Marco Rubio at Munich: the West versus the rest?

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio's impassioned speech at the Munich security conference a few days ago lays out very clearly what the US thinks is wrong with the world and how it thinks it should be set right.

Rubio highlighted the three principal mistakes the West made in the post- War era.

First mistake: free trade

.....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 – 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. 

Second mistake: climate change thesis

To appease a climate cult, we have imposed energy policies on ourselves that are impoverishing our people, even as our competitors exploit oil and coal and natural gas and anything else – not just to power their economies, but to use as leverage against our own. 

Third mistake: opening the doors to immigration:

And in a pursuit of a world without borders, we opened our doors to an unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people. 

How to set the world right? Europe must follow America's lead in asserting the primacy of Western civilisation over the rest of the world. The centuries of colonialism before the WW2 were the era of Western greatness and it's time for the West to put aside the post-WW2 order in order to reclaim that dominance:

For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding – 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 West’s 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. 

The troubling question for Europe is what the new colonial enterprise means for them. In the old days of colonialism, Europe called the shots. The partnership that Rubio now advocates is one in  which the US will hold the upper hand. As we have said, all trade agreements will be tipped in favour of the US. And Europe must defer to the US in matters that the US thinks are vital to itself, such as Greenland.

Many Europeans may well think that this order, unlike the earlier colonial era, is one in which they are at the receiving end of colonialism!