Oct 8, 2026 · 19 min · 11 segments
Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivers a sweeping defense of Western civilization in Athens, warning against national decline and urging Western nations to reclaim their sovereignty, strength, and…
Emily JashinskyHost
[upbeat music] Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivering a sweeping defense of Western civilization from Athens Wednesday, the Acropolis rising behind him as he traced America's political and cultural inheritance back thousands of years to ancient Greece.
Secretary Rubio arguing the West's extraordinary success grew from qualities first celebrated here: ambition, courage, curiosity, competition, and the relentless pursuit of excellence.
For 25 centuries since, the Parthenon has stood.
Empires have risen and fallen beneath its shadow, and the progeny of the men who built it, the sons of Athens and Rome, have carried their civilization with them to the ends of the earth.
Two and a half centuries after the founding of the American Republic, I stand here to testify to a debt that no lapse of time, no distance of space can ever extinguish.
The history of America, the history of my country, is covered with the fingerprints of antiquity.
Greece is literally carved into the architecture of our government, in the towering columns, in the domes and the monuments across our capital city.
The city where our Constitution was born, Philadelphia, is itself a Greek name.
The secretary going on to say too much of the modern West has lost confidence in that inheritance.
Over time, we in the West came to feel ashamed of the very things that made us exceptional.
We felt embarrassed that our achievements set us apart from the rest of the world.
Our prosperity somehow became a source of guilt.
We no longer believed we deserved and had earned our greatness.
The word nationalism became a dirty word, and so we tore down our monuments, we condemned our own history, and in too many places, we taught our children to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit.
In the process, we opened our borders and outsourced our industry and allowed our militaries to wither and to decay.
And with every passing year, we seem to outsource more of our sovereignty, transferring our decisions to global bureaucracies far beyond the reach of our control.
Secretary Rubio arguing the choice now facing the West is whether to accept that decline or reverse it.
The course we take will determine whether the West maintains its place at the head of the world or resigns itself to a future of atrophy and servitude and decline.
We will either choose to act now or lose the choice to act at all.
We choose the unapologetic pursuit of national power, to take back control of our critical supply chains, to reindustrialize our economy, to rebuild our defense, to fight for dominance of the technologies and industries of the future.
We choose to reach for new frontiers in advanced manufacturing and super intelligence, in drones, weapons, and warfare, in chips, minerals, cyber, and every other domain of human possibility to unleash our energy, to rebuild our factories, to return our astronauts to the Moon, and launch a new age of exploration in space.
Mr. Rubio then turning to the threats facing the West today and what he believes its alliances must be built to confront.
The threats we face today are every bit as real As they were on the dramatic stage of antiquity.
National interest did not vanish in the face of international institutions.
[upbeat music] Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivering a sweeping defense of Western civilization from Athens Wednesday, the Acropolis rising behind him as he traced America's political and cultural inheritance back thousands of years to ancient Greece.
Secretary Rubio arguing the West's extraordinary success grew from qualities first celebrated here: ambition, courage, curiosity, competition, and the relentless pursuit of excellence.
For 25 centuries since, the Parthenon has stood.
Empires have risen and fallen beneath its shadow, and the progeny of the men who built it, the sons of Athens and Rome, have carried their civilization with them to the ends of the earth.
Two and a half centuries after the founding of the American Republic, I stand here to testify to a debt that no lapse of time, no distance of space can ever extinguish.
The history of America, the history of my country, is covered with the fingerprints of antiquity.
Greece is literally carved into the architecture of our government, in the towering columns, in the domes and the monuments across our capital city.
The city where our Constitution was born, Philadelphia, is itself a Greek name.
The secretary going on to say too much of the modern West has lost confidence in that inheritance.
Over time, we in the West came to feel ashamed of the very things that made us exceptional.
We felt embarrassed that our achievements set us apart from the rest of the world.
Our prosperity somehow became a source of guilt.
We no longer believed we deserved and had earned our greatness.
The word nationalism became a dirty word, and so we tore down our monuments, we condemned our own history, and in too many places, we taught our children to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit.
In the process, we opened our borders and outsourced our industry and allowed our militaries to wither and to decay.
And with every passing year, we seem to outsource more of our sovereignty, transferring our decisions to global bureaucracies far beyond the reach of our control.
Secretary Rubio arguing the choice now facing the West is whether to accept that decline or reverse it.
The course we take will determine whether the West maintains its place at the head of the world or resigns itself to a future of atrophy and servitude and decline.
We will either choose to act now or lose the choice to act at all.
We choose the unapologetic pursuit of national power, to take back control of our critical supply chains, to reindustrialize our economy, to rebuild our defense, to fight for dominance of the technologies and industries of the future.
We choose to reach for new frontiers in advanced manufacturing and super intelligence, in drones, weapons, and warfare, in chips, minerals, cyber, and every other domain of human possibility to unleash our energy, to rebuild our factories, to return our astronauts to the Moon, and launch a new age of exploration in space.
Mr. Rubio then turning to the threats facing the West today and what he believes its alliances must be built to confront.
The threats we face today are every bit as real As they were on the dramatic stage of antiquity.
National interest did not vanish in the face of international institutions.
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