Rubio plays Good Cop to Trump's Bad Cop, invites EU to join the new imperial project

Marco Rubio got applause from a European audience in Munich for reiterating age-old imperialist and supremacist ideas popularised by two academics. One was Samuel Huntington, whose seminal essay, The Clash of Civilisations, published in Foreign Policy magazine in 1993, took the academic world by storm. The other was Niall Ferguson’s Empire: How Britain Made The Modern World. Huntington wrote that future conflicts would revolve around the edges of various civilisations, and not necessarily around nation-states. He also tried to define civilisations by their foundational ideas and ideologies, with the western civilisation being influenced by Judeo-Christian experience. Ferguson defended the idea of the British empire as something that benefited those who were ruled by the largest colonial empire the world has even seen.

Rubio’s speech is remarkable not because his ideas are entirely novel, but because they came at a time when Europe has been miffed by Donald Trump’s repeated insults. The US now needs to make more emollient noises to bring Europe back to its side at a time when the rest of the world is exploring options around China and other rising powers. It is highly unlikely that Rubio could have made that speech anywhere outside the US and Western Europe. (You can read the full speech here, or view it on YouTube, for then you get to hear the applause as well)

Quite simply, Rubio has tried to play good cop after Trump did his bad cop routine. He was trying to woo Europe back from its own sense of isolation and desperate search for new friends. The applause was one of relief, and possibly tapped into two different veins of support: one is the appeal to the new nativist Right, which is rising almost all over Europe, spooked by immigrants who are “not like us”. The other is the appeal to the non-Left-Liberal middle segment of the globalist elite, which has benefited the most from globalisation and the rise of tech-based capitalism, but is now equally concerned by woke ideologies. There is now a global pushback against the loss of national sovereignty and open borders in almost all countries.

It is worth parsing Rubio’s speech, especially that parts where he talks about the US’s new approach to the world. It is an unabashed, imperialist vision focused not any version of a reasonable rules-based order, but one where the US and Europe make the rules and expand their power and influence.

Rubio’s pitch to Europe was simple. He said: “We are part of one civilisation – Western civilisation.  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 civilisation to which we have fallen heir.”

Huntington would have approved.

Talking about western security, which was the focus of the Munich conference, Rubio went linked security to civilisational identity: “National security, which this conference is largely about, is not merely a series of technical questions - how much we spend on defence or where, how we deploy it, these are important questions. They are. But they are not the fundamental one. 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 civilisation 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.”

He did not mention hegemony, but that is what is implied.

Ferguson would have nodded once more, but from mere pride in the common heritage, Rubio went on to paint the vision of a new imperialism, an imperialism that cannot be rebuilt unless one sheds past guilt over colonialism and supremacist thinking. James Mill and Thomas Macaulay would have liked this formulation too.

Hear Rubio again: “…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 civilisation, and who, together with us, are willing and able to defend it. And this is why we do not want allies to rationalise the broken status quo rather than reckon with what is necessary to fix it, for we in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline.”

In other words, don’t feel guilty about past colonisation.

Rubio was unabashed in his pitch for a new imperialism by harking back to how the west gained supremacy in the past and why that quest must be resumed now. “For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding – its 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. But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, it was contracting. Europe was in ruins. Half of it lived behind an Iron Curtain and the rest looked like it would soon follow. The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come.” 

One wonders why he had to combine anti-colonialism with Communism, though it would be true to say that most newly-freed nations found socialism to be a vital part of ideological armoury to tackle extreme poverty.

Rubio’s diagnosis on why the west lost its drive to conquer and dominate goes back to the fall of the Berlin Wall, an event that led Francis Fukuyama to proclaim the “end of history” and the rise of a new, liberal democratic order. Hear Rubio on this: “But the euphoria of this triumph (the fall of the Berlin Wall) 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…In this delusion, we embraced a dogmatic vision of free and unfettered trade, even as some nations protected their economies and subsidised their companies to systematically undercut ours - shuttering our plants, resulting in large parts of our societies being deindustrialised, shipping millions of working and middle-class jobs overseas, and handing control of our critical supply chains to both adversaries and rivals.”

That most of this shift was encouraged by the very same big companies that benefited from free trade was beside the point for Rubio. But he still managed to come to a hypocritical conclusion. The US, he indicated, will neither abandon the old order, nor embrace change that is more inclusive. He said: “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.”

Put another way, the US will use the existing institutions for its own purpose, but work outside them to protect its “vital interests.”

One should have no doubt that if at all these institutions are rebuilt, they will be built to an American order.

Then he indulged in patent nonsense, unless the reference was to Europe and China. Rubio said: “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. 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. “

One wonders what Europe, which has been obsessed about climate change, thinks about this, though they may agree now that they invested too little on defence. As for China, its rise was clearly engineered by the US in a foolish attempt to corner Russia. Now Russia and China are in the same corner. 

The rest of the world cannot buy Rubio’s claim that the US outsourced sovereignty to global institutions, when these institutions were always under the thumb of the US. Even at the UN, it was the US which brought China as a permanent member in order to neutralise Russia. And what sovereignty has the US sacrificed when it has kept itself out of any globalist institution that threatened its own sovereignty (eg, the International Court of Justice), and did not allow the UN to dictate any of its interventions abroad? The US did not surrender any sovereignty to global institutions.

For India, this Rubio speech should come as an eye-opener, for it brings out the imperialist and colonial strains in US hegemonic ambitions. If it indeed appeals to both the Right and the Centre of European politics, it could take Europe back to American vassalhood.