© Alexandra Beier/Pool/AFPUS Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks during the 62nd Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany, on 14 February 2026.
The explicit goal of US foreign policy, according to Rubio, is to resurrect the western colonial order that persisted for some five centuries until the Second World War.
Old-school, white-man's-burden colonialism is unapologetically back.
In Rubio's preposterous retelling, Europe's colonisation of much of the planet, and the rape and pillage of its resources, was a glorious era of western exploration, innovation and creativity. The West brought a "superior" civilisation to backward peoples while maintaining global order.
Reflecting on the era before 1945, he observed: "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."
According to Rubio, that decline was accelerated by what he dismissed as the "abstractions of international law", established by the United Nations in the immediate postwar period. In the pursuit of what he derisively termed "a perfect world", these new universal laws - ones that treated all humans as equal - served only to hamstring western colonialism.
Rubio neglected to mention that the purpose of international law was to prevent a return to the horrors of the Second World War: the extermination of civilians in death camps and the firebombing of European and Japanese cities.
During his speech, Rubio offered Europe the chance to join the Trump administration in reviving "the West's age of dominance" to "renew the greatest civilisation in human history."
"What we want is a reinvigorated alliance that recognises that what has ailed our societies is not just a set of bad policies but a malaise of hopelessness and complacency. An alliance - the alliance that we want is one that is not paralysed into inaction by fear - fear of climate change, fear of war, fear of technology," he said.
Comment: Choice B. The oligarchs and neo-nazi goons keeping him in power won't let him settle, because as long as the war goes on he keeps breathing and the money laundering machine keeps spinning. Btw Vlodomir, sweetie, war is, and has never been "fair". Welcome to reality.
Aaaand more tantrums: