By Mathias Risse, Harvard University
The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges.
1. Rubio in Munich, One Year After Vance
For the second year in a row, a senior Trump administration official stood before the Munich Security Conference and told Europeans they were at risk of betraying Western civilization. In 2025, it was JD Vance, delivering an aggressive performance of grievance and accusation. In 2026, on February 14, it was Marco Rubio—widely regarded as one of the "reasonable" voices on Trump's team—who expressed regret about the end of Empire and invited Europeans to join American efforts to restore a glorious world of Western dominance that vanished decades ago. If anything, Rubio's speech was more troubling because of his reputation for seriousness: here was civilizational panic dressed in the language of statecraft, historically ill-informed, morally evasive, and unequipped to address the global challenges of the 21st century.
My response here is from the standpoint on how we should think of Western identity and the role of human rights in it that I developed in my December commentary called “Reclaiming Western Identity: A Human Rights Day Response to America’s New National Security Strategy.” That standpoint—which is at odds with Rubio’s views on just about all important matters—is organized around four positions on what Western identity should be all about these days that I called Critical Inheritance, Institutional Experimentalism, Uncomfortable Universalism, and Reflexive Pluralism—and is further shaped by the Indigenous critique of Western civilization articulated by Seneca scholar John Mohawk, an Indigenous American scholar of towering stature whose insights are badly neglected in public debate and philosophical discourse alike. Rubio’s speech uncannily exemplifies the kind of failure in Western civilization that Mohawk has diagnosed.
By now Europe is on a better path than the United States in acknowledging the darker sides of Western identity (and thus its complexity), and on a better path in recognizing 21st-century global challenges for what they are. (Also see my earlier commentaries on the possible end of universalism and on the American AI Action plan.)
We must hope that Europe stays the course. We must also hope that Europe continues to believe in an America beyond what it projects to the world in a decade politically shaped by Trump’s deeply personal refusal to acknowledge his resounding defeat to Biden in 2020—and his eagerness to assemble a leadership team defined by their sycophantic willingness to endorse that denialism, including Rubio. (Also see my commentary from earlier this week on the occasion of Presidents’ Day.)
We must hope, that is, that Europe understands that even though the America of Trump, Vance, and Rubio is one significant version of what America is, it is not the only version.
In my Human Rights Day essay, I argued that Western identity should now be understood not as a fixed essence or a comprehensive worldview, but as a particular stance toward tradition. Western identity, at its best, might be characterized by four stances I already mentioned:
Critical Inheritance: Engaging seriously with our intellectual and cultural past while refusing to treat it as sacred or unquestionable. Taking Shakespeare, Kant, and Beethoven as conversation partners, not authorities. Putting anyone on a pedestal is always a bad idea.
Institutional Experimentalism: Commitment to the rule of law, democratic governance, and human rights, understood not as perfected achievements but as ongoing experiments requiring constant refinement and extension. Human rights and democracy are respectively necessary to support each other.
Uncomfortable Universalism: Maintaining universal moral commitments (human dignity, freedom, equality) while recognizing that "universal" claims have often masked particular interests, and that different cultures may realize these values differently.
Reflexive Pluralism: Understanding that Western societies are internally diverse—by class, religion, ethnicity, ideology—and that this diversity is not a problem to solve but a condition to navigate.
These positions will all come up in due course in this human-rights-based reply to Rubio, as will Mohawk’s basic approach to the dark sides of Western civilization.
2. “Civilizational Erasure” and the Wrong Kind of Western Talk
Rubio’s central claim is that “the West” faces “civilizational erasure” and that Europe in particular is in danger of losing its Western identity. He presents the United States, under Trump, as the necessary custodian and revitalizer of that identity and urges Europeans to join a renewed civilizational alliance.
In my earlier commentary, I argued that the pertinent connection between Western identity and “erasure” does not run in the direction Rubio suggests. The basic historical pattern is not that Europe now erases Western identity, but that Western identity, as it manifested in colonialism and imperialism, brought actual civilizational erasure to others. It did so notably to Indigenous peoples in the Americas and elsewhere.
When Rubio speaks of “five centuries” of Western expansion—“missionaries, pilgrims, soldiers, explorers” crossing oceans, settling continents, building “vast empires”—he offers a sanitized genealogy of Western identity. Conquest becomes exploration, empire-building becomes civilizational flowering, and the victims of that process simply vanish from the story.
From the standpoint I developed, this is not a minor omission. Any serious discourse about Western identity must start by facing both its achievements and its atrocities. It must ask whether the West has sufficient inner resources—its traditions of self‑criticism, its evolving notion of human dignity, its institutional innovations—to confront what it has done in the world.
Rubio’s speech plainly refuses this task. It celebrates the imperial phase as an age of expansion to be emulated, laments post‑1945 “contraction,” and describes anti‑colonial movements as part of a decline narrative. That is the wrong kind of civilizational talk: one that treats Western identity as a heroic saga of glorious domination, not as a complex tradition that must now reckon with the world it has made.
When he warns Europe against “civilizational erasure,” he means self‑doubt about this triumphalist story, and he means demographic developments that no longer fit this story. The view I offer also offers pride of place to the notion of “civilizational erasure,” but I mean something very different by it: I mean the actual destruction of ways of life, cultures, and languages, as well as centuries of enslavement in the transatlantic region and elsewhere, that resulted from that story being put into practice. Any contemporary accounting of what the West is must recognize this part of our past.
Rubio might find it annoying that this topic comes up. Seeing reality is hard. And it is the long shadow of history that makes reality what it is. The point here is not to urge people who are currently alive to feel guilty about the centuries of oppression that predated them. The point is to understand that the world we inhabit did not start yesterday, and that those who inhabit it today live with privileges or live with deprivation depending on historical path dependencies.
If we are to speak of Western identity at all, we must refuse to let Rubio’s version monopolize the term. Western identity indeed is something to be proud of, but not the kind that Rubio talked about at Munich.
3. The Suspicious Absence of Human Rights
My Human Rights Day essay began from a simple, glaring observation: the new National Security Strategy does not mention human rights, not even once. This is not a technical oversight; it is a conceptual failure. If national security is not centrally about the protection of people’s rights—first at home, and then, as much as possible, abroad—what is it about?
Rubio’s speech reflects the same pattern. He speaks often of “freedom,” “liberty,” “rule of law,” and “civilization,” but he never once engages the contemporary human rights framework: the idea that every person, by virtue of being human, has certain protections and entitlements that bind states morally (and to some extent legally), regardless of citizenship or civilizational belonging.
From my point of view, that omission has two related implications. First, it reveals the parochialism of Rubio’s account of rights. He speaks of “our” liberties, “our” civilization, “our” way of life, and treats rights as essentially the property of Western citizens—above all, American and European citizens. Others appear primarily as threats (migrants, adversarial states) or as spectators to Western action.
Second, it disfigures what is best in the Western tradition itself. One of the key claims in my earlier essay was that if we want to take “Western identity” seriously, we must acknowledge that it has, over time, given rise to a powerful, if incomplete, universalist moral project. The American Declaration of Independence, for all its hypocrisies and exclusions, expressed ideals claimed for “all men.” The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in 1948, was a collective attempt—shaped importantly by non‑Western voices—to make that universalism concrete and global.
Rubio displaces that trajectory. Rights appear only as civilizational attributes of the West, not as universal aspirations. The “we” whose protection matters is the West; everyone else is, at best, incidental.
In the terms I proposed, this is a rejection of Uncomfortable Universalism in favor of a comfortable, bounded particularism. It is, once again, the wrong kind of Western talk.
4. Jerusalem, Athens, Rome—and Trump’s Washington
Like many conservative invocations of the West, Rubio’s speech draws—implicitly or explicitly—on the usual triad of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome. He invokes Christian faith and cathedrals, rule of law and universities, scientific revolutions and artistic geniuses. That vocabulary is familiar.
But allow me to recall the point I made in the earlier commentary: If you take those three reference points seriously, they do not point to Trump’s Washington. They point away from it.
Christianity and the Stranger
At the core of Christianity is a story about vulnerability. A child is born to parents who have been turned away. The savior of the world begins life in a stable. The gospels repeatedly insist on welcoming the stranger, caring for the least of these, loving one’s enemies. (Also see my commentaries on the relationship between Christianity and the Trump administration on the occasion of the election of Pope Leo XIV, here and here. It is also worth recalling that Secretary Rubio went on record with especially unkind words when Tufts student Rumeysa Ozturk was arrested on a Somerville street by masked ICE agents—an attempted deportation that courts have since found to be without legal merit.)
Rubio’s engagement with that tradition is almost entirely civilizational and aesthetic, omitting the moral dimensions. Christian faith appears as part of a shared heritage that binds “us” together—a sacralized identity marker. When he turns to migrants, his language is the language of existential threat: migration “threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people.” Controlling borders is “not an expression of xenophobia” but a matter of “the survival of our civilization itself.”
I have no trouble acknowledging that states have legitimate interests in border governance. Migration generates real challenges. But a Christian account of Western identity that never even tries to hold together the vulnerability of the migrant with the concerns of receiving societies is an impoverished Christianity—whatever else it is. It has amputated the very element that, from the standpoint of Jerusalem, is most distinctive and demanding.
Athens and Denial of Evidence
The Athenian component, as I understand it, involves a commitment to truth, evidence, and critical inquiry. You cannot, with any intellectual integrity, claim to stand in the tradition of Greek rationalism while embracing climate denialism, conspiracy theories about elections, or systematic attacks on universities.
Rubio describes climate policy as the work of a “climate cult” that is “impoverishing our people,” while our competitors exploit fossil fuels. There is no engagement here with climate science as science, no recognition of the overwhelming evidence for anthropogenic climate change, no sense that the West, having led the world into a fossil‑fuel civilization, has any special responsibility in leading it out.
If Western identity means anything more than rhetorical flourish, it cannot simultaneously celebrate the scientific revolution and dismiss one of its most important contemporary conclusions as a cult. That is a betrayal of Athens, not its continuation.
Rome and the Law Above Power
The Roman strand is about law standing above individual rulers, the refusal to let the whims of one man override the legal order. In my earlier essay I argued that any government that uses its justice machinery as a tool against political opponents, or that treats the rule of law as subordinate to the leader’s needs, cannot claim Roman inheritance with a straight face.
Rubio extols American “leadership” in Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, and Venezuela, in each case by bypassing or downplaying international legal frameworks. The UN is portrayed as impotent; international law appears only as an “abstraction” behind which adversaries hide. What matters is the “freedom of action” of the West, above all the United States. There is no recognition that the West authored much of this legal architecture precisely to bind itself against the kind of unconstrained force that produced two world wars.
A Rome that means anything must be a Rome of legal restraint. Rubio’s Rome is a Rome of unconstrained power, draped in legality when convenient and dismissive when not.
When I wrote that the road from Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome does not lead to Trump’s Washington, I had precisely this kind of speech in mind. It borrows the vocabulary of those cities while systematically hollowing out their most challenging implications.
5. Genealogical Amnesia: A West Without Its Victims
In my earlier essay I argued that we should approach “the West” genealogically rather than essentially. There is no eternal Western essence; there are only shifting stories that later generations tell about how they are connected to earlier ones. Those stories always involve selection and omission.
Rubio’s version is an especially blunt example of such genealogical editing. He recounts centuries of expansion as a story of missionaries, pilgrims, and explorers, interrupted and reversed by communism and anti‑colonial uprisings. The devastation inflicted on Indigenous peoples, the Atlantic slave trade, colonial despotism, racialized exploitation—all of that disappears into the background. Recognizing such realities is the kind of thing the Trump administration dismisses as “woke.”
We must push back against such narratives not simply by adding footnotes about bad things that “also” happened, but by foregrounding the structural role of conquest and domination in Western modernity. This is where John Mohawk’s perspective becomes indispensable.
John Mohawk (1945-2006) was a Seneca scholar, writer, and activist. The Seneca are one of the tribes that formed the Iroquois Confederacy, a once powerful group of tribes in what today is Upstate New York and the adjacent parts of Canada. In terms of nomenclature, they prefer being called the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
Mohawk was an important voice in Indigenous intellectual circles, extending well beyond the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. He wrote extensively about Indigenous perspectives on history, colonialism, environmentalism, and Western civilization. His analysis is particularly valuable here because it examines Western identity not as an insider reformulating the tradition, but as someone whose own tradition experienced the full force and sheer brutality of Western expansion.
Mohawk describes Western identity as rooted in a worldview of conquest and unlimited growth—a utopian dream that insists on one correct vision of the good life for everyone, and that legitimizes the remaking of the world to fit it. He sees Western civilization as organized around the commodification of nature, the enclosure of commons, a doctrine of discovery, and a deep conviction that progress means ever‑greater control over land, people, and resources. Mohawk argues that the Western mindset involves the pursuit of their ideals at any cost—in contrast to how the pursuit of ideals was understood in other cultural contexts.
Rubio’s speech fits this description uncannily. He treats world‑spanning empires as a natural expression of Western vitality. He laments their retreat. He treats contemporary efforts to limit extraction (for example, climate policy) or constrain force (for example, international law) as forms of decadence and self‑harm. He even seems to believe that the way the West pursued its ideals during the colonial era should be resumed.
From Mohawk’s vantage point, this is Western identity in its dangerous, unreconstructed form: still convinced that it possesses a special civilizational mandate, still uninterested in learning from those it has trampled, still inclined to treat limits as insults rather than as conditions of survival.
If we want Western identity to be more than a euphemism for “our power and our way of life,” we must insist that any serious genealogy integrate Mohawk’s critique and others like it. That is what I meant by Critical Inheritance: a willingness to engage with the most searing internal and external critiques of our tradition, rather than curating a museum of flattering images.
Rubio’s speech has no room for this. His “West” simply has no Indigenous peoples, no colonized subjects, no enslaved Africans, no Buchenwald near Weimar. It has only heroes, achievements, and temporary setbacks to be overcome.
But there has never been such a West, and so it makes no sense to try to reinvigorate it in 2026.
6. Migration: “We Come to You Because You Came to Us”
One area where my own earlier analysis and Rubio’s speech collide especially sharply is migration.
I suggested that many migrants from the global South could rightly say to Western societies: “We come to you now because you came to us first.” The world we inhabit—its borders, its economic patterns, its wars, its environmental crises—has been decisively shaped by Western expansion and by the post‑colonial order that followed. Migration is not an alien event that happens to the West; it is one of the main ways in which the world the West made now reaches back.
This does not mean that migration is simple or unproblematic. It brings challenges that receiving societies must manage: questions of integration, resources, social cohesion. But a Western identity that takes its own history seriously cannot treat migration strictly as invasion. It must see it as a shared problem in a world of deep entanglement, and it must approach it in light of human rights and historical responsibility.
Rubio’s framing is entirely different. Migration appears as a pure threat: “a crisis which is transforming and destabilizing societies all across the West… an urgent threat to the fabric of our societies and the survival of our civilization itself.”
While Rubio recounts his own family’s migration history, he offers no acknowledgment of why people move, of the West’s role in producing wars, economic disruptions, and climate impacts that push people to move, or of any obligation beyond border control. Migrants appear as objects of fear, not as subjects with histories and rights.
If we align ourselves with Uncomfortable Universalism, we must insist on a tension that Rubio’s speech refuses to entertain. States may reasonably claim the right to regulate entry, but they cannot ignore the right of refugees to seek asylum; the structural conditions that they have helped create; or the fact that migrants are human beings whose dignity does not just evaporate at a border—and who can be treated with “the perfidious lust for unbridled power” that was on ample display in the streets of Minneapolis earlier this year, that cost Renee Good and Alex Pretti their lives, and that has shocked many millions of Americans.
To react to migration primarily as “civilizational” threat is to reduce Western identity to a defensive reflex. A better exercise of Western identity—one truer to both its Christian and human‑rights strands—would start by asking: How can we design policies that protect legitimate interests, acknowledge historical responsibilities, and uphold the equal moral standing of all persons?
Rubio has no interest in this question, and he sets it aside in a spirit of realistic readjustment. But much like the Trump administration’s decision to ignore climate change, ignoring such global challenges will only mean they will come back with much greater urgency later.
7. Sovereignty, Institutions, and Turning Away from Our Own Creations
My proposal for rethinking Western identity emphasized what I called Institutional Experimentalism: the idea that one of the genuinely distinctive and precious elements in the Western tradition is its ongoing, fallible effort to build institutions—constitutional orders, courts, human rights regimes, multilateral bodies—that restrain power, channel conflict, and gradually extend protection.
Rubio’s speech offers a starkly different posture. International institutions, above all the United Nations, are portrayed as failures that have “no answers” and “play virtually no role” on major crises. International law appears not as a framework of shared constraint but as a shield that “they” use against “us.” The remedy he proposes is a reassertion of unconstrained national sovereignty and martial decisiveness.
Of course, many international institutions are indeed failing, often dramatically. They are slow, politicized, under‑resourced, and sometimes captured by actors hostile to human rights. But from my perspective, the Western response to these failures cannot be to abandon the institutional project in favor of raw power. That would be a betrayal of what we have supposedly learned, through catastrophic experience, about the dangers of unrestrained sovereignty.
Instead, a Western identity that respects its own better history should be committed to reforming and improving the institutions we have built, even as we subject them to harsh critique. The answer to a weak UN is not to glorify the B‑2 bomber; it is to ask how the system of collective security and international law can be made to function more justly and effectively.
Rubio, by contrast, essentially reiterates a doctrine of exceptionalism: we, the West (and really we, the United States), will act when institutions fail, unconstrained by “abstractions” like international law. That doctrine is precisely what much of the post‑1945 order was designed to curtail—and with good reason. (See also earlier commentaries on the possible end of universalism and the ways in which current U.S. foreign policy can be interpreted in light of the international thought of Carl Schmitt.)
If we treat Western identity as a tradition of institutional experimentation, we cannot celebrate our creations when they enhance our prestige and dismiss them as irrelevant when they impose constraints. To do so is to hollow out the moral core of our own innovation.
8. Reflexive Pluralism vs. Mythic Homogeneity
The last of my four proposed principles was Reflexive Pluralism: the recognition that Western societies are internally diverse and that this diversity is not a defect to be eliminated but a condition to be navigated justly.
Rubio nods toward diversity in one limited sense: he recounts, with a certain folksy charm, the contributions of various European groups to American nation‑building—Italians, Spaniards, Scots‑Irish, Germans, Dutch. But the underlying picture is one of civilizational homogeneity: “We are part of one civilization – Western civilization… bound by Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry…”
This is simply not a truthful description of the societies we inhabit. Europe is religiously plural and increasingly secular. The United States includes large populations whose ancestry traces not to Europe but to Africa, Asia, Latin America, and to the Indigenous peoples of the continent. Even within “European heritage,” there have always been deep conflicts—between Catholics and Protestants, elites and peasants, colonizers and colonized, fascists and their opponents.
To speak as though “Western civilization” is a single, bounded subject with one faith, one ancestry, one set of interests is to erase those internal fractures and hierarchies. It is to forget that many of the greatest Western achievements—emancipation, workers’ rights, women’s rights, civil rights, gay rights—were won against the dominant understandings of what “our civilization” required.
From a reflexively pluralist standpoint, Western identity cannot be defined against some external “other” alone. It must continually revisit its own internal boundaries. Who counts as “us”? Whose voices are heard? Whose suffering is recognized?
Rubio’s speech prefers, again, the easier path of unity against perceived threats. But a Western identity that cannot tolerate internal dissent and difference will soon enough turn its coercive energies inward (which is already happening in the United States, through the creation of the Intimidating State helped along by vindictive tolerance and gaslighting).
9. Western Identity as Responsibility, Not Possession
The central argument of my commentary from December 2025 was that Western identity, if it is to mean anything worth preserving, should be understood primarily as a set of responsibilities, not as a possession or as a license for power. Those responsibilities include:
- facing honestly the ways Western expansion has structured the world we all now inhabit;
- working to sustain a habitable planet in the face of climate change;
- strengthening a global human‑rights framework that does not treat Western citizens as uniquely entitled;
- learning from non‑Western and especially Indigenous traditions about how to live within ecological limits and in more reciprocal relations with the natural world;
- managing migration in ways that reflect both historical responsibility and the equal moral standing of all people.
Rubio’s Munich speech does not conceptualize Western identity along such lines. For him, Western identity is primarily a heritage to be proud of and a civilization to be defended—with reindustrialization, technological competition, military force, and strict borders as the principal tools.
There is nothing wrong with pride in genuine achievements or with robust defense of societies against aggression. But if that is all Western identity now means, then the tradition has deserted some of its most morally significant resources.
The question is not whether we should defend “the West,” but which West we are defending and what we are defending it for. A West that sees itself as nothing more than a beleaguered homeland of Christian heritage and industrial power, constantly under threat from migrants, institutions, and critics—a West in a stage of civilizational panic—is not a West I feel any urge to rally to.
The West I am interested in defending is a West that:
- takes Critical Inheritance seriously, including Mohawk’s indictment of its utopian legacies;
- remains committed to Institutional Experimentalism, not to the abandonment of institutions when they become inconvenient;
- holds fast to Uncomfortable Universalism, rather than retreating into a cozy civilizational narcissism;
- practices Reflexive Pluralism, acknowledging internal diversity as a site of learning rather than as a problem to eradicate.
Rubio’s speech gestures at greatness but tells us, in effect, that what makes the West special is its willingness to use its power unconstrained, to reject global responsibilities as self‑erasure, and to close ranks against outsiders. But that is not, in fact, the only vision. The tradition is richer, more self‑critical, and more open than this. It contains within itself the tools to critique exactly the kind of speech Rubio gave in Munich. It is those tools—and the responsibilities they entail—that I believe we must now reclaim.
U.S. Department of State
