nutrient" or positive value, leaving the rest for emptying the nocturnal fragrance (倒夜香) of what remains to be carting away . The popular legacy press reported it this way:
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered a reassuring message to America’s allies on Saturday, striking a less aggressive but still firm tone about the administration’s intent to reshape the trans-Atlantic alliance and push its priorities after more than a year of President Donald Trump’s often-hostile rhetoric toward traditional allies. * * * Rubio addressed the conference a year after Vice President JD Vance stunned the same audience with a harsh critique of European values. (here)
The focus was clear enough--it is not clear that anyone in the popular press is particularly interested in what the Secretary has to say or parsing through its structures and assumptions. No. One had the impression that the greatest value of the secretary's remarks is as an artifact the extracted essence of which might make the contest for the succession of President Trump for more interesting (for them at least). And there is nothing more delectably consumable than the appearance or reality; of a concept that Jacques Derrida, in his usual act of showmanship, made famous in the term "différance" (Jacques Derrida, Différance Alan Bass (trans), in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp 3-27)), and what semiotics now perhaps better understands in the shadow of tech, that Jan Broekman and I call the "flow" or the "signal" within which input exists (here).
Indeed, there is something to this--the revolution of the second and third decades of the 21st century require pathways. And on the Republican side at least two now are clearly visible--each with its own camp of supporters. The approaches of the likely contenders for the next Republican Party Presidential nomination certainly provides at least a useful public facing comparison of style and emphasis. It is not just the usual good cop/bad cop ploy; nor for that matter about the sort of nag one prefers (though here I am reminded of President Obama's Ghana speech as a reminder that Americans have a longish and a political history of nagging, see
Democracy Part XVI: Empathy and Hubris: America in Africa 2009) that tends to amuse onlookers and their amplifiers in the press, academia and influencers (is there a difference sometimes other than in delivery?). This may be, after all, the preferred level of discursive comedy which they are capable of perceiving (but on the powerlessness in nagging see
here). It is the incarnation of the choice for "post-revolutionary" Americans respecting the path forward. If they have an appetite for French, Russian, and Chinese style rectification/Terror/ purging campaigns, then door number 1; otherwise door number 2. But that is a story for next year.
Perhaps more importantly, Secretary Rubio's remarks are at their best as he tries to explain America First as a function of the rebooting of the meaning of the post 1945 order--and to that end, the understanding of revolutionary world remaking itself on the brink of the defeat of the Axis powers, the explosion of vibrant anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist movements targeting the structures of European expansion (but oddly not Russian or other "middle powers" empires) after the loss of their first colonial empires before the start of the Napoleonic period, and the re-invention of government and governance. That is, after all, what is at play--the meaning and practice of the revolution of 1945 as recast in 1963, and the place within that of the accretions that came after. Secretary Rubio reaches back to 1963; others might reach back to 1945. And it is from this cognitive starting point that political collectives must decide (1) how to identify important data at the moment of snapshot; (2) how to vest these with significance; and (3) how to build a cognitive cage around those data and that signification that can then be articulated, safeguarded, protected. . . or projected elsewhere and mostly forward in time.
It is to a more considered understanding of those remarks that is the focus of the remainder of this essay. It is divided into seven parts: (1) temporal starting points; (2) the foundational binary; (3) the betrayal; (4) the price of folly in a city of fools; (5) America First and the great reboot; (6) pitching revolution; (7) the rebooted world order; (8) putting the State back in the state system; and (9) its all about self-actualization
1. Temporal Starting Points. Secretary Rubio emphasizes starting points throughput the address. And, indeed, if one read the remarks carefully, it becomes clear that analytically, starting points are not historical markers but markers that frame structure, values, goals. He could have chosen 1945, the starting date of the new global ordering led by the Americans at the vanguard of leading States victorious in war against (1) the extra-moral forces of an amoral ethno-racial-religious managerial eugenics and human value hierarchy and (2) unconstrained militarism as the principal language of international relations. Their task was to reboot a global order, the manifestations of which emerged in the decade or so following, at least as to form and values.
But the Secretary did not. One cannot get in his head, of course, but it is plausible to consider that context dictated a starting point connected to the origins and context of the Munich Security Conference. And so the Secretary's speech is framed around 1963 as a starting point. 1963 was a momentous year in some respects. It started in the shadow of the so called Cuban Missile crisis of October 1962. The American adventure in Vietnam intensified, intensified by the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, as did its sanctions regimes against the revolutionary government in Cuba. George Wallace was inaugurated as Alabama's governor promising segregation forever, the federal government sent troops in to enforce desegregation, while the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King wrote his letter from the Birmingham Jail and the march on Washington where his "I Have a Dream Remarks" were delivered, and the Civil Rights Act was enacted. France and Germany continued a process of alignment, while France vetoed the UK's admission into what was to become the EU. Patsy Kine is killed in a plane cash and Beatlemania starts with the release of their new album. John XXIII dies and with the event the shaping of Vatican II, and the US and Soviets established the now famous "hotline" and sign a Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Computer programming language standardization draws institutional attention and the synthesizer received its first public demonstration. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Texas, as was the person who was facing charges in that murder. There was more of note as well.
That is a lot of data and a reminder of the complexities of contextualization and essentialization multiple data streams parallel, intermeshing, and multi-directional. But data can be "activated" by acquiring signification (or being vested with it--that is what people chose to consider as the data "set" from out of which analysis is to be undertaken). And with that signification one can develop a framework for rationalizing the world as a function of an issue, objective, or state of being that is central to an analysis.
All of these events o doubt started out in the mix that was 1963. But its essence, for Secretary Rubio, was shaped by a view of the context in which 1963 presented itself as the relationship between Europe and the U.S. The parsing and data selection, then, might be thought more direct, and perhaps brutal--that by 1963 it was apparent that there was unfinished business from what had started in the 1930s. Having defeated the forces of the radical and immoral political right--it was by then clear that that those efforts would have to be redirected toward achieving the same ends against the radical left. But now those efforts would be constrained by the normative architecture of human rights and the anti-militarism that served as the core templates of the post-1945 order. That, for Secretary Rubio is both the temporal starting point, and the touchstone for the essence of world ordering that he now seeks to apply in the resent, but with contemporary characteristics. The spirit of 1963 is invoked to move forward the project that is America First: "It will restore to us a clearer sense of ourselves. It will restore a
place in the world, and in so doing, it will rebuke and deter the forces
of civilizational erasure that today menace both America and Europe
alike." (Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference). That, at any rate, appears to be the plan.
2. The Foundational Binary. Leibnitz reminded us centuries ago that binary code may be a useful way of reducing complexity to its simplest forms. Cognition and its representation might be usefully organized as binaries--zeros and ones, black and while, Western democracies and Soviet Marxist Leninist totalitarianism. Secretary Rubio organizes the world of 1963 along what for the post-1945 world was its principal binary, or in the language of Marxist Leninism, as its general contradiction and the essence of its dialectics:
When this conference began in 1963, it was in a nation – actually, it was on a continent – that was divided against itself. The line between communism and freedom ran through the heart of Germany. The first barbed fences of the Berlin Wall had gone up just two years prior. And just months before that first conference, before our predecessors first met here, here in Munich, the Cuban Missile Crisis had brought the world to the brink of nuclear destruction. Even as World War II still burned fresh in the memory of Americans and Europeans alike, we found ourselves staring down the barrel of a new global catastrophe – one with the potential for a new kind of destruction, more apocalyptic and final than anything before in the history of mankind. (Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference)
Thus, it seems, 1945 might have provided the setting for the rebooting of the global order in the wake of victory against great manifestations of two distinctive forms of internal and external state organization, conduct, and with that, their value systems. Yet all that did was clear away the debris from the great underlying contradiction on the basis of which the old world order was engaged in sometimes violent "dialectic" and oftentimes engagement at odds with the values either side purported to advance. It solved the problem of the 19th century well into the 20th; but it now made it possible to see that this was only half the equation--ridding the planet of 19th century apex state values made confronting its 20th century incarnation unavoidable. And that moves the dial from 1945 to 1963. Or to put it in the language of Deng Xiaoping (On Opposing Wrong Ideological Tendencies (1981))--while the 2nd World War effectively rectified "right error", it left a potentially equally disturbing "left error" not just infect but able to corrupt the center in the absence of its old countervailing force.
This dialectic then, served as the basis for continued alliance. Gratitude, as many know, is a great burden, and tends to build resentment almost as much as it builds positive connection. And in 1963, certainly for critical elements of the elites, one might surmise, the world and world ordering of 1863 might have been far closer to their sensibilities intellectually than was that of 1917 or 1945, much less 1963. Threat, on the other hand, especially fresh off of the disasters of 1914-1945, can be a great motivator. It is here that the fundamental binary takes on its normative character.
At the time of that first gathering, Soviet communism was on the march. Thousands of years of Western civilization hung in the balance. At that time, victory was far from certain. But we were driven by a common purpose. We were unified not just by what we were fighting against; we were unified by what we were fighting for. And together, Europe and America prevailed and a continent was rebuilt. Our people prospered. In time, the East and West blocs were reunited. A civilization was once again made whole.(Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference)
And there it is, nicely packaged. For Secretary Rubio 1963 is decisive because it marked not the transformation of the global rebooting conceived in 1945. Rather it was decisive because it marked the first, and fundamental, shift in the conflict binary, the resolution of which produced the mid-20th century international framework. That shift moved the center of conflict from its 19th century moorings , from the defeated 19th century visions of internal and external imperium, in the form of the German Reich and the Japanese Empire, to an equally critical binary oppositional conflict with 20th century moorings between the liberal democratic West and its allies and the Soviet world order. What was a stake was the normative (human rights centered) and anti-militarist foundations of the post-1945 international ordering. Where those structures in 1945 were directed at defeating what came to be called the fascist right, after 1963 it became clear that the fight continued, this time against the totalitarian left. Standing between them was allied states bound by a roughly unified sense of the meaning and values of the post-1945 order, now deployed against what in the 21st century would be called the radical left, but which in the 20th century would be incarnated with and into the Soviet Empire.
3. The betrayal. For Secretary Rubio, then, 1963 serves as an excellent point for the distillation of the great project of the spirit of 1945, and its post-1945 reboot, the normative and structural expectations of which remained substantially uncontested as they shifted from a conflict against the 19th century radical right and refocused on the 20th century radical left. That was a process effectively completed by 1963, and evidenced by the structures of binary relations between the Soviet and Liberal democratic camps. This produced the stable state necessary to focus on the fulfillment of the promise of the normative systems that the post-1945 ordering put in place and the refinement of the promise of de-centering militarism as the first reflex of international relations.
But what happens after the great dialectic is resolved? What happens when Soviet totalitarian "left" error is defeated, at least in its 20th century forms? Secretary Rubio offers a distillation in the form of betrayal:
But the euphoria of this triumph led us to a dangerous delusion: that we had entered, quote, “the end of history;” that every nation would now be a liberal democracy; that the ties formed by trade and by commerce alone would now replace nationhood; that the rules-based global order – an overused term – would now replace the national interest; and that we would now live in a world without borders where everyone became a citizen of the world. (Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference)
Secretary Rubio contextualizes the betrayal within the psychology of delusion; perhaps arrogance and disconnection might also have worked in context, but both would have been less polite; Secretary Rubio prefers the suggestion of naivete. And indeed, betrayal might be better understood not as delusion but as efforts at mitigation by those elements within the western liberal democracies that had been, since the 1920s, sympathetic to the other side of the binary and now appeared to have been working not on the resolution of the binary but in its convergence. In effect, what Secretary Rubio suggests as the fundamental delusion was the idea that with the defeat of radical right error in 1945 and of radical left error (in Europe) in 1989ish, the only thing left for the victors to do was to disappear into the world they made possible. From the perspective of those globalists, the "betrayal" was on the other foot as they watched their belief and operational orthodoxy shattered visibly after 2015 in both Asia and the U.S., a perspective nicely developed in the Davos Remarks of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. For Secretary Rubio, on the other hand, it was the very mind set that the Canadian Prime Minister defended that was itself the fundamental betrayal of the spirit of 1945 and of 1963.
4. The price of folly in a city of fools. Sectary Rubio moves from the delusion of a set of assumptions that set the cognitive baseline of great states and their international institutional instrumentalities, (the post 1989 world (re)reordering) along with the interlocking public and private bureaucracies constituted to a consideration of the realization of the expectations of delusion, to the assessment of its project: foolishness. "This was a foolish idea that . . . has cost us dearly." (
Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference). The era of liberal democratic vanguard foolishness, is a function of dogmatic blindness, of the rejection of responsibility for undertaking the duties of democratic power, and a sense that the only way forward was by creating circumstances in which the state would itself would whither away. It is divided by Secretary Rubio, into three categories.
The first touches on what the Secretary describes as a detached and rigid ideology of trade.
In this delusion, we embraced a dogmatic vision of free and unfettered trade, even as some nations protected their economies and subsidized their companies to systematically undercut ours – shuttering our plants, resulting in large parts of our societies being deindustrialized, shipping millions of working and middle-class jobs overseas, and handing control of our critical supply chains to both adversaries and rivals.(Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference).
While at first blush this appears to be a reprise of variations of the Global South's New International Economic order, it lacks the ideological rigidity of that now ancient effort. The issue, for the Secretary, is the protection of efficiency capacity and the protection of markets.
The second touches on the system of public international institutions. It is not just the system of public international institutions that appears to be the target, but the emergence of a global internationally centered web of public and private techno-bureaucratic functionaries with what of the Secretary might be4 understood as a slim and indirect connection to the structures of democratic accountability (though in fairness democratic accountability of their own administrative apparatus remains a bit of a work in progress).
We increasingly outsourced our sovereignty to international institutions while many nations invested in massive welfare states at the cost of maintaining the ability to defend themselves. This, even as other countries have invested in the most rapid military buildup in all of human history and have not hesitated to use hard power to pursue their own interests. (Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference).
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| Pix Credit here (Addams Family Values) |
The terminology is interesting, and while odd to the ears of those heavily invested in the world view Secretary Rubio critiques--one which might have been understood as the triumphantly orthodox vision post 1989--the terminology now serves as the critical language of America First. Not that sovereignty, at least among Americans, had entirely disappeared. But it was balanced by a convergence imperative, one that might b understood as trading the indicia of sovereignty for forward movement in convergence through delegation of authority to international institutions operating under international legal regimes that now could be understood as special even within domestic legal orders. The Secretary also noted not just the delegation of sovereign authority, but perhaps more importantly, the hijacking of politics from the domestic sphere with people at the center, to the institutional sphere, with officials representing entities at the center. This last produces a self defeating effect: "To appease a climate cult, we have imposed energy policies on ourselves that are impoverishing our people, even as our competitors exploit oil and coal and natural gas and anything else – not just to power their economies, but to use as leverage against our own." (Ibid.).
The third touches on migration. If trade policy hollowed out states, and if the project of constructing a system of international organizations transposed sovereignty from state to international actors, then migration, if undertaken fully and properly, would sweep away the state itself. That, anyway, is the view: "And in a pursuit of a world without borders, we opened our doors to an unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people." (Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference).
These three then shape not only the Munich remarks of the Secretary but provide a nice summary of the three core values of America First: the rejection of the idea of trade as another form of politics, the rejection of supra national governance institutions, and the rejection of open borders. These "three rejections" then have a positive side--the three modernizations: efficient re-industrialization; inter-governmentality as the basic structure of international governance; and robust national control of migration.
5. America First and the great reboot. Having distilled the essence of the fool and the foolishness of that asylum that was the global ordering after 1989 slowly chocking on its own contradictions enough that even the subalterns began to see in the project an easier target, Secretary Rubio offers the America First alternative. In the process Secretary Rubio distills the essence of America First: trade (efficient re-industrialization); sovereignty (returning to inter-governmental at the international level); and migration (political solidarity of states). "Under President Trump, the United States of America will once again take on the task of renewal and restoration, driven by a vision of a future as proud, as sovereign, and as vital as our civilization’s past." This is a project that the United States is willing to undertake alone, but would prefer the company of like minded peers. "And while we are prepared, if necessary, to do this alone, it is our preference and it is our hope to do this together with you, our friends here in Europe. "
6. Pitching Revolution. If, indeed, the U.S. is to undertake this re-framing, in the company of its sovereign peers, then it needs to pitch them. That is, the United States must suggest why it may make sense for a Europe that had invested heavily in the post-1989 framework and is deeply and ideologically committed to a much deeper techno-bureaucratic institutional ordering of politics, may find it more in its interests to scrape away at least enough of the barnacles of post-1989 internationalism to make partnership satisfying, viability, and positive (however one s inclined to measure that).
To that end, Secretary Rubio starts with an argument grounded in socio-cultural solidarity.
For the United States and Europe, we belong together. America was founded 250 years ago, but the roots began here on this continent long before. The man who settled and built the nation of my birth arrived on our shores carrying the memories and the traditions and the Christian faith of their ancestors as a sacred inheritance, an unbreakable link between the old world and the new. We are part of one civilization – Western civilization. (Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference).
What is interesting here is the alignment of faith and civilization. At a time when that view has been fractured and reconstructed in an infinitely varied way by politicians, ideologues, social scientists, religious divines, and others, Secretary Rubio pulls on an ancient trope, and in this way picking up a thread of argument that had been advanced, with decreasing success by John Paul II (Ecclesia in Europa 2003, ¶ 120).
Secretary Rubio then makes the argument from shared history, and with it blood sacrifice for mostly common ends. "We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir." (Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference). This is wrapped in as close to a self reflection of the political psychology that separates the Americans from their European cousins.
And so this is why we Americans may sometimes come off as a little direct and urgent in our counsel. This is why President Trump demands seriousness and reciprocity from our friends here in Europe. The reason why, my friends, is because we care deeply. We care deeply about your future and ours. And if at times we disagree, our disagreements come from our profound sense of concern about a Europe with which we are connected – not just economically, not just militarily. We are connected spiritually and we are connected culturally. (Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference).
And he offers the consolation of family, of peoples who may quarrel but cannot become estranged. "We have fought against each other, then reconciled, then fought, then reconciled again. And we have bled and died side by side on battlefields from Kapyong to Kandahar." (Ibid.) But he offers no apologies; context makes that impossible from his way of thinking. But beyond that it is meant as a challenge to generations of culture makers and intelligentsia that have, from his pint of view, made it their business to bring something up by tearing other things down. It is not critique that annoys the Secretary is is the cognitive cages within which critique is undertaken.
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| Pix credit here ("One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you. |
7. The rebooted world order is, at its core a national security order. Where does all that inspirational and analytics language lead? It leads Secretary Rubio to the nub of the problem--the emerging alignment and perhaps fusion, of national security with the core issues that serve as the heart of the Secretary's critique of the international
ancien regime--de-industrialization, sovereignty transfers, and open migration. National security cannot be reduced to technical questions that are quarantined off from the core elements of social organization.
The fundamental question we must answer at the outset is what exactly are we defending, because armies do not fight for abstractions. Armies fight for a people; armies fight for a nation. Armies fight for a way of life. And that is what we are defending: a great civilization that has every reason to be proud of its history, confident of its future, and aims to always be the master of its own economic and political destiny. (Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference).
And then the connection to trade (de-industrialization) and migration. None of these policies were inevitable--except perhaps as inevitable from the premises and goals embraced by elites after the 1980s. And that returns the Secretary to the theme of the fool. De-industrialization was a long term foolish choice. "It was a foolish but voluntary transformation of our economy that left us dependent on others for our needs and dangerously vulnerable to crisis." (Ibid.). Of course some might think that what was foolish was the unwillingness of those who embraced this orthodoxy to ruthlessly undertake all measures necessary to attain their goals. Secretary Rubio then seeks to recenter migration--not around individuals but about the internal stability of states. "Controlling who and how many people enter our countries, this is not an expression of xenophobia. It is not hate. It is a fundamental act of national sovereignty. And the failure to do so is not just an abdication of one of our most basic duties owed to our people. It is an urgent threat to the fabric of our societies and the survival of our civilization itself." (Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference).
At its root, of course, are the ordering premises through which the world can be rationalized, values constructed and actions judged against them. There is a lot to chew there:
An alliance ready to
defend our people, to safeguard our interests, and to preserve the
freedom of action that allows us to shape our own destiny – not one that
exists to operate a global welfare state and atone for the purported
sins of past generations. An alliance that does not allow its power to
be outsourced, constrained, or subordinated to systems beyond its
control; one that does not depend on others for the critical necessities
of its national life; and one that does not maintain the polite
pretense that our way of life is just one among many and that asks for
permission before it acts. And above all, an alliance based on the
recognition that we, the West, have inherited together – what we have
inherited together is something that is unique and distinctive and
irreplaceable, because this, after all, is the very foundation of the
transatlantic bond.(Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference).
8. Putting the State back in the State system. The Secretary suggested what a rebooted international ordering might look like. The object of challenge is the international techno-bureaucracy. Left alone are the uses of these communal fora for state to state discussions.
And finally, we can no longer place the so-called global order above the vital interests of our people and our nations. We do not need to abandon the system of international cooperation we authored, and we don’t need to dismantle the global institutions of the old order that together we built. But these must be reformed. These must be rebuilt.(Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference).
Secretary of State Rubio then offers the evidence--all well known: Gaza, Ukraine, Iranian (and North Korean for that matter) nuclear ambitions. Also proffered was the effective indifference f the international institutional apparatus to critical non-state actors--for the Americans now most pressing the Hemispheric narco trafficking enterprises. And behind all of this is a barely concealed indictment of international law and lawyering, one that, to the Secretary appears to take pride in its self suffocation on its own internal affectations, histories, practices and conceits; "we cannot continue to allow those who blatantly and openly threaten our citizens and endanger our global stability to shield themselves behind abstractions of international law which they themselves routinely violate." (Ibid.). International lawyers would strongly object of course.
Secretary Rubio then ends with a full throated defense, a robust panegyric of, the West. That might, at first blush, be understood as directed to outsiders. Perhaps it makes more sense when understood as internal critique. One might then reasonably consider that this defense, this praise statement, was directed as a challenge and warning to the elites, so comfortably ensconced within the systems of privilege and control within the post-1980s order, that, as far as the Secretary was concerned, and with him the President, their time was, if not up, then facing what Secretary Rubio would hope to be a fatal challenge.
Secretary Rubio looks at the spectrum of criticism of America First and sees something quite different: weakness is a choice; self-denial is a choice, suicide is a choice, dissipation is a choice; decline is a choice.
And this is why we do not want our allies to be weak, because that makes us weaker. We want allies who can defend themselves so that no adversary will ever be tempted to test our collective strength. This is why we do not want our allies to be shackled by guilt and shame. 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.(Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference).
And what Secretary Rubio sees, specifically, when he encounters those who dismiss him and America First is this--an intense disdain for managed decline.
9. It's all about self-actualization. Where does all of this lead states? Well, for Secretary of State Rubio, perhaps it leads to national self-actualization, We have reached the point where the notion of self-actualization, once considered the domain of the individual, now moves into the domain of the collective, and more specifically the State. "Acting together in this way, we will not just help recover a sane foreign policy. It will restore to us a clearer sense of ourselves. It will restore a place in the world, and in so doing, it will rebuke and deter the forces of civilizational erasure that today menace both America and Europe alike." (
Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference). That includes, not necessarily a defense, but an acknowledgement of the actualities of history--from expansion, to conquest, to revolution, to settlement, to displacement. Not candy coated, certainly, it is too late in the day for that, but clear eyed and honest. One celebrates advances and confronts and learns from mistakes; one does not use mistakes as the sort of indictment, which has become fashionable, of the cognitive bases of the social and political order, and on that basis seek to sweep it aside or perhaps, overwhelm it through the early 21st century project of de-industrialization, sovereign displacement by techno-bureaucratic internal institutions, and the withering the state in the constancy of migration. That is what Secretary Rubio appears to believe, and that is what he appears to state.
And that is how Secretary Rubio ends his remarks: "We should be proud of what we achieved together in the last century, but
now we must confront and embrace the opportunities of a new one –
because yesterday is over, the future is inevitable, and our destiny
together awaits." (Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference). It is all about the self-actualization of states--functioning optimally in one's environment to fulfill one's potential, "to become more and more of what one is"! (here)
* * *
For those who came of age during the Presidencies of Messrs. Bush (Sr), Clinton, Bush (Jr), Obama, and to some extent Biden, Secretary Rubio offers nothing but disdain and rebuke. There is little here that could possibly resonate with the generation that came of age under the tutelage of an intelligentsia, and their progeny larded into the highest levels of public and private power, whose orienting premises, world views, values and objectives were trashed by Secretary Rubio. Not just trashed but characterized as a fundamental betrayal that requires substantial rectification. That rectification might be structural, but also personal. One might think the temptation to engage and criticize would be difficult to overcome. But that sort of critique is unlikely to happen--other than to dismiss the entire enterprise as unworthy of serious engagement. To criticize Secretary Rubio's assertions might be viewed as acknowledging that they are weighty enough to merit criticism. The harshest punishment is to trivialize them (eg Secretary Rubio was nice to the Europeans and made them happy; we can work around that), or to pretend they were just never uttered. Still, one has at last a much clearer picture of America's new era ideology, a long step forward from the relative incoherence of the first Trump Presidency on that score. More fundamentally, of course, it is difficult to critique in the absence of a common language. The two camps each rejects the formative premises of the other; without a common conceptual base, what is there to argue about?
But talk is cheaper and transactional approaches tend to value them less than action. We will see what comes of all of this.
The full text of Sectary Rubio's remarks follows.
