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Marco Rubio’s recent speech at the Munich Security Conference (telling Europeans that the US and Europe “belong together”) triggered immediate controversy, especially on social media platforms. While many commentators have been denouncing it, several European officials reportedly offered a standing ovation.
Social media commentators aside, Western specialists however did not pay much attention to the deeper implication of the US Secretary of State’s rhetoric: an enthusiastic defense of colonialism and an implicit call to recolonize the Global South. Albeit underreported, this may be the most consequential aspect of the address.
Rubio’s speech, delivered on February 14, framed world politics as a kind of civilizational struggle. He praised five centuries of Western expansion, lauding those who settled “new continents” and built “vast empires extending out across the globe.”
Tellingly, he then portrayed decolonization as a tragedy, accelerated by “godless communist revolutions” and anti-colonial uprisings that, according to him (in a very Cold War-like tone), spread the “red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map”.
For Rubio, the West’s decline was imposed, and it must now be reversed to “renew the greatest civilization in human history.” This blunt nostalgia for empire was applauded in the hall, the audience being overwhelmingly Western (with a few Global South representatives present).
The speech in fact echoed earlier interventions, as noted by political scientist Nathalie Tocci, who argued that Rubio offered a subtler version of JD Vance’s 2025 address. Tocci warned that the dismissal of a rules-based order (in favor of “raw power”) positions Europe as junior partners in a US-led empire, thereby lulling Europeans into a false sense of security - while US and European interests actually diverge.
Daniel Drezner (a Tufts University's Fletcher School academic) went further, calling the speech repackaged Trumpism with imperial and colonial undertones, and highlighting the logical contradiction of praising centuries of conquest while lamenting post-1945 anti-colonial revolutions as the source of Western decline.
Overall, not many Western commentators noticed that Rubio was really defending the recolonization of the Global South. A few did. Trita Parsi (of the Quincy Institute), for instance, described the address as an “embrace of empire and colonisation,” basically urging Europe to join a US-led effort to restore Western dominance over the Global South through control of supply chains, minerals, AI, and markets.
Likewise, French businessman and commentator Arnaud Bertrand called it “one of the most revisionist and imperialist” speeches by a US official, and an open invitation for Europe to share the “spoils” of a new imperial order. Writing for India Today, journalist Sushim Mukul in turn likened Rubio’s economic prescriptions to the East India Company.
That European leaders applauded Rubio’s words is itself quite revealing. One may recall that in October 2022 top European diplomat Josep Borrell sparked outrage internationally by calling Europe a “garden” surrounded by a “jungle” (the rest of the world). Rubio’s Munich applause shows that the European colonial mindset persists. Be as it may, Europe today is itself increasingly treated as part of a subordinated periphery, targeted, as it is, by American tariffs, economic warfare, and even threats of annexation in Greenland (Denmark).
It thus follows that Washington’s approach to its allies is rather schizophrenic, so to speak. It insistently shifts the “burden” of Ukraine onto Europe while antagonizing its European “allies”; and then invokes shared classical heritage - to demand obedience.
As I have argued elsewhere, even delegation requires trust, while coercion erodes it, thus pushing Europe toward strategic uncertainty. The US currently declares the transatlantic alliance obsolete (as seen in the NSS document), while praising Western unity.
Rubio’s rhetoric in any case also fits a broader trend: an American return to Monroeism (or to a strange new version of it), and, moreover, to what Eric Hobsbawm famously called “The Age of Empire” (1875–1914). Threats against Greenland, military interventions in South America (as recently seen in Venezuela), and the declaration, by Western leaders at Davos, that the US-centric order is “over” all point to major changes and a return to crude unmasked imperialism.
Rubio’s somewhat anachronic fixation on “communism” in the Global South is equally revealing. Whatever one thinks of the socialist period, and its many failures and contradictions, the Soviet Union undeniably supported anti-colonial movements. And large parts of the Global South remember it. This fact bears a positive impact on positive Russian relations with African countries, for instance, to this day. To frame decolonization as a sinister communist plot is therefore to rewrite history quite blatantly. It also legitimizes present American actions, from economic strangulation to regime-change fantasies, including, again, recent developments in Venezuela and Cuba.
One could also add that there is some irony in the very fact that Rubio himself is a Cuban-American. Washington’s neo-colonial and neo-Monroeist stance, in any case, risks backfiring at home, especially among diasporas largely shaped, as they are, by interventionist policies.
The same neocolonial logic is visible elsewhere, as is the case in Trump’s proposals for Palestine - another neocolonial mirage dressed up as pragmatism for peace.
To sum it up, Empire is back - at least in rhetoric and worldview. Rubio’s Munich speech suggests that if the US has its way, the emerging multipolar world order will be nothing but a new Age of Empires. Europe, it seems, has applauded such a vision, thus far, but it may soon discover, once again, that vassalage is not the same as partnership.
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