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U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and President Donald Trump alongside James Gillrayâs 1805 cartoon, âThe Plumb-pudding in danger.â The historical caricature, depicting empires carving up the world, is used here to critique Rubio's 2026 Munich Security Conference speech on Western renewal. Photo: Geopolitical Economy Report.
By Ben Norton – Feb 18, 2026
Speaking to EU leaders at the Munich Security Conference, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave a pro-colonialist speech calling to revive âgreat Western empiresâ and âbuild a new Western centuryâ based on exploiting the Global South.
The Westâs global dominance has been in serious decline for several decades. The US government wants to reverse this by undoing the progress made by decolonization and reimposing Western hegemony on the world â by force.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered an overtly pro-colonialist speech to European leaders, in which he praised âthe great Western empiresâ and said North America and Europe should unite to âbuild a new Western centuryâ, based on the subjugation of the Global South.
Speaking on behalf of the Donald Trump administration, Rubio made it clear that what Washington has done to Gaza, Venezuela, and Cuba is what it now hopes to do to the rest of the Global South â which represents 86% of the world population, and therefore constitutes the Global Majority.
Marco Rubioâs pro-colonialist speech at the 2026 Munich Security Conference
Marco Rubio is the second-most-powerful person in the US government, after Donald Trump. He is serving as both secretary of state and national security advisor. (Rubio is just the second person in US history to simultaneously hold the two positions, following notorious war criminal Henry Kissinger.)
Rubio spoke at the Munich Security Conference in Germany on February 14.
He was surrounded by prominent EU officials, who gave a standing ovation and applauded Rubioâs explicitly pro-colonialist remarks.
The top US foreign-policy official revealed that the US empire wants to reverse the gains made by the anti-colonial struggles in the latter half of the 20th century, and he portrayed decolonization as a sinister plot by âgodless communistsâ.
These were Rubioâs comments (all emphasis added):
For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding â 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.
But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, it was contracting. Europe was in ruins. Half of it lived behind an Iron Curtain and the rest looked like it would soon follow. 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.
Against that backdrop, then, as now, many came to believe that the Westâs age of dominance had come to an end and that our future was destined to be a faint and feeble echo of our past. But together, our predecessors recognized that decline was a choice, and it was a choice they refused to make. This is what we did together once before, and this is what President Trump and the United States want to do again now, together with you.
And this is why we do not want our allies to be weak, because that makes us weaker. We want allies who can defend themselves so that no adversary will ever be tempted to test our collective strength. This is why we do not want our allies to be shackled by guilt and shame. We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization, and who, together with us, are willing and able to defend it.
And this is why we do not want allies to rationalize the broken status quo rather than reckon with what is necessary to fix it, for we in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the Westâs managed decline. We do not seek to separate, but to revitalize an old friendship and renew the greatest civilization in human history. What we want is a reinvigorated alliance that recognizes that what has ailed our societies is not just a set of bad policies but a malaise of hopelessness and complacency. An alliance â the alliance that we want is one that is not paralyzed into inaction by fear â fear of climate change, fear of war, fear of technology. Instead, we want an alliance that boldly races into the future. And the only fear we have is the fear of the shame of not leaving our nations prouder, stronger, and wealthier for our children.
It is worth noting that Marco Rubioâs reactionary red-baiting fails to get even basic facts right. The hammer and sickle on a communist flag are not red; they are yellow. It is the flag itself that is red. But this only further illustrates Rubioâs extreme ignorance of history.
The point is that Rubio used his global platform to regurgitate far-right disinformation, demonizing the anti-colonial struggles of the Global South as an evil communist conspiracy, and vowing to reverse them.
The US secretary of state asserted that Washington will not accept the fact that âthe Westâs age of dominance had come to an endâ, and will use all the tools at its disposable â including and especially military force â to âbuild a new Western centuryâ and ârenew the greatest civilization in human historyâ.
Rubio tells the West to stop apologizing for its colonial crimes
Marco Rubio also told the European leaders who were sitting around him at the Munich Security Conference that they must stop apologizing for the colonialist crimes against humanity that their countries committed in the Global South.
âWe do not want our allies to be shackled by guilt and shameâ, Rubio declared. âWe want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization, and who, together with us, are willing and able to defend itâ.
In fact, the top US foreign-policy official disputed the undeniable historical fact that Western empires carried out monstrous atrocities.
Rubio insisted that the West must not âatone for the purported sins of past generationsâ. By using the term âpurportedâ, Rubio was calling into question whether or not they actually were sins; he was whitewashing the horrific history of colonialism, in which the Western imperial powers colonized the vast majority of the world, killed hundreds of millions of people, and enslaved many millions more.
The US secretary of state declared that the West should be proud of these colonial crimes.
âArmies fight for a way of life. And that is what we are defending: a great civilization that has every reason to be proud of its historyâ, he proclaimed.
The European Union gives Rubioâs far-right, pro-colonialist speech a standing ovation
Meanwhile, Rubioâs far-right, pro-colonialist diatribe was being applauded by the same EU officials who often bloviate about so-called âdemocracyâ and âhuman rightsâ and love to lecture Global South countries for supposedly not being enlightened enough.
The Western mediaâs coverage of Rubioâs speech erased his pro-colonialist rhetoric and made it all about the US reaffirming Europe that they will stay together in a cozy transatlantic alliance, despite Trumpâs aggressive tariffs.
After Rubio concluded his remarks, the moderator of the Munich Security Conference, the German diplomat Wolfgang Ischinger, thanked him profusely.
âMr. Secretary, Iâm not sure you heard the sigh of relief through this hall when we were just listening to what I would interpret as a message of reassurance, of partnershipâ, Ischinger said.
âYou spoke of intertwined relations between the United States and Europeâ, the German diplomat effused. âThank you for offering this message of reassurance about our partnershipâ.
Rubio identifies with European colonialists, not Latin Americans â and he denies the genocide of Native Americans
Throughout his speech, Marco Rubio emphasized that colonialism links the United States and Europe in a transatlantic imperial bond.
Rubio repeatedly stressed that United States is itself a European colonial creation. He stated:
For the United States and Europe, we belong together. America was founded 250 years ago, but the roots began here on this continent long before. The man who settled and built the nation of my birth arrived on our shores carrying the memories and the traditions and the Christian faith of their ancestors as a sacred inheritance, an unbreakable link between the old world and the new.
We are part of one civilization â Western civilization.
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⌠for us Americans, our home may be in the Western Hemisphere, but we will always be a child of Europe.
Rubio similarly made it clear that he personally identifies with European colonialists.
Although Rubioâs family is technically of Cuban descent, he made no mention of this in his speech. Instead, Rubio stressed that his ancestors came from modern-day Italy and Spain.
Rubio sees himself, proudly, as a child of the European colonial elites of the Americas, rejecting his Cuban heritage. He admires the European colonizers, the conquistadores, who traveled to Latin America, declared themselves the ruling classes, and carried out horrific crimes against humanity against the indigenous populations.
This is what Rubio said:
⌠for us Americans, our home may be in the Western Hemisphere, but we will always be a child of Europe.
Our story began with an Italian explorer whose adventure into the great unknown to discover a new world brought Christianity to the Americas â and became the legend that defined the imagination of a our pioneer nation.
Our first colonies were built by English settlers, to whom we owe not just the language we speak but the whole of our political and legal system. Our frontiers were shaped by Scots-Irish â that proud, hearty clan from the hills of Ulster that gave us Davy Crockett and Mark Twain and Teddy Roosevelt and Neil Armstrong.
Our great midwestern heartland was built by German farmers and craftsmen who transformed empty plains into a global agricultural powerhouse â and by the way, dramatically upgraded the quality of American beer. (Laughter.)
Our expansion into the interior followed the footsteps of French fur traders and explorers whose names, by the way, still adorn the street signs and townsâ names all across the Mississippi Valley. Our horses, our ranches, our rodeos â the entire romance of the cowboy archetype that became synonymous with the American West â these were born in Spain. And our largest and most iconic city was named New Amsterdam before it was named New York.
And do you know that in the year that my country was founded, Lorenzo and Catalina Geroldi lived in Casale Monferrato in the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. And Jose and Manuela Reina lived in Sevilla, Spain. I donât know what, if anything, they knew about the 13 colonies which had gained their independence from the British empire, but hereâs what I am certain of: They could have never imagined that 250 years later, one of their direct descendants would be back here today on this continent as the chief diplomat of that infant nation. And yet here I am, reminded by my own story that both our histories and our fates will always be linked.
When Rubio claimed that European colonizers in the modern-day United States âtransformed empty plains into a global agricultural powerhouseâ, he was engaging in overt genocide genial.
The US secretary of state erased the objective historical fact that European colonizers killed tens of millions of Native Americans, ethnically cleansed them, and stole their land. According to Rubio, these inhabited lands were mere âempty plainsâ.
Anti-communism unites the West
While he denied and whitewashed the genocidal crimes of colonialism, Marco Rubio stressed that the basis of âWestern civilizationâ is fundamentally predicated on capitalism.
The US secretary of state emphasized that anti-communism is a point of unity between Washington and Brussels. He proclaimed:
When this conference began in 1963, it was in a nation â actually, it was on a continent â that was divided against itself. The line between communism and freedom ran through the heart of Germany. The first barbed fences of the Berlin Wall had gone up just two years prior.
And just months before that first conference, before our predecessors first met here, here in Munich, the Cuban Missile Crisis had brought the world to the brink of nuclear destruction. Even as World War II still burned fresh in the memory of Americans and Europeans alike, we found ourselves staring down the barrel of a new global catastrophe â one with the potential for a new kind of destruction, more apocalyptic and final than anything before in the history of mankind.
At the time of that first gathering, Soviet communism was on the march. Thousands of years of Western civilization hung in the balance. At that time, victory was far from certain. But we were driven by a common purpose. We were unified not just by what we were fighting against; we were unified by what we were fighting for. And together, Europe and America prevailed and a continent was rebuilt. Our people prospered. In time, the East and West blocs were reunited. A civilization was once again made whole.
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When we found ourselves divided once again by the Iron Curtain, the free West linked arms with the courageous dissidents struggling against tyranny in the East to defeat Soviet communism.
It must be mentioned that, during the First Cold War, the US empire joined the European empires in violently opposing most of the anti-colonial movements and propping up racist colonial regimes.
On the other side, the Soviet Union and the Socialist Bloc supported the anti-colonial struggles in the Global South, providing national-liberation movements with weapons, technical assistance, diplomatic backing, and other forms of aid.
This does not mean that all of the anti-colonial movements were evil plots by âgodless communistsâ, as Rubio argued in his speech.
But it is certainly true that the national-liberation struggles were supported by socialist countries, and opposed by capitalist ones.
Rubio calls for a new Western supply chain that cuts out China
In his speech, Rubio strongly insinuated that the West should ally together once again in Cold War Two, this time against the Peopleâs Republic of China.
Although he did not directly name China, Rubio heavily implied that this is the shared adversary of âWestern civilizationâ.
Rubio argued that China was supposedly trying to destroy the West by deindustrializing their economies. He did not mention that it was Western capitalists who voluntarily moved their factories to China and other countries in the Global South in order to exploit lower paid workers.
Instead, Rubio portrayed the deindustrialization of Western neoliberal capitalist economies as an evil Chinese plot, and he argued that the US and Europe should work together to reindustrialize, isolate China, and develop âa Western supply chain for critical mineralsâ.
These were his remarks:
⌠we embraced a dogmatic vision of free and unfettered trade, even as some nations protected their economies and subsidized their companies to systematically undercut ours â shuttering our plants, resulting in large parts of our societies being deindustrialized, shipping millions of working and middle-class jobs overseas, and handing control of our critical supply chains to both adversaries and rivals.
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Deindustrialization was not inevitable. It was a conscious policy choice, a decades-long economic undertaking that stripped our nations of their wealth, of their productive capacity, and of their independence. And the loss of our supply chain sovereignty was not a function of a prosperous and healthy system of global trade. It was foolish. It was a foolish but voluntary transformation of our economy that left us dependent on others for our needs and dangerously vulnerable to crisis.
Mass migration is not, was not, isnât some fringe concern of little consequence. It was and continues to be a crisis which is transforming and destabilizing societies all across the West. Together we can reindustrialize our economies and rebuild our capacity to defend our people. But the work of this new alliance should not be focused just on military cooperation and reclaiming the industries of the past. It should also be focused on, together, advancing our mutual interests and new frontiers, unshackling our ingenuity, our creativity, and the dynamic spirit to build a new Western century. Commercial space travel and cutting-edge artificial intelligence; industrial automation and flex manufacturing; creating a Western supply chain for critical minerals not vulnerable to extortion from other powers; and a unified effort to compete for market share in the economies of the Global South. Together we can not only take back control of our own industries and supply chains â we can prosper in the areas that will define the 21st century.
Rubioâs insistence that Western corporations must control the âmarket share in the economies of the Global Southâ illustrates how Washington considers the Global South to be little more than a market for US goods and a region that must be dominated by West, with no regard for its sovereignty.
Benjamin Norton is the founder and editor of the independent news website Multipolarista, where he does original reporting in both English and Spanish. Benjamin has reported from numerous countries, including Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador, Honduras, Colombia, and more. His journalistic work has been published in dozens of media outlets, and he has done interviews on Sky News, Al Jazeera, Democracy Now, El Financiero Bloomberg, Al Mayadeen teleSUR, RT, TRT World, CGTN, Press TV, HispanTV, Sin Censura, and various TV channels in Mexico, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Benjamin writes a regular column for Al Mayadeen (in English and Spanish). He was formerly a reporter with the investigative journalism website The Grayzone, and previously produced the political podcast and video show Moderate Rebels. His personal website is BenNorton.com, and he tweets at @BenjaminNorton.
