The U.S. secretary of state is reviving the language and intent of 19th century colonialism to deter what he sees as “the forces of civilizational erasure that today menace both America and Europe alike,” writes Joe Lauria.

Marco Rubio’s Cecil Rhodes Moment

By Joe Lauria

Special to Consortium News

Cecil Rhodes may have been the most unabashed imperialist of the modern era. In his 1877 “Confession of Faith,” he wrote:

“I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts that are at present inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings what an alteration there would be if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence, look again at the extra employment a new country added to our dominions gives.

I contend that every acre added to our territory means in the future birth to some more of the English race who otherwise would not be brought into existence. Added to this the absorption of the greater portion of the world under our rule simply means the end of all wars. “

Rhodes ever regretted that the British Empire lost its North American colonies. He wanted the United States to be rejoined with Britain to create a great, racially superior Anglo-Saxon Empire that would rule over a global Pax Britannica.  

“Why should we not form a secret society with but one object the furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole uncivilised world under British rule for the recovery of the United States for the making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire. What a dream, but yet it is probable, it is possible.“

Instead the U.S. went its own way to build such a global empire with Britain as junior partner. The transition to predominance from the British to the American Empire could be demarcated at the Suez Crisis of Oct. 29 to Nov. 7, 1956 when the United States, the preeminent power after the war, put an end to the French, British and Israeli military adventure to stop Egypt nationalizing the canal. 

That made the U.S. the major power in the Middle East, supplanting British and French colonialism.

Four months later, on March 6, 1957, the Gold Coast became the first African country to gain independence, renaming itself Ghana.  That was the beginning of the end for direct British, French, Belgian and Portuguese rule on the continent.

Colonialism only superficially ended in the wave of independence that followed in the 1960s, 70s and 80s in Africa and Asia. After many bitter and protracted wars, the worst coming in Angola (1961–1975) and Vietnam (1945–1975), European flags were lowered and the flags of proud, new nations rose. 

But European and American political and economic dominance of the Global South continues, at first challenged by the non-aligned movement and now by the BRICS nations led by China and Russia — the greatest obstacles to U.S. global domination.  

The Rise & Coming Crisis of the US Empire

The U.S. empire arose almost immediately after the separation from Britain that Rhodes so lamented. 

First, the slaughter and takeover of Native American nations; then the purchase of Louisiana from a cash-strapped Napoleon; followed the conquest of Mexico’s northern territories from Texas to California; and then defeat and displacement of the decrepit Spanish empire in the Caribbean and the Pacific.  

Two world wars extended U.S. presence first in Europe and Russia and then on military bases spanning the globe. While Rhodes was busy running Africa, planning a Cape Town to Cairo railroad and enriching himself on the continent’s diamonds, the United States today seeks to dominate the entire world and all the resources it needs to do it. 

Major setbacks in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan has left Washington and its corporate partners undeterred. The Global South’s continuing aspiration for full independence is the enemy that threatens unbridled U.S. power.  

This is the context in which Marco Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state and national security adviser, stepped to the podium at the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 14 to deliver a speech worthy of Rhodes, one that may have led Rhodes to believe the U.S. had returned to the Anglo-Saxon home where it belonged.  

Rubio said Americans and Europeans “are part of one civilization – Western civilization.  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.” 

He asks what the U.S. and its Western allies are fighting for?

“Armies fight for a people; armies fight for a nation.  Armies fight for a way of life. And that is what we are defending: a great civilization that has every reason to be proud of its history, confident of its future, and aims to always be the master of its own economic and political destiny.”

Rubio is dismissing seven decades of anti-colonialism, arguing it has impeded American and Western greatness. There’s nothing to be ashamed of in the West’s colonial past of slavery and abuse and the future is there again for the taking. 

Europe’s great cultural treasures, built on the exploitation of the colonies, “foreshadow the wonders that await us in our future.  But only if we are unapologetic in our heritage and proud of this common inheritance can we together begin the work of envisioning and shaping our economic and our political future.”

The West must shake off any residual guilt from its colonialist past and proudly reassert Western dominance like in the good old days of conquest and expansion. The good old days of Cecil Rhodes. Greenland, Canada, Venezuela and next Iran are open imperialist targets of the Trump administration. 

‘Expand Our Territory’

In his January 2025 inaugural address, Donald Trump spelled it out: “America will reclaim its rightful place as the greatest, most powerful, most respected nation on Earth, inspiring the awe and admiration of the entire world. From this moment on, America’s decline is over.”  

Trump said:

“It is time for us to once again act with courage, vigor and the vitality of history’s greatest civilization. … The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons.” [Emphasis added.]

The Days of Denial

The U.S. had long denied it was an empire. But no more. 

Before the Soviet Union made “imperialism” a dirty word, empires were proud to be called empires. The U.S. founders in their writings referred to the new country as one. George Washington called the U.S. “a rising empire,” and Thomas Jefferson said western expansion would create a “empire of liberty,” Manifest Destiny became the slogan to conquer the continent. 

During William McKinley’s presidency, the 1898 U.S. defeat of the Spanish Empire and seizure of overseas colonies was wildly popular. There was no shame in empire.

McKinley tried to frame imperialism as a civilizing mission and “benevolent assimilation” rather than the naked conquest that it was, but the Anti-Imperialist League aptly named it. That the openly anti-imperialist William Jennings Bryan fell in McKinley’s 1900 re-election showed just how popular American imperialism was.

But the rise of the Soviet Union and its criticism of the West as “imperialist” turned the word into a curse which Ronald Reagan eventually invoked to label the Soviets the “Evil Empire” in a case of pure projection. 

Post-war U.S. coups and invasions expanded dominance under cover of spreading democracy, though democrats were unseated for dictators, such as in Iran and Chile.  A fleeting revival of domestic anti-imperialism around Vietnam was overcome in the 1991 Gulf War, in which George H.W. Bush proclaimed the Vietnam syndrome over. 

That cleared the way for U.S. interventions in Yugoslavia in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001 and the major invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Despite all this clear evidence, the trepidation with which U.S. politicians approached the idea that the U.S. was an empire was illustrated by a 2008 radio interview in which then Sen. John Edwards, a Democratic presidential candidate, was asked an incredible question:  ‘Is America an empire?’  

There was dead air for about 10 seconds before Edwards said, “Gee, I hope not.”

Now it’s back in the open again. And Trump and Rubio are saying it out loud.

“This is the path that President Trump and the United States has embarked upon,” Rubio told his Munich audience. “It is the path we ask you here in Europe to join us on.  It is a path we have walked together before and hope to walk together again.” 

Let’s us revive Western colonialism together. Let us return to its heyday that lasted from the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and English expansion, through the 1880’s Scramble for Africa, until the 1940s.

“For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding – its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe,” Rubio said proudly.  

Ruin then befell the West when the colonial powers warred against each other. This was followed by godless demands for sovereignty from the colonized. 

“But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, [the territorial expansion] was contracting.  Europe was in ruins.  Half of it lived behind an Iron Curtain and the rest looked like it would soon follow.  The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come.” 

Rubio lamented that,

“Against that backdrop, then, as now, many came to believe that the West’s age of dominance had come to an end and that our future was destined to be a faint and feeble echo of our past.  

But together, our predecessors recognized that decline was a choice, and it was a choice they refused to make.  This is what we did together once before, and this is what President Trump and the United States want to do again now, together with you.”

There can be no more explicit example of the reinvigoration of colonialism than the ongoing U.S. and European support for Israel’s colonial genocide in Palestine. It is colonialism rooted in the pre-war era, dripping in lies about Israel’s right to defend itself, not against its rebellious, anti-colonial subjects, but against anti-semites in Palestine and around the world. 

Here is the Rubio Doctrine shouted from the hill top: the supremacist West is back. Europe must join America in its revival. 

“This is why we do not want our allies to be weak, because that makes us weaker. We want allies who can defend themselves so that no adversary [BRICS] will ever be tempted to test our collective strength,” Rubio said. And anti-colonial accusations will not be tolerated. 

“This is why we do not want our allies to be shackled by guilt and shame. We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization, and who, together with us, are willing and able to defend it. 

And this is why we do not want allies to rationalize the broken status quo rather than reckon with what is necessary to fix it, for we in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline.  We do not seek to separate, but to revitalize an old friendship and renew the greatest civilization in human history.”  

Fear is to be conquered on the road back to colonial greatness.

“The alliance that we want is one that is not paralyzed into inaction by fear – fear of climate change, fear of war, fear of technology. Instead, we want an alliance that boldly races into the future.  And the only fear we have is the fear of the shame of not leaving our nations prouder, stronger, and wealthier for our children.” 

Ignore your suffering populations and overcome your guilt.  Rubio said the U.S. wants an alliance “ready to defend our people, to safeguard our interests, and to preserve the freedom of action that allows us to shape our own destiny – not one that exists to operate a global welfare state and atone for the purported sins of past generations.”  

He is talking about ambitious elites  pursuing their self-interest with no regard for the immense human suffering they causes on their way to success. 

Western elites stand above the peoples of non-West nations, whom Rhodes called “the most despicable specimens of human beings.” A reinvigorated U.S. and Europe will not “maintain the polite pretense that our way of life is just one among many and that asks for permission before it acts,” said Rubio.  

Underscoring the point further, he said, 

“What we have inherited together is something that is unique and distinctive and irreplaceable, because this, after all, is the very foundation of the transatlantic bond. Acting together in this way, we will not just help recover a sane foreign policy.  It will restore to us a clearer sense of ourselves.  It will restore a place in the world, and in so doing, it will rebuke and deter the forces of civilizational erasure that today menace both America and Europe alike.”

Leaving no doubt what he meant, Rubio concluded: 

“I am here today to leave it clear that America is charting the path for a new century of prosperity, and that once again we want to do it together with you, our cherished allies and our oldest friends.  (Applause.) 

We want to do it together with you, with a Europe that is proud of its heritage and of its history; with a Europe that has the spirit of creation of liberty that sent ships out into uncharted seas and birthed our civilization; with a Europe that has the means to defend itself and the will to survive.  

We should be proud of what we achieved together in the last century, but now we must confront and embrace the opportunities of a new one – because yesterday is over, the future is inevitable, and our destiny together awaits. Thank you.”  

The assembled mostly European officials in the audience rose to their feet in sustained applause. Anyone who thinks the revival of the colonial mindset is just an American phenomenon would be sadly mistaken by this response.  

Cecil Rhodes’ spirit is revived.  But it is a very different world than his. One can only see frightening amounts of bloodshed ahead if American and European leaders act on Rubio’s vision.

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.

https://consortiumnews.com/2026/02/23/marco-rubios-cecil-rhodes-moment/

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