Commentary

He Stood Where They Voted Centuries Ago, and He Talked About Winning

Posted on by Bill McCarthy

Marco Rubio spoke Wednesday evening on the Pnyx, the hill where ancient Athens held its assembly, with the Parthenon over his shoulder and about 250 Greek and European officials and reporters in front of him. He is the secretary of state. The trip is Iceland, Greece, and Portugal, three allies in the same week. He had already sat with the Greek prime minister. The speech was not a communique. It was a case that loyalty to your own country is the old Western habit, and that the next ten years decide whether the West stays at the head of the world or settles for atrophy, servitude, and decline.

The ten things he actually said

1. Your own people come first, and he called that Greek. It has become fashionable, he said, to believe that an enlightened foreign policy means putting the global community ahead of your own people. The men of ancient Greece, he said, knew there was nothing selfish or wrong about loyalty to your nation, or about fighting for its interests above all else. That is the whole doctrine, stated on the hill where the doctrine of the assembly was invented. He tied it to the president by name. Under President Trump, the United States has made its choice. We choose the unapologetic pursuit of national power.

2. The next decade writes the next century. He put a clock on it. The course taken now decides whether the West keeps its place at the head of the world or resigns itself to atrophy, servitude, and decline. That is not a management memo. It is a claim that the argument about national interest is the argument about whether the civilization continues.

3. Europe is asleep, and Greece is the counterexample. He said Europe can awaken from its long slumber and rekindle the fire lit on that hill. He pointed at what he called the good signs: defense spending up, manufacturing and production expanding, a flurry of new partnerships. Greece, he said, has been a model ally on energy, on migration, and on defense. The ask underneath it is the one the alliance has been hearing for a year. An ally is a military multiplier, not a client. He told the prime minister afterward that the alliance rests on shared culture and shared values, and that it has grown.

4. He defended ambition, and he named the habit of lowering the bar. The Greeks, he said, organized civic life around contest, ambition, and competition, in philosophy, poetry, athletics, war, and statecraft. The modern habit, he said, is to build downwards, to design standards so that no one will lose, to hold the exceptional hostage to the average, the ordinary, the mediocre. He told the audience to take the line that runs through Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton. Excellence, in his telling, was the Greek principle of a man’s existence. Safety as the highest good was the thing he set against it.

5. He put the American founding in that line, and he cited Plutarch. Greece, he said, is carved into the capital: columns, domes, and Philadelphia, a Greek name. The most commonly cited author in the Federalist Papers, he said, was not an Enlightenment theorist. It was Plutarch, the biographer of the great men of Greece and Rome. He stood there as secretary of state and as the great-grandson of settlers who came to the New World from Spain, and he called the debt one that time and distance do not cancel.

6. He named Columbus and Cortés. The canon he read included the explorer and the conquistador, which is a choice. He did not apologize for the names. The speech treated exploration, risk, and the outward look as the Western trait, against cultures whose highest end was stability and subsistence. A secretary who puts those two men in a speech on the Pnyx is telling the audience that the inheritance includes the conquest, not only the philosophy.

7. He drew a line at the cult of death. He went after political Islam and, in his words, the radical mullahs of Iran, whose cult of death hails child suicide bombers as national heroes and portrays martyrdom as an end in itself. Our heroes may be willing to die for their cause, he said, but our heroes do not worship death. That is the sharpest policy sentence in the address. It sits next to a war with Iran that is not over, and next to a Greek government that has to live with the eastern Mediterranean as it is.

8. He named the fields he wants dominated. Drone warfare. Critical minerals. Cybersecurity. Super intelligence, the president’s name for the new computing. Rebuild the institutions and the alliances, he said, for a new set of great-power rivalries and a new universe of threats. The list is industrial. It is not a plea for a rules-based order. It is a claim on the tools.

9. The Greek meeting filled in the map the speech left blank. Off the hill, he told an Athens paper that American and Greek interests overlap on energy and on supply lines that now run through the most volatile water on earth, the Strait of Hormuz and potentially the Red Sea. He called a fight between Greece and Turkey unimaginable. Both are allies. It would be good for neither, and not good for the United States. He called the Greek-Israeli defense relationship a positive, and said the hard part is keeping that tie while keeping workable relations with other states in the region that do not share it. He said Washington is ready to make quiet diplomatic efforts to head off a crisis over the power cable meant to link the grids across that sea.

10. The production was the tell. Four cameras, one of them on a crane. A hillside. A canon. A sentence about national power with the president’s name on it, and a sentence about the next century with nobody else’s. He is the secretary of state, three years from an open nomination, speaking in the place where the assembly met. The speech does the job of a diplomat and the job of a man who intends to be read later. The content is the same either way. Nation first. Allies who spend and who hold the line. No cult of death. Dominate the new tools. Do not be ashamed of the inheritance, including the parts with blood on them.

He did not announce a treaty. He announced a standard, on the hill where they used to vote, and he applied it to the president’s foreign policy, to Europe’s budgets, to Iran, and to the next decade. The prime minister said the speech would resonate past the place it was given. That was the point of the crane.

Help American Liberty PAC in our mission to elect conservatives and save our nation. Support – American Liberty PAC