VERSIÓN EN ESPAÑOL AQUÍ
Full text of the Reflections HERE
"US Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke in Greece on the third anniversary of October 7, 2023. He spoke Wednesday against the epic backdrop of the Parthenon on the summit of the Acropolis in Athens. In his speech, he sought to channel the world of the ancient Greeks and contrast it with today’s world." (here). This is true as far as it goes. And yet a reflection on the remarks something perhaps more profound. What follows are my brief reflections on Secretary of State Rubio's remarks, its connections to the normative foundations of America First, and its deeper roots in ancient premises around the organizaiton and self awareness of communities. It is, in its own way, deeply semiotic suggesting the underlying complexity of the emerging cognitive structures of America First within its civilizational connective tissue.
What follows is a set of reflections built on Secretary Rubio's remarks. It is entitled Thumos (θυμός, the Spirited Soul) and the America First Merchant State: Reflections on Secretary Rubio's Athens Address (The Pnyx, 7 October 2026). The Executive summary, Introduction and summary of the Secretary's remarks follows here; the entire reflection follows below along with the text of Secretary of State Marco Rubio's Remarks. Harvey AI and Anthropic's Sonnet was used in the production of the essay. The full text of the reflection may be accessed HERE.
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Pix credit and video of Remarks here |
以銅為鏡，可以正衣冠；以古為鏡，可以知興替；以人為鏡，可以明得失。
With bronze as a
mirror, one can straighten one's robe and cap; with antiquity as a mirror, one
can know the rise and fall of regimes; with another person as a mirror, one can
see one's own achievements and shortcomings. Emperor Taizong of Tang (Li
Shimin; r. 626-649), on the death of his chief minister and critic Wei Zheng
(643), as recorded in the Tang histories.
The thumos, as the ancient Greeks called it – the fire of passion,
strength, courage, pride – is the heart of great civilization. And
without it? Without it, nations lose their will to fight, the will to
strive, the will to survive. Address
Secretary Rubio delivered at the Pnyx on 7 October 2026
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
Since the start of President Trump's second term, Marco Rubio has been an important participant in shaping the conceptual basis of America First. One gets a sense of that project through the Secretary of State's key speeches and remarks. These are usually delivered abroad, and they seem intended to project the structures, norms, and driving presumptions of America First coherently to foreign audiences who are often not well disposed toward them. That project continues. Among the best known of these remarks is the speech delivered at the Munich Security Conference. With a fascinating set of remarks delivered at the Athenian Pnyx on 7 October 2026, the Secretary now adds another stratum to the layered labor of cognitive coherence that America First is meant to be.
This essay considers the Athens remarks in the context of the layers that came before them and on which they are grounded. The remarks present a remarkable tapestry that weaves together the triadic relationships within America First. They may be clearer when viewed not in themselves but as reflected in ancient tropes from the civilizations to which the Secretary alludes. Among these is the centrality of thumos (spiritedness) within the triad that Plato presented to the ancient world as an intermeshing of logos (reason), epithumia (appetite), and thumos. Other triads also help in understanding the matrices that, in the aggregate, make up America First. The first is drawn from the three mirrors of the Tang Dynasty Emperor Taizong: the mirror of oneself, the mirror of time, and the mirror of our reflection in others. The second is semiotic. One might understand America First, and its cognitive starting point in the transactional sensibilities of the Merchant, as moving from the object, to the signification that invests that object with meaning, and then to the interpretation that turns a single act of signification into a collective projection of meaning, through which a coherent and rationalized space can be organized.
These triads are then structured by the discursive device through which the Secretary turns underlying norms into textual performance. That device is the parallel layering of historical figures, which carries the past into the future and presents the future as iterative mimesis. To that end the Secretary offers his audience the layered parallelism of Plutarch's Parallel Lives. These lives, each signifying its time, were foundational to the constitution of the American Republic. They also represented a mimetic iteration of the earlier Greek and Roman cycle, within which the United States and Europe now choose pathways that offer hope, or ruin. And it is perhaps in that layered parallelism that America First and its significations may be found.
The essay begins where the Secretary starts his remarks, with the living ruin of the Acropolis. It follows the address through its twelve movements until it comes to rest with Webster's testimony of debt in 1824, on the view that the order of the speech is itself part of its argument. With that sequence in hand, the essay asks what the address might do to the America First project. It listens first for what the speech only hints at: Persia shading into Iran, China present only as an unnamed rival, the hemisphere, and the long Ottoman shadow. It then considers how the speech expands the project, moving its baseline from 1963 to 480 BCE and recasting national security as something closer to a theory of civilization. That expansion seems to carry a series of redirections, from institutions to character, from rights to duty, and from the deal to the debt, in which the scholar-warrior the Merchant once defined himself against reappears as an honored ancestor. Alongside these redirections the speech amplifies familiar themes, among them the politics of naming, sovereignty as the protected value of alliance, and a candid admission of empire, while the transactional machinery of the Merchant continues to run quietly beneath the myth.
From there the essay turns to object, signification, and interpretation in motion. It suggests that the mythic and operational currents of the speech wind around one another like a helix, each lending the other legitimacy or content, and that each interpretation the speech stabilizes becomes the object of the next. Along the way it pauses over Apollo on the moon, Plutarch's discipline of parallel without identity, the buried ruin beneath the Parthenon, and the vessel into which a civilization deposits its belief in itself. These threads gradually draw together into the triad of logos, thumos, and epithumia. Read now not as faculties of a soul but as registers of signification, their flows among and between one another may help explain how political and normative ideology constructs states and other forms of political agency. The essay then asks, tentatively, whether Taizong's three mirrors and the Homeric-Platonic soul might be two articulations of a single psycho-semiotic structure. If they are, the Secretary's reversal of the third mirror would take place in the register of thumos. In that reversal the United States is offered as the image in which Europe is invited to see its own shortcomings, and those shortcomings are to be felt as shame and answered with pride rather than recognized as error and corrected. A brief closing note leaves open whether Europe will recognize itself in that mirror or read the glass instead, which may be the question on which the next turn of the helix depends.
The essay is offered as a reading rather than a verdict, and readers are warmly invited to take it up in full and to carry the conversation forward.
Introduction
The address
Secretary Rubio delivered at the Pnyx on 7 October 2026 might
usefully be understood as a second foundation laid beneath a structure that was
already standing. The
Conceptual Architecture of America First described that
structure as a transition from an order organized around institutions and their
techno-bureaucratic managers (the Bureaucrat, 士) to one
organized around transactions and the people who make them (the
Merchant, 商).
It also suggested a weakness in that transition: every system appears to need a
narrative, and a politics of the deal may not, by itself, supply the cognitive
baseline from which a political line draws its authority. The Secretary’s
Munich address of February 2026, against which the current remarks are
considered, supplied one baseline, the year 1963 and the binary of communism
and freedom, from which the betrayal of 1989 could be narrated (Reflections
on Friendship, the Power of National Self-Actualization, and the Defining
Baseline of 1963 in and as America First--Text of Secretary of State Marco
Rubio at the Munich Security Conference). Athens may supply a
deeper one. It appears to move the starting point from 1963 to 480 BCE, from a
quarrel among allies to a genealogy of a civilization, and from the vocabulary
of trade, sovereignty, and borders to the vocabulary of ego, glory, and honor—spiritedness
(thumos or thymos, θυμός), what has been suggested to be, from its
Homeric origins, something at the foundation of every internal manifestation,
whether cognitive or intellectual, emotional, or physical (Caroline P. Caswell,
A
Study of Thumos in Early Greek Epic (Leiden: Brill, 1990)).
The analysis
proceeds in three steps, each building on what the prior one leaves unresolved.
Section 1 summarizes the speech movement by movement, since its argument
appears to be carried as much by sequence as by assertion. Section 2 then asks
what the speech might do to the America First project: what it hints at,
expands, redirects, and amplifies. Section 3 reads the speech through the
phenomenological semiotics developed in my earlier work: object, signification,
and interpretation as a recursive motion in which each interpretive matrix
becomes the object of the next turn. The speech seems unusually well suited to
that reading. It begins with a physical object (the Acropolis, standing behind
the speaker), it narrates a ruin that was buried and became a foundation, it
cites a precedent that cites a precedent (Webster, the Founders, Plutarch), and
it moves between two registers, the mythic and the operational, in alternating
rhythm. Read as text it is a sequence. Read as sign in motion it may be closer to
a helix, and Section 3 tries to suggest what that might mean. One might also
suspect that the speech's central device is its method, and that the method is
Plutarch's: Rubio layers parallel lives and parallel moments (Athens and Rome,
Alexander and Caesar, Webster and himself) into crystalline matrices that
suggest connection and iterative mimesis, but never identity. Running through
all three sections is thumos itself, which, it will be suggested, may serve
less as a theme of the address than as the semiotic force that animates it.
The epigraph
suggests the cognitive forms of the semiotics that follows. The maxim
attributed to the Tang Dynasty Emperor Taizong speaks of three mirrors: the
mirror of the appearance of the self, the mirror of what came before and what
might come next, and the mirror of the “other” through which one might better
“see” the self. Secretary Rubio may be read as using all three. He gazes into
the bronze mirror and sees in it America First; he gazes into the past to see
the present and the future; and he appears to reverse the gaze of the third,
inviting Europe to see itself in the mirror that is the U.S. The bronze mirror
reveals the U.S. straightening its outward garments; antiquity shows the West
what it was and could become; and for Europe, the United States are offered
(the plural, common before the U.S. Civil War, is used deliberately but to
different ends) as the image in which Europe might see its own successes and
now its contemporary shortcomings. That inversion, if it is one, is the essay's
central suggestion, developed further at Section 3.6.
A note on method
and sources. The reading is stereoscopic, an effort at a three dimensional
rendering, if only illusory, of two dimensional imagery reflecting the flatness
of the imaginaries depicted. I make no attempt to judge whether Rubio's
historical claims are true; the essay considers claims, normative and factual
assertions, as signs, and asks what interpretive communities might make of
them. Quotations from the address are taken from the published text of the
remarks.
1.
The Speech: A Comprehensive Summary
The address has
twelve movements. They are summarized here in order, because the order is part
of the argument.
I. The living ruin. Rubio opens by distinguishing the
Acropolis from the world's other ruins, which are places where history seems to
have exhausted itself. The Acropolis, he says, still calls the Western
imagination back. He tells the story of 480 BCE: Xerxes' armies burn Athens;
most Athenians evacuate by ship; a handful barricade themselves on the
Acropolis and hurl stones on the invaders; they are overwhelmed and the temples
razed. When the Athenians return they gather the broken remains of the old
Acropolis and bury them in the hill, and decades later, under Pericles, they
raise the Parthenon. It has stood twenty-five centuries, and the sons of Athens
and Rome have carried the civilization it represents to the ends of the earth.
(“The Persians plundered the temples, burned the shrines, and razed the
Acropolis to the ground but when the Athenians returned, they gathered the
broken remains of the old Acropolis and buried them in the hill where it had
stood. And decades later, under Pericles,
they raised the Parthenon.” Rubio
Remarks) One might glimpse here something of the cyclicity of a
civilization that repeats but is never quite the same as it was before.
II. The debt. Rubio introduces himself as Secretary of
State of a republic two and a half centuries old and the great-grandson of
settlers from Spain, and says he has come to testify to a debt that time and
distance cannot extinguish (“I stand here today as the Secretary of State of
that republic, and a great-grandson of settlers who arrived in the new world
from Spain – I stand here to testify to a debt that no lapse of time, no
distance of space can ever extinguish.” Rubio
Remarks). He catalogs the Greek fingerprints on American government:
columns, domes, the name Philadelphia. He asserts that the most commonly cited
author in the Federalist Papers was Plutarch, not an Enlightenment theorist. He
then concedes the familiar inheritance (democracy, philosophy, law, the
vocabulary of politics) and says it is true but shallow.
III. The deeper inheritance. What the West owes Athens, he argues, are
not institutions but qualities that cannot be reduced to any political system:
fierce individuality and ambition, daring exploration, a hunger for risk and
glory, an impatience with limits. These belong to a people, not a school. He
adds that the Greeks looked outward where other cultures looked inward, so that
they gave the West history itself, and that they bequeathed the conviction that
the unknown can be known because the cosmos has a rational order. That conviction
is the foundation of Western math, science, and medicine, and it prepared the
soil for the gospel and for the theology of Augustine, Aquinas, and natural
law. The result is a civilization with a common anthropology, a shared view of
man and his place in the universe.
IV. Excellence, contest, and thumos. The Greeks organized civic life around
contest, in art, war, athletics, and statecraft. Though everyone today has a
sense of what that means, some senses more informed than others, one might be
tempted to understand a (never “the”) consequence this way: the polis (πόλις), understood as the urban center and the
humans who constituted it, bound together with its chora (χώρα), so that this space and these humans
might together be understood as an arena in which great men proved themselves.
The alignment with modern sensibilities suggests both the connection to the old
notions and their attenuation over centuries. That gap is perhaps what
Secretary Rubio considers. He contrasts an age that builds downward, designing
standards so that no one loses and holding the exceptional hostage to the
average, with the Parthenon's builders, who built upward. Thumos, the
fire of passion, strength, courage, and pride, or perhaps more precisely ego,
glory, and honor, is for him the heart of great civilization, and without it
nations lose the will to fight, strive, and survive. Rubio holds up the mirror
of bronze and seems to see the raiment of Greek (Western) civilization that
remains at once unchanged and changed (“But the things we owe to this place –
as Americans, and as Westerners – are actually far far deeper. These institutions and ideas – these
institutions and ideas were the outward expression of more fundamental
qualities we see in the ancient Greeks – qualities that can’t be reduced to any
particular political system or theory. . . To know them is to know ourselves.” Rubio
Remarks).
V. The diagnosis. The contemporary West has forgotten
thumos. (“The thumos, as the ancient Greeks called it – the fire of
passion, strength, courage, pride – is the heart of great civilization.
And without it? Without it, nations lose their will to fight, the will to
strive, the will to survive. Today, too much of the West has forgotten
this quality. Over time, we in the West
came to feel ashamed of the very things that made us exceptional.” Rubio
Remarks). It grew ashamed of what made it exceptional, made nationalism a
dirty word, tore down monuments, taught children to be ashamed of their
countries, opened borders, outsourced industry, let militaries decay, and
transferred sovereignty to global bureaucracies. Others filled the vacuum.
It is here that
the embrace of thumos becomes interesting, and interesting in two ways. The
first is its apparent detachment of thumos from the Platonic triad, in which
the soul is a composite of logos, thumos, and epithumia—reason,
spiritedness, and the appetites. In the Timaeus, Plato places the
rational part in the head, the spirited part in the chest near the heart, and
the appetitive part below the midriff. The second is the address’s implicit
distance from much of what post modernity has done to thumos (again detached
from, or connected in distinctive ways to, logos and epithumia). The Secretary
might be heard to foreground the heart over the head and the gut. The reason
may be fairly clear, though its politics are contested. One might wonder
whether the Secretary was suggesting that several centuries of Enlightenment,
in which logos was foregrounded, produced tremendous systems, structures, and
technologies that were nonetheless soulless; a soullessness that could produce
the Industrial Revolution and, at its extreme, the capacity of collectives to
kill millions subject only to the end point of logical sequencing. Likewise the
gut, hysteria as well as the bodily passions, might be thought to produce
chaos; yet it also produces life. The antidote to chaos has often been thought
to reside in logos alone, which may in turn have stripped the body of life.
Thumos, the address might be thought to remind its listeners, could represent a
more classically balanced intermediary between reason without life and life
without reason, the place where both might be mediated. And it is perhaps that
centering which the speech suggests has been lost, its vestiges visible in
Enlightenment extremism on one side and populist chaos on the other. If both
logos and epithumia tend at their end points toward death, then thumos might be
read as life in the mediation between the extremes. This is not quite Plato, of
course, who in the Phaedrus made reason the charioteer driving the two
horses of spirit and appetite. The Secretary seems instead to suggest thumos
propelling humanity by harnessing the combustion of logos and epithumia. That
move may carry the Secretary from the ancients toward the post moderns. In the
context of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, there is an implication
worth considering (perhaps unconsciously put forward through the remarks) that
in modernity something of epithumia has been transformed into the ressentiment
of slave morality, against which thumos, though rarely named as such by
Nietzsche, might be read as a more pronounced mediating force, expressed
through the sublimation of base drives (cruelty, domination) into
something that embeds reason in desire. One might go further, with some
caution, and read Deleuze and Guattari’s “desiring-machines” (Anti-Oedipus)
as a later reworking of desire that some readers might set alongside thumos,
though neither author frames it that way. All of this lies well beyond what the
Secretary said, but perhaps not beyond the capacity of his audience to hear,
whether subliminally or otherwise.
VI. The crossroads and the choice. The Secretary does, however, suggest
where the diagnosis leads: the next decade will write the next century: the
West either keeps its place at the head of the world or sinks into atrophy and
servitude. “The course we take will determine whether the West maintains its
place at the head of the world or resigns itself to a future of atrophy and
servitude and decline. We will either
choose to act now or lose the choice to act at all.” (Rubio
Remarks). Under President Trump, the United States has chosen the
unapologetic pursuit of national power: control of critical supply chains,
reindustrialization, rebuilt defense, dominance in the technologies of the
future. It chooses new frontiers, named as advanced manufacturing and super
intelligence, drones, weapons and warfare, chips, minerals, cyber, energy, a
return to the moon, and a new age of space exploration.
VII. Greek statecraft. The ancient Greeks, for all their ideals,
were not naive. They understood national interests, the need for prudence and
diplomacy, and the need to wield force when those fail. Power requires the
credibility that one is willing to use it. This classical understanding is what
the Trump Administration hopes to reclaim, for the whole civilization.
VIII. Europe, Greece, and the ledger of
alliance. Europe can
awaken from its long slumber, and there are signs: higher defense spending, new
partnerships and programs, expanded production, following the commitments at
The Hague last year. Greece is a model ally on energy, migration, and defense,
and Rubio hopes Europe will follow. Passions have strained transatlantic bonds
but must not break them. The alliance should not be zero-sum; the proof offered
is the agreement among the United States, Denmark, and Greenland last month,
which he says reshapes the Arctic and in which all three partners emerged
victorious. "We want to win together. We must win together."
IX. Loyalty and the hero. Rubio rejects the fashionable view that
enlightened foreign policy ranks the global community above one's own people.
The Greeks saw nothing selfish in loyalty to one's nation. Their ideal was the
great man who wins immortality through striving and sacrifice for something
larger than himself, as in Socrates, the three hundred Spartans, and Achilles
choosing glory at Troy. The line runs through the Christian martyr, Thomas
More, the Alamo, and the pledge of lives, fortunes, and sacred honor in the
Declaration of Independence. This is the West's sense of duty, and he contrasts
it with the "radical mullahs of Iran," whose "cult of
death" celebrates martyrdom as an end in itself. Western heroes do not
worship death; they honor those who give life up rather than betray principle.
These qualities, he insists, are not universal. They are the product of a
distinct character that arose in Greece, and the civilization that carries them
must be defended with the passion of the forefathers.
X. The lineage. Athens passes to the builders of European
cathedrals (Milan, Cologne, Florence), to Michelangelo, and to Copernicus,
Galileo, Kepler, and Newton. The hunger for knowledge produces Magellan,
Columbus, and Apollo 11. The spirit that drove Alexander reappears in Caesar,
Charlemagne, and Cortes. In America the tradition rediscovers itself on an open
and wild land, where the Greek aspiration for new horizons becomes the frontier
spirit and Athens and Rome transform a seaboard republic into a continental empire.
The greatest Americans are "born in Athens, formed by Rome, baptized in
Christendom, hardened in the furnace of medieval Europe, endowed with the
English genius for liberty," and reborn in the new world.
XI. The inflection point. The threats are as real as in antiquity.
National interests did not vanish in the face of international institutions,
and war did not disappear because the West preferred peace. Institutions and
alliances must be rebuilt so that they defend the sovereignty of their members
rather than abolish it, and nations need not abandon their identities to
recognize common interests. Greece is a working model, in defense, energy,
technology, and the shared ambition to secure Europe's borders against mass
migration.
XII. Webster and the mirror. Rubio recalls the Greek rising of 1821
and Daniel Webster's address to Congress three years later, which pointed to
the columns and the assembly around him as evidence that Americans are Greece's
debtors. Those words, he says, are as true today. The history of Greece does
not merely show institutions in embryo; it shows an image of ourselves. The
West should be intensely proud of what he calls the greatest story ever known
to man, and from the first men and women of the West it can rediscover the
virtues, the courage, and the strength to face the dangers of its own time.
