The Secretary of State’s Answer to What Will Replace the Liberal International Order
The fall of the old global order is upon us. It has been unable to deal with wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and elsewhere. And it has presided over a decaying West that’s being sapped of its unique history and traditions through mass immigration. What replaces that order is now one of the biggest challenges in the realm of modern foreign policy.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is trying to answer the call.
In a pathbreaking speech at the 2026 Munich Security Conference, he boldly stated that America has “no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline.” Rubio told the audience that the U.S. does “not want allies to rationalize the broken status quo rather than reckon with what is necessary to fix it.”
As is obvious from these two sentences, this is a speech no Bush administration official would have given or even countenanced were it given by an ally. After all, consider George W. Bush’s colorful reaction to President Trump’s First Inaugural Address.
Following Vice President Vance’s pointed speech in Munich last year, Rubio continued to build on the same foundation, taking a more diplomatic approach, which is no surprise given his office. Nevertheless, Rubio’s address was bold in both its diagnoses and its solutions to the problem of the crumbling liberal international order.
In 2025, Vice President Vance blasted Europe for establishing a censorship regime that tramples on the views of those who break with the E.U. consensus. Free speech, he maintained, should be cherished across Europe. In 2026, Secretary Rubio added to this critique America’s role in the decline and fall of the old order. We’ve joined Europe in making many poor political choices—an ever-growing bureaucracy, unprotected borders, sovereignty giveaways, dogmatic free trade ideology, and destructive climate policies.
An “End of History” ideology has consumed the West, helping bring the post-war international system of alliances to the brink. Utopian dreams spurred on by vibes more than any serious confrontation with the work of Francis Fukuyama, the intellectual who popularized Alexandre Kojève’s view of “History” with a capital H, helped hasten the breakdown of the global order. As Rubio told his audience in Munich, “This was a foolish idea that ignored both human nature and it ignored the lessons of over 5,000 years of recorded human history.”
But this is not the last word: “We made these mistakes together,” Rubio said, “and now, together, we owe it to our people to face those facts and to move forward, to rebuild.
The answer to our current conflicts, as Rubio presented it, is a renewed alliance between the U.S. and European nations—which have historically shared similar traditions, history, and certain mores. “We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share,” he stated, “forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.” The very bonds upholding Western civilization itself are at stake, Rubio argued, a rhetorical move that Winston Churchill and other past statesmen have used to clarify the seriousness of the problem. Additionally, it is no coincidence that his description of our shared culture closely mirrors John Jay’s famous description of the ties that bound his countrymen together in Federalist 2.
Rubio’s pointing out the importance of the Christian religion in maintaining the nation’s health multiple times in the speech harkens to George Washington’s Farewell Address. There, the U.S.’s first president cautioned his countrymen on entertaining “the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.” Continuing, Washington noted that “reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” Though even some conservatives in Reformed denominations contemplate such thoughts today, Washington counseled Americans to reject such notions.
As Rubio defines it, a revivified alliance between the U.S. and Europe will look to defend the building blocks of Western civilization—“the civilization that birthed Mozart and Beethoven, of Dante and Shakespeare, of Michelangelo and Da Vinci, of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.” (The West’s decline is evident when comparing the august group of names to the latter two bands, despite them being good in their own right). A “great civilization that has every reason to be proud of its history, confident of its future, and aims to always be the master of its own economic and political destiny,” Rubio noted.
Upholding the culture of Western civilization is imperative to this project. Sociologist Eric Kauffman defines culture as the “external practices visible to the observer.” What Rubio lists formed the basis of European culture, which then became a substantial part of white culture in America (which made its own unique additions). Even to imply such a thing as Rubio did—that a specific culture that undergirds Western civilization needs to be protected and promoted—has caused howls of indignation on the Left and from liberals in the conservative movement when others have made a similar case.
“We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage,” Rubio stated, “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.”
According to Rubio, a reformed alliance between the U.S. and Europe should be defined by
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.
One of the clear implications from this section of the speech is that President Trump’s bombastic rhetoric about Greenland clearly had these larger considerations in view. Stopping a revanchist China from looting our hemispheres is imperative to protecting the sovereignty and independence of action of Western nations.
Rubio’s lively call for renewal was in stark contrast to the presentations from the smug, self-satisfied managers of decline like Hillary Clinton, who has somehow learned nothing over the past ten years. Her sputtering, boring, and predictable performance in Munich—centered, of course, on denouncing Donald Trump for the umpteenth time—demonstrates the utter poverty of the old guard’s ideas. And that she thinks she’s still entitled to rule shows that Clinton and her ilk should be kept far away from political power.
The reaction to Rubio’s speech across the Right, especially on the New Right, was very positive. Some evangelicals have opined that his address in Munich was confirmation of why they voted for him during the 2016 primaries, or wrote his name in for president. But that confuses cause and effect.
The 2016 Marco Rubio was just three years removed from being part of the disastrous Gang of Eight comprehensive immigration reform, which would have likely doubled down on the mistake of Ronald Reagan’s 1986 immigration amnesty. If it hadn’t been for Trump’s victory in the 2016 election—an election that initiated a still-ongoing national political realignment—it’s highly unlikely that Marco Rubio would’ve given that same speech, much less highlighted the serious problem of mass immigration in the straightforward manner that he did.
Though hesitation in some corners of the Right about both Vance’s and Rubio’s political shifts since 2016 remains, rhetoric married with actions is what should be measured, since no one can know the inner soul.
Whether or not Europe—and America—can be revived is an open question. Though many of the self-inflicted problems affecting both continents are of a more recent vintage (consider the extensive damage imposed by the mid-20th century Supreme Court), reversing these effects will likely take the work of generations. Europe has markedly declined over the past 20 years, mostly due to mass immigration, and America has its work cut out for itself to get back to some semblance of republican government. But though the prospects look dim, American citizens must try regardless—for our nation and our posterity demand nothing less than our best attempts.
