On 7 October, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered a remarkable speech in Athens. The event did not produce significant headlines - but it should have.
Rubio’s statement deserves scrutiny, both because he could be a contender for the Republican nomination ahead of the 2028 presidential elections, and for the problematic nature of his comments (to say the least).
Standing before the Parthenon, he delivered less a speech than a sermon on civilisational destiny.
Rubio told his Athenian audience that the West owes the world its curiosity, its ambition, its “impatience with the notion of impossibility”. The setting was magnificent, and the rhetoric was built to match.
Unfortunately, it was nothing more than an exercise in selective memory and civilisational vanity.
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Rubio’s central claim was that the ancient Greeks gave rise to traits that “would come to define the West”, setting it apart from “so many other cultures and civilisations where stability and subsistence were the highest ends of life”.
This sentence deserves close attention. It essentially describes the builders of Cambodia’s Angkor temples, the astronomers of Samarkand, the engineers of the Inca road system, and the mathematicians of India’s Kerala as people who aimed for subsistence.
It ignores Ibn Battuta, who spent three decades crossing the known world, longer than Marco Polo’s journey. It overlooks the Polynesian navigators who settled the Pacific with no instruments. The list could go on and on.
History of subjugation
It is also a strange reading of the Greeks themselves. Rubio praised Herodotus-style curiosity as a western trait, yet much of what reached medieval Europe from Greek philosophy and science survived because Baghdad’s Islamic scholars translated, preserved and extended it.
The “unbroken” western inheritance he described ran through Arab-Islamic libraries and Muslim Spain. A civilisation that borrows, adapts, and is rescued by others is the normal human story - not a lineage of lone exceptionalism.
Rubio presented Alexander the Great, Caesar, Charlemagne and Cortes as bearers of one noble flame, hailing “the qualities that led Alexander to conquer the entire known world”.
The western science and cartography Rubio celebrates were instruments of conquest, used to chart coasts, classify peoples and justify hierarchies
Cortes, we should remember, destroyed the Aztec capital and subjugated millions. Columbus, who Rubio credited with “discovery”, began a system of forced labour and enslavement on Hispaniola that devastated the native population within a generation.
The same restless hunger “to know the mysteries” and “chafe at all boundaries” drove the Atlantic slave trade, in which roughly 12 million Africans were forced onto ships; well over a million died in the crossing.
It also drove the partition of Africa at the Berlin Conference in 1884-85; the Opium Wars in the mid-19th century, where the United Kingdom forced narcotics on China at gunpoint; and the devastation of India and Belgian King Leopold’s Congo, where rubber quotas were enforced with mutilation, and millions died.
The western science and cartography Rubio celebrates were instruments of conquest, used to chart coasts, classify peoples and justify hierarchies.
Rubio spoke of “daring exploration and invention”, as though the word “exploration” required no further comment. For those on the receiving end, exploration was frequently the first stage of invasion.
A speech that celebrates ambition, but never counts the costs, is not history; it is advertising.
Rhetorical trap
The venue itself undermined Rubio’s argument. The Athens of Pericles, the golden age Rubio invoked, ran on slavery. Enslaved people made up a large share of Attica’s population, working the silver mines at Laurion, in conditions that few survived. Women and foreigners were excluded from citizenship. The democracy Rubio admires was a democracy of a minority of adult men.
The speech’s most revealing passage was his diagnosis of the contemporary West. Rubio argued that the West lost its thumos, its fire, because it became “ashamed of the very things that made us exceptional”.
Prosperity became “a source of guilt”. Countries “opened our borders and outsourced our industry”, and surrendered sovereignty to “global bureaucracies”.
For the record, the country that in the 20th century advocated more than anyone else a policy of “open borders” was the US itself. This same country outsourced its industry abroad for greed, increasing profits by reducing labour costs and throwing US blue-collar workers under the bus.
Rubio turns historical scholarship into weakness. In his view, those who study the slave trade, colonial violence or the dispossession of Native Americans are participants in civilisational decline - people who have lost the will to survive.
This is a rhetorical trap. It makes honest accounting unpatriotic, and leaves only celebration.
Meanwhile, Rubio described the US itself as an “open and wild land” that became the site of a “great revival of western imagination”, noting that the Greek aspiration for new horizons “became the American frontier spirit”.
Once again, for the record, that land was neither open nor empty. It was inhabited by hundreds of indigenous tribes, who were displaced, killed or confined into reserves through treaties broken as quickly as they were signed. Rubio’s speech was the old language of manifest destiny, polished for a new audience.
He then added that this tradition “transformed an infant seaboard republic into a continental empire” - the last word uttered without apparent unease, even approvingly. That word choice, from a State Department that claims to oppose imperial ambitions elsewhere, deserves attention.
Flaw that brought down kings
Finally, there is the contrast Rubio draws with Iran, whose leaders, he said, worship death, while “our heroes do not”. It is a comfortable line that conveniently forgets how often western powers have glorified sacrifice for flag and empire.
The slaughter of 1914 was sold to young Europeans in precisely these terms of duty, honour and glory. The cult of heroic death is hardly foreign to the West. Pretending otherwise requires forgetting the First World War entirely.
The Greeks had a word for what Rubio’s speech displayed: hubris, the arrogance of the powerful who mistake fortune for virtue. Their tragedians returned to it obsessively. It was the flaw that brought down kings who believed their success proved their superiority.
The play Persians by Aeschylus, performed eight years after the Battle of Salamis, depicts the fall of the Persian emperor Xerxes as a warning to the victors, not a taunt to the defeated.
A speech delivered at the symbol of Greek history could have honoured that tradition. It could have said that the western inheritance is a mixture of brilliance and brutality; that curiosity without humility leads to catastrophe; and that the best use of the past is to learn from its failures. Instead, Rubio offered a flattering mirror.
The intention here is not to deny the numerous outstanding achievements of western civilisation, beginning with the very tools of self-critique now used against it, or its role in the abolition of slavery and in the promotion of human rights law, science and human progress - but rather to place them in the right context, to avoid the mistaken belief that there is no alternative, or, as Rubio’s poor choice of words suggests, that there must not be.
The civilisation that the US secretary of state, and - God forbid - potentially next US president, described in his speech never actually existed. The one that did, with its conquests, slave ships and genuine achievements, deserves a more honest steward.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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