The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, delivered a classically inspired apologia for Donald Trump’s “America first” foreign policy on Wednesday, giving a sweeping speech to the backdrop of the Parthenon in Athens that appeared tailor-made for campaign ads if he runs for president in 2028.
In the speech, the top US diplomat drew historical parallels from the founders, philosophers and conquerers of antiquity to the modern American spirit – as well as his family’s own journey to the United States – as he called on Europe to “awaken from its long slumber” and reject a “future of atrophy and servitude and decline”.
The highly produced speech contained a forceful rejection of the kind of globalist politics that Trump has blamed for America’s and Europe’s ills, including growing illegal immigration and the outsourcing of manufacturing. In it, Rubio warned that the western world was at an “inflection point” and defended America’s “unapologetic pursuit of national power”.
“The word nationalism became a dirty word, so we tore down our monuments,” Rubio said. “We condemned our own history, and in too many places, we taught our children to be ashamed of the country they would inherit.”
Now, he said, the western world had found itself at a crossroads, where it either must “maintain its place at the head of the world or [resign] itself to a future of atrophy, servitude and decline”.
“Under President Trump, the United States has made its choice,” Rubio continued. “We choose the unapologetic pursuit of national power: to take back control of our critical supply chains, to reindustrialise our economy, to rebuild our defense, to fight for dominance of the technologies and industries of the future.”
The speech comes as relations between the US and Europe are facing numerous strains, including the US war in Iran, Washington’s scattershot support for Ukraine’s defense against Russia, disputes inside Nato including Trump’s recent demands for sovereignty over Greenland, and a growing ideological divide being driven by powerful officials including the US vice-president, JD Vance.
The shift in the Trump administration’s use of national power has unsettled many European allies, who have continued to seek compromises in order to keep the Trump administration onside on major issues including support for Ukraine and economic cooperation through the European Union.
Vance, a likely contender in the 2028 elections, put European allies on notice last year in a speech at the Munich security conference, when he accused leaders of being “terrified of their own people” and warned about the “threat from within” that Europe would reject values it shared with the US.
Rubio has developed a less aggressive – but nonetheless pointed – message of calling for European powers led by the US to fight against “civilisational erasure”.
Rubio addressed the tensions as he invoked Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address in 1861 on the eve of the civil war, saying: “Though passions may, at times, have strained the bonds of affection between the United States and Europe, it must not be allowed to break them.”
“Together, we must strengthen an alliance capable of confronting threats of our age,” he said, extolling the recent agreement between the US, Denmark, and Greenland that he claimed will “reshape the Arctic and bolster the security of all of Nato.”
But the speech on Wednesday indicates that the shift in US geopolitical power may remain through a following presidency, as two of the most prominent Republican officials in the current administration have delivered forceful declarations to Europe that there will not be a return to the politics of the past.
On Wednesday, speaking to a crowd of 250 invited Greek and European officials, as well as journalists, Rubio sought to rally European allies, saying they should follow the example of the current government of Greece, to embrace a partnership with the US on everything from “everything from energy to migration to defense, where Greece has been a model ally”.
“We believe that Europe can awaken from its long slumber and rekindle the fire that was lit here millennia ago,” Rubio said, pointing to positive tendencies including increases in European defense spending, expanded manufacturing and production, and a “flurry” of new partnerships and programs.
To bolster his case, Rubio delivered a selective reading of history from antiquity to the present, saying that the values of the Ancient Greeks imbued those of later scientists and explorers, including some controversial choices including Christopher Columbus and the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, whose legacies are associated with the subjugation of Latin America.
But Rubio said they, as well as many others, carried a frontier spirit that was born in antiquity.
“The greatest Americans of every generation have carried the unmistakable features of their forefathers – born in Athens, formed by Rome, baptized in Christendom, hardened in the furnace of medieval Europe, endowed with the English genius for liberty, and then carried across the Atlantic to be reborn on the shores of a new world,” he said.
The Acropolis speech was heavily produced, with four cameras including one mounted on a crane, and was unusual for a secretary of state delivering a speech during a three-country swing through Iceland, Portugal and finally Greece.
In an unusual aside for the US’s top diplomat, Rubio also linked his own journey back to Europe, and then back to the Greeks of antiquity as well.
“Two and a half centuries after the founding of the American republic halfway across the world from where I stand now – 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,” he said.
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