Rubio declared a return to brutal western colonialism - and Europe applauded

In Munich, the US announced its intent to crush all opposition to its permanent status as imperial top dog, even if that means destroying everything, and all of us, in the process

[First published by Middle East Eye]

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speech at the Munich Security Conference last weekend was another troubling declaration of intent by the Trump administration.

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.”

That course went into reverse 80 years ago: "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."

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.

No peace, no order

Quite astonishingly, Rubio was greeted with enthusiastic applause throughout his speech from an audience comprising heads of state, politicians, diplomats and military officials. He is reported to have received a standing ovation from half of the attendees.

They seemed swept up in Rubio’s triumphalist account of empire, one utterly oblivious to the well-documented realities of “western domination” – not least its brutal colonial tyrannies, its industrial-scale genocides and the mass enslavement of native populations.

These were not unfortunate episodes or mistakes in the West’s imperial past. They were integral to it. They were the coercive means by which colonised peoples were stripped of their assets and labour to finance empire.

He also appeared blind to another downside of the colonial West, which was all too evident over those five centuries. Ruthless competition between European states, vying to be first to pillage resources in the Global South, led to endless wars in which Europeans, as well as the people they colonised, were killed.

Empire did not ensure order, let alone peace. Colonialism was about systematised theft – and, as the saying goes, there is rarely honour among thieves.

In the dog-eat-dog world that preceded international law, each colonial power was out for its own advancement against rivals. That culminated in two terrible wars in the first half of the 20th century that decimated Europe itself.

Because Rubio does not understand the past, his vision of the future is inevitably defective as well. Any attempt by the Trump administration to restore overt western colonial rule will prove suicidal. As we shall see, such a venture would spell doom for us all. In fact, we may already be well advanced on that path.

Imperial muscles

There are a number of glaring flaws in Rubio and the Trump administration’s thinking.

First, Rubio’s assertion that the West gave up colonialism some 80 years ago is flatly wrong. At the end of the Second World War, Europe’s physically battered and economically exhausted colonial powers passed the baton of empire to the US. Washington did not end colonialism. It rationalised and streamlined it.

Washington continued the European tradition of overthrowing nationalist leaders and installing weak, obedient clients in their stead.

It also seeded the globe with hundreds of US military bases to project hard power, while exploiting new globalising technologies to project soft power. Economic carrots and sticks, wielded largely out of view through the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, incentivised submission to its diktats by non-western leaders.

Washington’s freedom of manoeuvre was limited chiefly by a rival power in the form of the Soviet Union, which armed and subsidised its own clients. The Cold War kept the US empire in relative check. That was not “decline”, as Rubio claims. It was simple pragmatism: avoiding confrontation in a nuclear age that could, through a misstep, lead to global annihilation.

Over the past 30 years, since the fall of the Soviet Union, the US has flexed its imperial muscles ever more aggressively: in the former Yugoslavia, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Iraq again, in Libya, in Syria, and now – assisted by its ultimate client state, Israel – more widely across the oil-rich Middle East, in Palestine, Lebanon and Iran.

Long before Trump’s first term as president, Washington’s core bipartisan foreign policy aims involved boxing in Russia, chiefly through creeping colonisation of former Soviet states, and threatening China over Taiwan.

In typical Trumpian fashion, Rubio has simply made explicit what was already implicit. The US has been an imperial superpower since the 1940s and has become an ever more confrontational one in a world of diminishing resources, where it enjoys the advantage of being the sole military superpower.

Rubio is simply more honest than his predecessors about the decades-long trajectory of US foreign policy.

Horror show

There is a good reason why “godless communists“ and their God-obsessed successors waged “anti-colonial uprisings” that ultimately could not be contained by western empire.

The West's ruling colonial elite had spent centuries making life in the Global South a horror show, whether through brutal tyranny, massacres or the slave trade.

Native populations were desperate for liberation from western-imposed “order”, which is why, after World War Two, so many turned to a communist Soviet Union rather than the US for support.

In the West’s last settler-colonial client outposts – apartheid South Africa until 1994, and apartheid Israel today – there were sustained mass revolts by those they oppressed.

Living under white-minority rule in South Africa was dangerous and soul-crushing if you were not white, just as living under a system of Jewish supremacy in Israel and occupied Palestine is dangerous and soul-crushing if you are not Jewish.

Note too that both of these apartheid regimes spawned global solidarity movements.

Most people – even westerners – understand that oppressing another people, denying their humanity and their right to equality, is profoundly unjust and immoral. That is not going to change because Washington has a misty-eyed view of colonialism and apartheid.

The lesson from history is that any intensification of US imperialism by the Trump administration will provoke intensified resistance. That should already be clear to anyone who has not been dozing through the past 20 years.

Extortion of Ukraine

Russian President Vladimir Putin was excoriated in the West when he set out the geostrategic rationale for his invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, for example, accused Putin of imagining himself as Peter the Great and trying to restore Russia’s imperial past.

Zizek cited as proof a speech delivered by Putin to a group of young entrepreneurs in Moscow in June 2022, a few months after the invasion. Putin stated: “Any country, any people, any ethnic group should ensure their sovereignty. Because there is no in-between, no intermediate state: either a country is sovereign, or it is a colony, no matter what the colonies are called.”

Putin’s meaning should have been obvious at the time, given that for more than two decades a series of administrations in Washington had co-opted former Soviet states into Nato – the US empire’s military alliance – and located military bases ever closer to Moscow.

The promise made in 2008 by Nato to allow Ukraine to join the alliance at some point in the future could be interpreted by the Russian leadership in only one way: as a threat. If realised, Nato’s nuclear warheads would be minutes from the Kremlin.

Putin was determined to maintain Russian sovereignty and avoid becoming yet another “in-between” colony of the US empire, as it so nearly did under his drunken predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. The Russian leader rejected Europe’s model of handing Washington the keys to its resources, economy and defence systems.

Doubtless, Putin noted with smug satisfaction Trump’s extortion of Ukraine last year, when President Volodymyr Zelensky was made to sign away his country’s mineral wealth in return for US protection. It was a perfect illustration of Putin’s point that there are no “intermediate” states in a world of ugly power politics: you are either sovereign or a colony of a stronger power.

It was that very logic that prompted Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine. If that was difficult to make sense of at the time, it should be easier to comprehend now in the light of Rubio’s speech.

Given Washington’s imperial ambitions, Ukraine was going to fall into the geostrategic orbit of the US, becoming another colonial outpost for its war machine, unless Russia compelled its neighbour into its own geostrategic orbit first.

New normal of Gaza

The Trump administration is making its realpolitik clear: the genocidal erasure of Gaza is the new normal, as is the kidnapping of world leaders such as Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro.

European states are increasingly nervous about Trump’s unapologetic imperialism and what it might mean for them. The threat to seize Greenland from Denmark was a wake-up call; it reportedly dominated discussions at the Munich conference.

In line with Putin’s warning four years ago, European leaders are scrambling to consider how they might regain a degree of sovereignty to stop their irreversible colonisation by the US.

Rubio tried to placate them by inviting Europe to join Washington in resurrecting western empire. The offer was pure deception.

This is no joint project, as they should have understood when Trump introduced tariffs as a stick to beat them into greater servitude; when he ditched support for Ukraine, their proclaimed rampart against “Russian imperialism”; and when he demanded ownership of Greenland.

Those “betrayals” were the stimulus for a speech by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at the Davos World Economic Forum last month.

There, he warned that the 80-year-old rules-based order was a “pleasant fiction”, a cover story that allowed US allies to benefit from American hegemony “with public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes”.

And for that reason, Washington’s allies had colluded in the deception: “We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.”

It was, said Carney, time to stop “living within a lie”.

Many assumed that the Canadian leader was voicing, on behalf of technocratic allies in Europe such as Britain’s Keir Starmer and France’s Emmanuel Macron, a new commitment to transparency and honesty as a counterweight to US law-breaking abroad.

Nothing could be further from the truth, as highlighted by Carney, Starmer and Macron’s continuing complicity in the Gaza genocide and their silence over Trump’s threats to launch a war of aggression against Iran.

The purpose of Carney’s Davos speech was something else entirely. Trump’s own honesty – his open contempt for international law and enthusiasm for old-school imperialism – threatens to expose their hypocrisy in riding on US coattails.

They have not changed their ways. They simply want Trump to stop blowing up the facade they constructed to conceal and prettify their collusion in US colonialism.

Rubio detonated those lies once again at Munich. When he declared a return to avowed might-is-right imperialism, the conference broke into applause.

Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission’s technocrat-in-chief, said she felt “very much reassured” by Rubio’s speech, calling him a “good friend”.

Nuclear Armageddon

The biggest misdirection in Rubio’s remarks was his omission of the real reason the West abandoned overt colonialism after the Second World War and built international institutions such as the United Nations.

It was not an acceptance of defeat or decline by the US, but rather a recognition that, with the rapid development of nuclear arsenals by the superpowers in the wake of the war, a system capable of mediating the worst excesses of power had become a necessity.

It was the only hope of preventing reckless colonial competition and confrontation that could trigger a Third World War likely to spiral quickly into nuclear armageddon.

Nothing has changed over the past eight decades.

Russia and China still have large nuclear arsenals, and Moscow now has hypersonic missiles capable of carrying these warheads at unprecedented speeds.

There is still no failsafe mechanism to prevent misunderstandings from rapidly escalating into mutual attack.

Human nature has not changed since the 1940s - only the arrogance of a superpower determined to prevent great powers like China or Russia from ever ousting it from its imperial perch.

The threat of nuclear annihilation has not diminished. It has grown exponentially as limitations on global resources – those needed to sustain western consumption and endless “economic growth” – put ever greater pressure on the US to discard its mask as the guardian of superior values.

Rubio used the Munich conference to lay bare the new reality: Washington will no longer pay lip service to being the nice guy or abiding by any red lines.

The US is determined to crush all opposition to its permanent status as imperial top dog – even if it means destroying everything, and all of us, in the process.

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