When Secretary of State Marco Rubio climbed the Pnyx in Athens this month to defend Western civilization, one outlet ran the headline “bizarre.” TAG24 called the trip a “bizarre bid to warn against Western civilization ‘decline.’” Read past the headline, though, and the article offers no argument at all. It simply relays the State Department’s own description of the speech. The word “bizarre” was doing all the work.
That reflex is worth examining. To a certain kind of commentator, saying the West is worth preserving is strange on its face. To most Americans it isn’t.
The Founders did not think it bizarre. They read Plutarch and Polybius by candlelight. They studied how the Athenian democracy and the Roman republic rose, and above all how they fell. Rubio was right that Plutarch was the author the Federalist Papers cited most. But the authors of the Federalist did not study Greece and Rome to admire them. They studied them as warnings. Republics die when citizens trade liberty for comfort, when power gathers at the center, and when ambition abroad hollows out freedom at home.
That is why this speech deserves both applause and a hard question.
The applause
Rubio named the right enemy. For decades, American sovereignty has been bled away into unaccountable global bodies: trade tribunals, climate regimes and, yes, the United Nations. They make rules Americans never voted for. When Rubio talks about reclaiming control from global institutions and rebuilding American industry, he is saying what constitutionalists have said for sixty years, usually to jeers. It is good to hear it from the hill where self-government was born.
He was also right that faith, law and reason form one inheritance. Athens gave us philosophy. Jerusalem gave us the moral law. Rome gave us the rule of law. That inheritance crossed the Atlantic, and it reached our shores first in Florida, Puerto Rico and Cuba, five centuries ago.
Look at France
Anyone who thinks Rubio’s warning was “bizarre” should look at France this weekend. More than half a million people filled French streets. City halls burned, shops were looted, more than 600 police officers were injured and nearly 2,000 people were arrested in two days.
It was sold as a student revolt over crowded classrooms. But a Fox News investigation identified 54 organizations in the protest ecosystem, and only 16 were student or youth groups. The other 38 were adult-led: communist groups, Trotskyist factions, labor unions, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed, and a global network funded by Neville Roy Singham, an American-born Marxist tycoon living in Shanghai. According to Fox, far-left and communist organizations “helped organize and amplify” the revolt from the outset, using school grievances as a pretext for a broader war on capitalism and the police.
That fire landed on a country already scarred by the riots of 2005 and 2023, after decades in which France opened its doors without asking newcomers to join its civilization. A nation ashamed of its own inheritance cannot defend it, and it cannot ask anyone else to embrace it. That is exactly what Rubio came to Athens to say.
The question
Rubio called for the “unapologetic pursuit of national power.” Constitutionalists should ask: power under what authority?
The Founders feared standing power more than any foreign enemy. Washington’s Farewell Address warned against permanent entanglements. The Constitution gave the war power to Congress, not to the executive. A West worth defending is not defined by how strong its government is. It is defined by how firmly its government is chained.
If “national power” means American factories, secure borders, an honest currency and freedom from foreign tribunals, then it is the Founders’ vision restored. If it means open-ended commitments abroad, undeclared wars and an ever-larger security state at home, then it repeats the same mistakes that ended Athens and Rome, the very republics Rubio came to honor.
The defense of Western civilization begins at home: with the Constitution, enforced as written. That is not decline. It is the cure.
En español
No hay nada «extraño» en defender a Occidente. Rubio acertó al denunciar las instituciones globales que erosionan la soberanía y al reivindicar la herencia de Atenas, Jerusalén y Roma, que llegó a la Florida, Puerto Rico y Cuba hace cinco siglos. Francia muestra lo que está en juego. Pero los fundadores estudiaron Grecia y Roma como advertencias: el poder nacional debe estar sujeto a la Constitución, y la defensa de Occidente empieza en casa.