Inventing Tradition

Rubio in Munich

JD Vance went to Munich in 2025 to offend; Marco Rubio went in 2026 to make amends—up to a point. He tried to reassure Europeans stung by Vance's insults that the United States criticized Europe “because we care deeply.” He invoked his European ancestors from Seville and Sardinia so as to claim consanguinity with his audience and thus solicit its trust. And he insisted the the U.S. and the countries of Europe were bound by “the deepest bonds that nations can share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage.”

It was an artful portrait, slyly conceived to obscure crucial features of that “shared history,” which consisted of “centuries” indeed of bloody internecine warfare; of a “Christian faith” marked by schism, sectarian bloodletting, and intolerance; and of cultures that fought incessantly more than they “shared,” cultures that were often brandished as banners of nationalist division rather than invoked as symbols of common values (see Thomas Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen).

On reading this ostensibly conciliatory speech, it is impossible to overlook the fact that the Europe that Rubio invokes is the Europe of the 19th century, a Europe that could still be described without apology or qualification as “Christian,” a sanctifying and unifying label that conceals a motley multitude of sins and sensibilities.

The secretary's own America is similarly whitewashed by his characterization of “an Italian explorer's” achievement as “bringing Christianity” to “the Americas,” conveniently overlooking the fact that on the island of Santo Domingo where Columbus landed, voodoo still vies with Christianity as the people's faith. To complicate the history with the mingling of races and the religious syncretism that ensued would have taken the story too far from the Plato-to-NATO fairy tale that our national mythmaker hoped to fob off on his eager audience.

After wooing the Europeans gathered in fear and trembling around the ruins of the “rules-based international order” (a phrase “too frequently used,” he rightly observed), Rubio, as Alberto Alemanno points out, jetted off to Bratislava to meet Robert Fico and then on to Budapest to endorse Viktor Orban in his bid for re-election. “Let that sink in,” Alemanno comments. “Fico and Orbán are the two EU leaders closest to the Kremlin, and both are under EU rule-of-law scrutiny.” In short, Rubio's myth of a Christian monoculture underlying “Western civilization” was immediately belied by his embrace of Europe's two most divisive leaders, whose ally Putin portrays himself as the defender of Orthodox Christianity in justification of his claim to rule Ukraine.

There is a saying, falsely attributed to Göring or Goebbels, that comes to mind in such circumstances: “When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my revolver.”¹ Neither of these authorities is noted for subtle cultural criticism, so I hesitate to invoke them, but it's true that when a demagogue employs the word “culture” to posit some presumed set of shared values to be defended with a nation's blood and treasure, it is always best to be wary, especially when the culture in question is sanctified by slathering it with religious unction.

None of this is to deny that there once was a Western alliance. Its roots can be traced not to Solon's or Socrates’ Greece or the garden of Gethsemane but to the aftermath of World War II. An exsanguinated Europe needed the aid of the United States to recover its strength; the triumphantly ascendant United States needed Europe as a market for its wares and a bulwark against its erstwhile Soviet ally, henceforth unleashed as its global rival.

The global balance has since shifted, but a similar confluence of interests could plausibly be invoked to underwrite Rubio's apparent desire to perpetuate the postwar alliance under somewhat altered terms. His mythification of the past is unlikely to result in a new understanding, however. He might begin by asking himself whether the people he ought to be consulting about Europe's future are Fico and Orban or Merz and Macron, Meloni and Starmer. In the MAGA world from which Secretary Rubio emanates and which he one day hopes to lead, however, such questions cannot be asked, let alone answered. Trump's America swaggers abroad demanding fealty from its former allies, despite having proven itself to be completely untrustworthy and unreliable. To escape from this abyss will require more art than Secretary Rubio or his master is capable of.

1. According to Google's AI: The phrase "When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun" (or revolver) is a notorious quote often wrongly attributed to Nazi leaders like Hermann Göring or Joseph Goebbels. It actually originates from the 1933 Nazi play Schlageter by Hanns Johst, where a character says, "When I hear 'Culture'... I release the safety catch on my Browning!".