Civilizational Erasure

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, February 17, 2026

 

Marco Rubio’s most valuable skill as a politician is bilingualism.

 

By that, I don’t mean his fluency in English and Spanish (although that’s also a useful skill), but his ability to master different political dialects. The secretary of state has always had a canny diplomatic knack for convincing his audience that he’s speaking their ideological language.

 

In 2010, the New York Times anointed Rubio as “the first senator from the Tea Party” despite the Senate candidate himself not personally identifying as a member of that movement. He charmed centrists by championing comprehensive immigration reform in 2013, yet somehow continued to speak conservatism fluently enough to become a top-tier contender leading up to the 2016 Republican presidential primary.

 

After Reaganism was all but extinguished by Donald Trump’s victory that year, Rubio began teaching himself how to speak nationalism. He picked it up well enough to land a spot in Trump’s Cabinet and today is its chief ambassador to the world, which is a bit like someone converting to Catholicism and becoming a cardinal within a decade.

 

His most impressive achievement in political bilingualism, though, may have come last week at the Munich Security Conference. At the same event one year ago, J.D. Vance berated the stunned crowd by questioning whether America and Europe still shared enough values to sustain the Atlantic alliance. On Saturday, a soft-spoken Rubio made a similar argument in more politic terms … and drew a standing ovation.

 

In fairness to Vance, the vice president spoke at a moment when the White House still believed it could bully America’s allies into doing anything it liked. A year later, things are different; Rubio’s tone was more conciliatory because it had to be. The two men’s roles in the administration also require different approaches. The secretary of state’s job requires cooperation from Europe, whereas the vice president’s job consists mainly of boorish grandstanding to impress Tucker Carlson and the chud right in hopes of averting a primary challenge in 2028.

 

And so, if Vance’s tone was that of an angry father warning his adult child to get a job or move out, Rubio’s was that of a concerned mother reminding the child that daddy’s only saying that because he loves you. “We are part of one civilization—Western civilization,” he said on Saturday. “We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, 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 only way to defend our shared culture against the forces of “civilizational erasure,” Rubio warned his audience, is for Europeans to embrace nationalism—namely, reindustrialization and tight borders rather than unfettered free trade and mass migration. If “we Americans … sometimes come off as a little direct and urgent in our counsel” on that point, he added, alluding to Vance’s speech last year and Trump’s perpetual belligerence, it’s only “because we care deeply. We care deeply about your future and ours.”

 

At one point, Rubio proclaimed that the United States and Europe “belong together,” which probably explains the standing O. He was, in a way, recommitting to the Atlantic alliance.

 

Sounds good. Just tell me this: Why bother? Which mutual threat is this newly reconstituted Atlantic alliance supposed to contain?

 

Three threats.

 

“Why, the threat from China,” you might say. Nonsense.

 

If the White House wanted to weaken China by strengthening ties with Europe, it wouldn’t have spent the past year waging a trade jihad that made every country on the continent a target. We’re less than a month removed, remember, from Trump threatening to slap new tariffs on eight European nations for no better reason than that they refused to let Denmark be extorted into forfeiting its sovereignty over Greenland.

 

The administration was also conspicuously more critical of Europe than it was of China in the new National Security Strategy it released in December. The president has done everything he can since returning to office to show European powers that America is no longer a reliable ally, a predictable trade partner, or a stable hegemon. Beijing now looks more, not less, attractive to those powers than it used to, and they’re acting accordingly.

 

Postliberals have no real ideological commitment to containing China. It’s awfully late in the game for anyone to still be pretending otherwise.

 

“Fine, it’s about containing the threat from Russia,” you counter. That’s even sillier.

 

U.S. aid to Ukraine dropped by 99 percent in the first year of Trump’s second term. After a few fits and starts of correctly blaming Vladimir Putin for the war’s continuation, the president seems to have settled on placing the onus squarely on the Ukrainians. An exasperated Volodymyr Zelensky has been reduced to whistleblowing, howling into the void that the Russians are offering our venal White House economic deals in exchange for siding with them in negotiations and complaining about the insanity of the U.S. pressuring Ukraine for concessions without serious security guarantees.

 

The Trump administration is at best indifferent to the outcome in Ukraine, and plainly keen to move on to the kind of rapprochement between Washington and Moscow of which the president has dreamed for years. It’s not interested in some grand alliance with Euroweenies to restrain a Russian menace that it doesn’t regard as actually menacing.

 

“Well, then, the new Atlantic alliance is aimed at containing Islam,” you offer, hoping the third time’s the charm. “Muslims are migrating to Europe en masse, and the White House fears that a white Christian stronghold won’t be white and Christian for much longer.”

 

Now we’re getting somewhere. But even this theory has a weakness.

 

Without a doubt, the muttering about “civilizational erasure” in Rubio’s Munich speech and in the National Security Strategy I mentioned earlier refers to a cultural threat more so than a military or economic one. It couldn’t be otherwise, as nationalists are chiefly concerned with defending the rightful cultural dominance of their nation’s ruling tribe from rival tribes. The more foreign those rivals are in terms of race and religion, the more urgent the defense needs to be. That was the core of the secretary of state’s message over the weekend.

 

“It was this continent that produced the genius of Mozart and Beethoven, of Dante and Shakespeare, of Michelangelo and Da Vinci, of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones,” he noted. The subtext was clear enough: If the Muslims take over, Europe will no longer produce Beethovens and Mozarts. The cultural heritage that Americans and Europeans share will be gone. That’s why Americans are and must remain committed to Europe’s—white, Christian Europe’s—success.

 

Islamization is what the new Atlantic alliance is supposed to contain, or rather prevent.

 

Here’s the problem, though. Knowing Donald Trump as you do, whom do you think he’d rather have in charge of France? Emmanuel Macron or Mohammed bin Salman?

 

Civilization without liberalism.

 

I think the point of Rubio’s Munich speech was to redefine “Western civilization” so that it no longer includes liberalism.

 

He referred in passing to Europe planting the “seeds of liberty” and to its role in developing “the rule of law, the universities, and the scientific revolution” that became fundamental aspects of the Western world. But the kinship between the U.S. and Europe that he outlined was palpably more tribal than it was ideological. “We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share,” he said, “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.” That’s as close as one can get to blood-and-soil nationalism in describing two populations that no longer occupy the same soil.

 

What’s missing is the Enlightenment.

 

Until recently, any account of the ties that bind America and Europe would have emphasized—and possibly led with—democracy, legal restraints on government power, and freedom of thought and of religion. Those are, or were, the pillars that supported the Western liberal order and on which arguments about the superiority of Western civilization frequently relied. I’m old enough to remember right-wingers citing classical liberalism as a triumph of Christianity, in fact, as only a faith that celebrated the value of every person could inspire a politics that took individual rights seriously.

 

Nationalists dislike liberalism because they resent the accountability that legal regimes inspired by the Enlightenment demand from leaders. That’s why I’d bet my bottom dollar that Trump would rather see a Muslim like bin Salman, an authoritarian after his own heart, in charge of France than a secular liberal like Macron. President bin Salman wouldn’t ride to Denmark’s defense when America sought to seize Greenland, scolding Trump by citing various international rules and norms that prevent such things. No, I suspect that he would acquiesce because he’s no more eager to be bound by those rules and norms than our president is.

 

As long as treasures like the Louvre and the Notre-Dame de Paris were protected, I don’t think the White House would care a bit how “Western” or non-Western an Islamic French government behaved. For postliberals, “civilization” is measured exclusively in terms of culture, not civics; illiberal modes of government don’t affect the calculation.

 

Absorbing that lesson has been part of Marco Rubio’s own education in nationalism.

 

In 2019, the then-senator from Florida co-signed a letter warning Trump about a meeting he planned to hold with Hungarian President Viktor Orbán. “In recent years, democracy in Hungary has significantly eroded,” it read, explaining that the country “has experienced a steady corrosion of freedom, the rule of law and quality of governance. … Under Orban, the election process has become less competitive and the judiciary is increasingly controlled by the state.” Sen. Marco Rubio was offended by Hungary’s departure from Enlightenment ideals and worried that the leader of the free world was normalizing that.

 

Seven years later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio swung by Budapest after his speech in Munich last week to … effectively endorse Viktor Orbán for president. And he did so at a moment when Orbán’s chief opponent is promising to end Hungary’s Putinist foreign policy if elected and reestablish strong ties with Europe.

 

There’s no way to reconcile that endorsement with support for “Western civilization” without reading liberalism out of your definition of the latter. Orbán, Trump, and Putin are all attempting to redefine “the West” in the same basic way, dialing up their followers’ chauvinism about cultural touchstones like Christianity while dialing down liberal expectations for constraints on their own power. According to that redefinition, the Russian army rampaging across Europe would be a triumph for Western civilization, not a calamity, which probably explains Trump’s and Orbán’s rooting interests in the Russia-Ukraine war.

 

Reimagining the West without liberalism is a form of “civilizational erasure” all its own. How far is Marco Rubio prepared to go to enable it?

 

Nostalgia.

 

Awfully far, it seems. Unless I missed it, for instance, Rubio hasn’t made a peep about his boss’ scheme to tamper with this fall’s election.

 

He also hasn’t said anything about the comical degree of corruption in and around the White House. Or the Justice Department trying to indict its political opponents for speech crimes on evidence so flimsy that even a grand jury laughed them out of court. Or the president’s secret immigration police force enjoying total legal impunity for its conduct, even when it kills Americans. Or the dark-age hostility with which the administration has greeted remarkable scientific advances, as anti-Enlightenment as politics in the 21^st century gets.

 

As America’s chief diplomat, Rubio is now the international face of a population that has chosen—chosen—to replace a civic order that made it the preeminent nation on Earth with the sort of third-world “sh—hole country” political culture that mass migration is supposedly forcing on Europe. Where he and Vance get the nerve to lecture foreign diplomats on their supposed betrayal of Western culture while they preside over the institutional and ethical ruin of the United States, I simply can’t imagine.

 

But Rubio does have the nerve. To all appearances, he doesn’t seem perturbed by a bit of what’s happening around him.

 

We’re left, then, with the question with which we began. Without a common enemy to contain, why does the White House want to keep up the pretense of being allied with liberal Europe in the first place? Why not just be done with the Atlantic alliance and form a postliberal Voltron with Russia and China, as the president would surely prefer to do?

 

I wonder if the answer lies in nostalgia, as it often does with Trump’s movement.

 

In aspiring to make America great again, Trump and his supporters have always been slippery about specifying when they believe America was great in the first place. A “RETVRN” bro might tell you that our nation was born a millennium or two too late to ever experience true greatness, but I sense the touchstone for most MAGA types is the 1950s or thereabouts. The U.S. had just won the war, the economy was booming, the white-picket-fence American dream was within reach, and, with the civil-rights era not yet in full flower, the proper tribe was still in charge of everything. That’s the period to which we should retvrn. Er, return.

 

Not coincidentally, that period encompasses the president’s childhood, the most nostalgic period of a person’s life. And not coincidentally, that period was when the United States became the unquestioned leader of the free world, head of the greatest peacetime alliance in history. When you think of American greatness, in other words, you inevitably think of the U.S. as primus inter pares among dozens of European allies, forming a unified front against the threatening East.

 

That relationship is part of our “heritage” now, to borrow one of Marco Rubio’s new favorite words, and heritage isn’t lightly dispensed with. Postliberals are perfectly capable of imagining the West without fraternity between America and Europe, but the other 85 percent of us will struggle to do so, including and especially the nostalgists among us.

 

So, despite our obvious and growing incompatibility, the White House will continue the supposed partnership between our country and the continent. All Europe needs to do to cement it for many years to come is jettison liberalism. A small price to pay in the name of defending Western civilization, don’t you think?