<
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/17/maga-marco-rubio-munich-security-conference>
"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 longtime
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 – about 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.”"
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
