Marco Rubio, who’s one of the most powerful figures in the US due to his roles as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, gave an historic speech at last weekend’s Munich Security Conference detailing Trump 2.0’s envisaged new world order. His words were shaped by the National Security Strategy, the National Defense Strategy, and the “Trump Doctrine”, which readers can learn more about from the preceding hyperlinked analyses. The present one will review, contextualize, and analyze his speech.
He lambasted the notion that “the end of history” arrived after the Old Cold War wherein liberal democracies would supposedly proliferate across the world and the “rules-based global order” would replace national interests. Rubio particularly criticized the outsourcing of industry to adversaries and rivals, the outsourcing of sovereignty to international institutions, self-impoverishment “to appease a climate cult”, and mass migration, all of which he admitted were mistakes and says the US wants to fix.
Rubio declared that Trump 2.0 will renew and restore Western Civilization on its own if need be but prefers to do so together with Europe from which the US emerged. He then loftily praised their shared civilization in multiple ways before claiming that its reinvigoration will inspire their armed forces. This preceded him touching upon Trump 2.0’s plans to reindustrialize, end mass migration, and reform global governance to that end, which he said will deliver tangible dividends to the Western masses.
Far from the isolationist policies that some fearmonger that the US will pursue, it actually wants to optimize its global network of alliances, but this can only happen through fairer burden-sharing. Restoring pride in Western Civilization is another of Trump 2.0’s top foreign policy goals. Reflecting on this envisaged world order, it clearly takes its cues from Samuel Huntington’s and Alexander Dugin’s works on civilizationalism, which focus on this aspect of shared identity as a rising factor in global affairs.
As could be expected, the concept of American Exceptionalism pervades Rubio’s speech, which is evident with respect to him declaring that the US will go it alone in restoring Western Civilization if need be and also describing the West’s perceived “terminal decline” after World War II as a “choice”. The latter hints that the US doesn’t believe that multipolarity, understood in this context as the rise of other civilization-states for balancing the nascent Western one that Trump 2.0 wants to create, is inevitable.
Extrapolating from that, this in turn suggests that the rise of other poles (however they’re described [countries, civilization-states, blocs, etc.]) is the result of the West’s counterproductive policies, not due to any policies of their own. That’s questionable, since while it’s true that Nixon’s Sino-US Détente from the Old Cold War provided the capital responsible for China’s rise for instance, the Communist Party of China directed this process to protect national sovereignty and turn China into an economic superpower.
What Trump 2.0 wants to do is lead Western Civilization’s comprehensive reforms with a view towards building a nascent civilization-state that would then unrestrainedly wield its restored collective strength to coerce rising rivals into subordinating themselves to it for restoring unipolarity. The US has achieved some foreign policy successes over the past year, but this doesn’t mean that it’ll succeed in reforming Western Civilization, creating a civilization-state out of it, and then controlling the world.
