By Daniel Foster
Monday, February 16, 2026
It’s the dead of midwinter and that means that I’m
spending my days watching curling and moguls and luge and foreign policy
speeches at the Munich Security Conference.
Like pretty much the entire American right, I mostly
liked Marco Rubio’s speech there, certainly better than the last guy’s. But I
took note of one perhaps tellingly awkward construction, the one the State
Department chose to blast out on social media as the money quote: “Armies do
not fight for abstractions. They fight for a people, a nation, and a way of
life. That is what we are defending.”
I caught hell on X/Twitter from other fans of the speech,
for pointing out that a people, a nation, and a way of life are, in fact,
abstractions — paradigmatic ones, even. For this I was called a pedant, a
stupid leftist, and sundry slurs about my masculinity. But I’m obviously right.
And not just for semantic reasons, but for substantive ones. Let me explain.
First, the easy part. A “people” is not a concrete
object. You can’t trip over it. It has no home address. A “nation” is a
community of shared sentiment and mutual obligation that, critically, need not
constitute a state or any other geographically contiguous area. It’s an
“imagined community,” and all the more powerful for being imagined. A “way of
life” is the vaguest and most abstract of the three, the sort of thing that
resists specification because its power is precisely in its capaciousness: Your
way of life and mine overlap in important places but diverge in a hundred
others, yet we’re both American.
When I asked one of my more energetic social media
critics to list the people the U.S. Army fights for, he (and others) offered
conventional or stipulative definitions. And you could do that a thousand
different ways: Every living U.S. citizen. Or citizens plus legal permanent
residents. Or all the ones who actually reside in the United States. Or the
ones who reside in the United States but not the outlying territories. Or only
the patriots. And so forth.
Those are all fine, but they don’t change matters a whit.
Because nobody who wields the term “the American people” has met them all, and
indeed none can even specify the exact list of members, and yet they still
understand what the term means.
Your mother is a particular. The nation is an
abstraction. More precisely, it’s a social construction. But both your mother
and the nation are real. It very much doesn’t follow that because something is
socially constructed it’s fake. Take the U.S. dollar, or the English language,
or civil marriage, or the infield fly rule.
So there’s nothing wrong with the fact that a people, a
nation, and a way of life are abstractions. They’re still predicates in good
standing. And Rubio, it seems to me, used them advisedly. That is to say, I
have a hard time believing that he and his writing staff didn’t understand the
apparent contradiction in his construction: “Armies don’t fight for
abstractions. They fight for [abstractions a, b, and c].”
Notice that Rubio could have said “Armies don’t fight for
the rules-based international order,” or “Armies don’t fight for procedural
liberalism,” and gotten all the same back-slaps and attaboys from his domestic
supporters. Indeed, those are the kind of unspecified abstractions it seems
Rubio’s hootin’-and-hollerin’ domestic fans imagined him to mean.
But Rubio didn’t use those examples. The interesting
question is why. I think it’s because he wanted to make an affirmative point,
one that distinguishes his view from the one articulated by JD Vance in his RNC
speech and elsewhere, in which Vance suggests that Americans only fight and die
for their actual families and their literal homes (or, if you like, for their
blood and their soil).
Contra Vance, Americans understand that they share
Americanness with people they’ve never met, and they understand what it means
without generating a specific set of necessary and sufficient conditions.
That’s an abstraction, and it’s the kind of abstraction that armies have always
fought for. They already fight for a “people” they can’t fully specify. For a
“way of life” that has no home address. For a “nation” whose boundaries are as
much conceptual as geographic. The question was never whether to fight
for abstractions; it was always which abstractions.
The inherent contradiction in Rubio’s construction
suggests he was trying to make this point in a way that didn’t call too much
attention to itself, to build a bridge from Vance’s smaller and more insular
view and invite MAGA to walk a little ways across it. Given how many people who
fundamentally agree with Vance are aggressively missing my point about Rubio,
it seems he succeeded. He smuggled what was, if not a universalist sentiment,
then at least a transnational and expansive one, through the checkpoint of
populist nationalism, and nobody patted him down.
Indeed, people seem to miss the point that Rubio’s
entire speech was about Western civilization, an idea so abstract it makes
“the American people” look like the Empire State Building.
But that’s okay. Because armies fight for Western
civilization all the time, and precisely because of its strange and
unprecedented decision to extend its circle of moral concern beyond blood and
soil to anyone who accepts the same premises. That’s a hell of an abstraction.
The best one we’ve got.
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