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Marco Rubio’s Munich Security Conference speech revived the myth of Western civilisation while erasing colonial violence, war crimes and imperial destabilisation across the Global South.
By IQBAL JASSAT
At the Munich Security Conference on February 14, 2026, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not merely deliver a speech. He shamelessly articulated a doctrine which was framed as resurrection of ‘Western civilisation’.
Indeed, it was in substance, a declaration of Western primacy restored through force, coercion and civilisational arrogance.
Unsurprisingly, what was glaringly absent from Rubio’s sweeping narrative of ‘Western civilisation’ was any acknowledgement of the violence that birthed it.
No serious analysis of the rot associated with Rubio’s fairytales will be complete if the atomic incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is erased from memory. So too the genocide of indigenous peoples in the Americas, the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism. These were not oversights. They were erased because they fracture the myth of moral superiority.
Rubio invoked the Cuban Missile Crisis as proof of Western resolve. Conveniently omitted was the fact that the crisis was created by the US. History records that it followed the secret US deployment of nuclear missiles in Türkiye, creating a first-strike threat against Moscow. The Soviet response in Cuba was symmetry, not madness.
The pattern of military aggression against the Islamic Republic of Iran is evidence that US appetite for war remains intact.
From Cuba to Ukraine, American forward basing, covert destabilisation and broken assurances are reframed as ‘defence’, while reactive measures are branded aggression.
As for deindustrialisation, Rubio lamented it as a self-inflicted wound. Yet it was the same Western institutions that imposed Structural Adjustment Programmes across Africa and the Global South, dismantling industries, stripping sovereignty and engineering dependency.
Rubio attacked migration as a threat to Western civilisation. His dishonesty was yet again exposed for he failed to acknowledge that mass displacement followed US/NATO-led invasions, sanctions, wars and economic strangulation.
Devastating results of Western hegemonic wars are evident across many parts of the world including Somalia, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Venezuela and Palestine.
Destabilise, then denounce the refugees. Bomb, then fortify borders. This is not policy failure. It is imperial continuity.
In his portrayal of the United Nations as ineffective in Gaza and Ukraine, Rubio shrewdly omitted Washington’s decades-long sabotage of multilateral institutions whenever it constrained Israeli or American violence.
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The erosion of international law did not occur in a vacuum. It was hollowed out by those now lamenting its weakness.
Rubio’s call for a ‘new Western century’ made the objective explicit: control supply chains, dominate critical minerals, compete for market share in the Global South, reassert borders, reject global norms when inconvenient. This is not cooperative renewal. It is a strategic rearmament of empire.
His civilisational appeal was unambiguous: erase history of colonised indigenous people.
So too was his silence on Islamic renaissance and African civilisations. His narrative was built on a skewed reading of history but clearly intended to advance US/European dominance.
The military doctrine Rubio espoused echoed earlier blueprints. Project for a New American Century is one such.
The sequence of wars that followed the list of targeted states was premised on the false belief that history can be bent indefinitely through force. It failed then. It corrodes now.
What Munich revealed was not Western confidence. It revealed panic. A recognition that the balance of power has shifted. That BRICS exists. That China industrialised without Western tutelage. That Russia did not collapse. That Palestine remains defiant. That the Global South is no longer passive terrain.
Rubio’s speech was not reassurance. It was mobilisation.
The language of renewal masks a deeper anxiety. The West is confronting decline and seeks to securitise it as destiny. The rest of the world sees it as reckoning.
History is not ending. It is turning.
Iqbal Jassat is an executive member of the Media Review Network, Johannesburg.
