Marco Rubio Before the Acropolis: the Temptation of a War of Civilizations

On October 7, 2026, before the Acropolis in Athens, Marco Rubio invoked twenty-five centuries of history to defend a vision of Western power driven by a desire for confrontation and domination. This selective reading of the past, which reduces relations between ancient Greece and Persia to their military clashes, reveals a conception of international relations profoundly at odds with the history of exchange between civilizations.

Yet this vision of power runs up against the results of the Trump administration’s foreign policy: from Ukraine to the Persian Gulf, Donald Trump’s brutal unilateralism weakens America’s alliances without allowing Washington to achieve its strategic objectives. At a time when the global balance of power is shifting, this determination to preserve American hegemony through force risks turning the transition toward a multipolar order into a succession of confrontations with uncontrollable consequences.

A Distorted Reading of History to Legitimize a Policy of Confrontation

Marco Rubio’s choice of the Acropolis as the setting for presenting his vision of the West is far from incidental. By tracing Western civilization back to its Greek origins, the American Secretary of State seeks to place the Trump administration’s foreign policy within a historical tradition stretching back more than two millennials. His speech thus does more than evoke the past: it proposes a redefinition of Western identity, its place in the world, and the principles that should henceforth guide its actions.

The message is explicit: the West, Rubio suggests, has gradually lost its power by abandoning the qualities that once ensured its greatness. Ambition, the competitive spirit, national pride, and the will to dominate have given way to historical guilt, the pursuit of consensus, and excessive confidence in international cooperation. Western societies have come to regard their own success as a fault, their history as a source of shame, and their power as a legacy for which they must apologize.

Rubio counters this trend with a vision of the West rooted in the will to power and permanent confrontation. He does not merely call for military rearmament or the reindustrialization of Western economies. He calls for a renewed mindset, a collective determination to defend Western interests, including through force, without feeling the need to justify doing so.

This reading of history is anything but innocent. It selects from the Greek legacy those elements capable of legitimizing a contemporary policy of confrontation, while obscuring other essential dimensions of that civilization. Yet Greek philosophy cannot be reduced to a celebration of competition and conquest. It is also, and above all, a reflection on justice, truth, the limits of power, and the need to subject human passions to reason. Thymos, which Rubio invokes as an expression of courage and pride, is not, in Plato’s thought, a virtue in its own right. It must be guided by reason if it is not to become a destructive force.

By emphasizing only one aspect of this heritage, Rubio turns the historical narrative into a political argument. The greatness of ancient Greece would be followed by that of Rome, Christian Europe, and finally the United States. In his account, this lineage would define a Western civilization with a distinctive identity, whose fullest expression today would be America and whose history would be driven above all by the spirit of conquest and the will to dominate.

In this reading of history, Donald Trump’s policy appears not as a break with Western history but as a return to its origins. Nationalism and the use of force cease to be mere political or strategic choices and become the natural expressions of a civilization that has temporarily forgotten its true vocation.

This is where the speech’s real political significance lies. By making the will to dominate a defining feature of Western identity, Rubio seeks to confer historical legitimacy on the Trump administration’s aggressive and brutal foreign policy, founded on intimidation, blackmail, and power politics, in disregard of international law. Multilateral institutions and the principles of sovereignty, themselves partly products of Western political history, are thus trampled in the name of a conception of national interest in which the law of the strongest tends to replace common rules.

The paradox is all the more striking because Rubio elevates national sovereignty to a fundamental principle, yet seems to reserve its full exercise for the United States, recognizing it for Western allies only insofar as it does not conflict with American interests. As for nations outside this grouping, their sovereignty appears subordinate to another imperative: preserving American supremacy. What thus emerges is a profoundly hierarchical conception of international relations, in which the United States stands at the top, its allies enjoy conditional autonomy, and other nations are expected to accept an order defined in Washington. Such a vision is difficult to reconcile with the principle of the sovereign equality of states, which underpins the contemporary international order.

The Athens speech therefore does not merely announce a reorientation of American diplomacy. It reveals a deeper ambition: to challenge the foundations of the international order in favor of a system in which power relations would prevail over common rules, with the aim of preserving the United States’ preeminence. To give this ambition historical legitimacy, Rubio portrays the West in which conquests and conflicts occupy a central place, at the expense of exchanges, reciprocal influences, and shared legacies.

This vision becomes particularly questionable when it portrays ancient Persia and contemporary Iran as the historical adversaries of a Western civilization whose cultural, intellectual, and political heritage the Iranian world has nevertheless helped shape over the centuries.

From Cyrus to the Present Day: Iran, the Legacy Rubio Would Like to Erase

The Greco-Persian Wars: A History Stripped of Its Context

By choosing to begin his account with the burning of the Acropolis in 480 BCE, Marco Rubio immediately casts Persia in the role of the enemy. Xerxes’ armies appear as a destructive force against which the Athenians are said to have defended civilization. Twenty-five centuries later, the American Secretary of State invokes Iran’s religious leaders and their alleged cult of death, once again contrasting two irreconcilable conceptions of heroism and duty.

This parallel is not incidental. Without explicitly asserting that contemporary Iran is the political continuation of the Achaemenid Empire, Rubio constructs a narrative in which ancient Persia and present-day Iran are cast, in turn, as the enemy. The former supposedly threatened the birth of Western civilization; the latter now supposedly threatens its fundamental values.

But this presentation rests on a remarkably selective reading of history. The burning of Athens cannot be isolated from the context of the Greco-Persian Wars, which pitted the Greek city-states against the Persian Empire between 499 and 449 BCE. In 498, Greek forces, including Athenians, had captured Sardis, the capital of the Persian satrapy of Lydia, and set part of the city ablaze. Herodotus recounts that Darius, on learning of the destruction of Sardis, swore revenge against the Athenians and ordered a servant to repeat to him three times at every meal: "Master, remember the Athenians." His son Xerxes fulfilled his father’s wish, in an expedition that also served Persian imperial ambitions.

These events remind us that the Greco-Persian Wars were conflicts between powers pursuing their interests, ambitions, and sometimes their revenge, rather than a confrontation between a creative civilization and another destined for destruction. By focusing solely on the burning of Athens, Rubio turns one episode of this complex history into the symbol of a civilizational opposition supposedly spanning the centuries.

Cyrus and Persia in the West’s Political and Religious Heritage

Relations between Greece and Persia were not, however, limited to their military confrontations. They were also marked by mutual observation, exchanges, and intellectual curiosity, of which Greek authors left numerous accounts.

Herodotus, who recounts the Greco-Persian Wars, also describes Persian institutions, customs, and practices. Xenophon goes further. In his Cyropaedia, he makes Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid Empire, a central figure in thinking about the art of government. The Persian sovereign appears not merely as a conqueror, but as a leader capable of organizing a vast political entity, securing the allegiance of different peoples, and giving moral education and justice an essential place.

The paradox is remarkable: one of the great models of government transmitted by Greek literature to the Western political tradition is precisely that of a Persian sovereign. Military hostility therefore did not preclude admiration or intellectual borrowing.

Cyrus’s legacy also extends far beyond the Greek world. After the conquest of Babylon in 539 BCE, his policy toward the populations and religious traditions of conquered territories left a lasting mark. The Cyrus Cylinder, presented as the first declaration of human rights, remains associated in contemporary memory with a conception of power based on religious tolerance and respect for peoples. Its symbolic significance in the history of ideas of tolerance and justice remains considerable.

His place in the biblical tradition is equally remarkable. The books of Ezra and Chronicles attribute to him the decision to allow the Judeans deported to Babylon to return and to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. In the Book of Isaiah, Cyrus is even designated as the Lord’s "anointed," a term corresponding to the Hebrew mashiah, from which the word "messiah" derives.

Thus, the founder of the Persian Empire occupies a singular place in the history of Judaism and, consequently, in the religious heritage from which Christianity emerged. How can Iranian civilization be presented as historically alien to a West whose Judeo-Christian roots Rubio himself emphasizes?

This place of Persia in the history of human civilization was also recognized by great European thinkers. Hegel wrote in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History: "With the Persian Empire, we enter for the first time into a continuous history. The Persians are the first historical people." A particularly significant statement from a philosopher who assigned world history a central place in his thought.

Persia was therefore not, in Hegel’s eyes, a civilization outside the movement of history, still less its antithesis. It constituted a fundamental stage in it. This reveals the gulf between this philosophical recognition and the narrative that reduces the Persian Empire to the figure of an invader who came to destroy the West.

An Enduring Influence on Western Thought, Culture, and Science

Persia’s influence can also be found in American political history, which occupies a central place in Rubio’s speech.

The Secretary of State recalls that the Founding Fathers of the United States were deeply steeped in classical culture. But that culture also included knowledge of Persian civilization. John Adams referred to the Persian kingdom described by Xenophon in his reflections on the drafting of the American Constitution. James Madison referred to the kings of Persia during the constitutional debates of 1787. Cyrus thus belonged to the intellectual world from which the founders of the American Republic drew their historical examples and reflections on political authority.

This does not, of course, mean attributing the institutional architecture of the United States to Persia. But it would be equally inaccurate to exclude the Persian legacy from the references that informed American political thought. Through classical authors, Iranian civilization was present in the debates that accompanied the birth of that Republic.

Another, more tangible example illustrates the persistence of this legacy. On the façade of New York’s former main post office, the James A. Farley Building, a monumental inscription celebrates the determination of couriers to carry out their mission despite snow, rain, heat, or darkness. This phrase, which has become one of the best-known symbols of the American postal service, is inspired by Herodotus’s description of the Persian Empire’s messenger system.

The tribute is striking: in the heart of New York, a public institution has for more than a century celebrated the administrative efficiency of an Iranian empire two and a half millennia old. Persia is therefore present not only in the accounts of war that have shaped the Western imagination. It is also present in the models of organization and symbols that Western societies have chosen to perpetuate.

European intellectual history offers equally significant examples. In his Persian Letters, Montesquieu chooses the perspective of Persian travelers to question the institutions, beliefs, and contradictions of French society. This literary device goes beyond exoticism: it makes Persia a means of shifting intellectual perspective, enabling Europeans to look at themselves through the eyes of the other.

Voltaire takes an interest in Zoroaster and the religious traditions of ancient Iran to inform his reflections on the origins of beliefs and morality. Goethe discovers in Hafez’s poetry a source of inspiration powerful enough to engage in a genuine poetic dialogue with him in his West-Eastern Divan. Nietzsche chooses the figure of Zarathustra as the central figure in one of his most famous philosophical works. In the United States, Ralph Waldo Emerson helps introduce Hafez and Saadi to the American public.

These encounters were not merely a fascination with a foreign civilization. They show how works and ideas originating in Iran contributed to the renewal of European and American thought. The West did not develop in isolation. It also took shape through contact with intellectual traditions that it studied, translated, discussed, and sometimes incorporated into its own creations.

This circulation of knowledge is particularly evident in the history of science. Between the ninth and fifteenth centuries, scholars from the Iranian cultural sphere played a major role in the development of mathematics, medicine, astronomy, and geography. Their work circulated among different regions of the Islamic world, India, and Europe, contributing to the transmission and transformation of knowledge.

The name Mohammad Khwarizmi gave rise to the word "algorithm," while the title of one of his works is the origin of the term "algebra." Omar Khayyam made important contributions to the study of cubic equations and to geometry. Aburayhan Biruni developed remarkable methods of geographical measurement and observation. Nasir al-Din Tusi contributed to advances in trigonometry and astronomy.

In medicine, Avicenna’s Canon, translated into Latin, became a reference work in European medical education for several centuries. The work of Rhazes also left its mark on the history of medicine through its attention to clinical observation and the classification of diseases.

These scholars did not merely transmit knowledge inherited from Antiquity. They produced new knowledge that contributed greatly to European scientific progress. The history of science cannot be understood as a succession of autonomous civilizations, but as a cumulative process in which knowledge circulates, evolves, and is enriched through exchange.

This scientific tradition did not die out with the end of the medieval period. In the modern era, Iranian researchers have continued to contribute to scientific advances worldwide. Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman to receive the Fields Medal in 2014, Ali Javan, who participated in the development of the first helium-neon gas laser, and Lotfi Zadeh, who developed fuzzy set theory, illustrate this continuity.

The influence of contemporary Iranian culture is also evident in cinema, whose creativity and human depth have won exceptional international recognition in recent decades. The numerous honors bestowed at major European festivals, notably the Palme d’Or awards presented to Abbas Kiarostami in 1997 and Jafar Panahi in 2025, as well as the awards won by Asghar Farhadi, testify to the vitality of artistic creation that continues to enrich the world’s cultural heritage.

Far from being a civilization bent on destruction, as Marco Rubio might suggest, Iran has contributed considerably, at different periods, to the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge that today constitutes the shared heritage of humanity.

The "Culture of Death" in the Light of History

American leaders themselves have recognized this reality. On March 20, 2009, in his message to Iranians on the occasion of Nowruz, Barack Obama explicitly acknowledged the greatness of Iranian civilization and recalled that its art, music, literature, and innovations had helped make the world a better and more beautiful place. This recognition showed that it was possible to distinguish disagreements between governments from the value of a civilizational heritage.

The contrast with Donald Trump’s rhetoric is striking. In April 2026, the American president threatened to send Iran "back to the Stone Age." On April 7, he went further still, declaring that "a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again." Such words no longer targeted only a government, its leaders, or its military capabilities: they raised the threat of destruction over an entire civilization.

The contradiction becomes even more striking when Rubio attributes a genuine "culture of death" to Iranian leaders. Certainly, the human rights violations and repression carried out by the Islamic Republic must not be minimized. But such an accusation, expressed in civilizational terms, must also be measured against the United States’ own military history.

In a study published in 2023 in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, researchers Sidita Kushi and Monica Duffy Toft identify 392 American military interventions between 1776 and 2019. Nearly half took place between 1950 and 2019, and more than a quarter since the end of the Cold War. These were not 392 wars in the classical sense, but a range of military operations, uses of force, and interventions of different kinds and scales. Their growing number nevertheless attests to the central role of military force in American foreign policy.

The human toll of contemporary conflicts is equally considerable. According to Brown University’s Costs of Warprogram, the wars waged since the beginning of the twenty-first century are estimated to have caused between 4.5 and 4.7 million direct and indirect deaths.

The comparison with Iran also deserves to be placed in its historical perspective. For more than two centuries, Iran has not launched a war of conquest against a foreign state.

The question must therefore be asked: on what historical or moral grounds can a culture of death be attributed to a particular civilization, when the history of the power that claims to embody its opposite is itself marked by wars, conquests, and their human consequences?

Iranian civilization has never been reducible to opposition to the West. Its history includes wars, rivalries, and conquests, like that of other powers, from Antiquity to the present day. But it is also a history of coexistence, exchanges, intellectual creation, and lasting contributions to the development of human civilization.

By reducing twenty-five centuries of Iranian history to a succession of confrontations with the West, Marco Rubio does not merely distort Iran’s past. He also offers a truncated vision of Western history itself, obscuring the exchanges, reciprocal influences, and shared legacies that contributed to its formation.

This selective reinterpretation of the past is not merely an injustice to Iranian history. It raises a far more troubling question: what becomes of international politics when rivalries between states are presented as the continuation of age-old conflicts between civilizations?

Brutal Unilateralism and the Specter of a Clash of Civilizations

The danger of such a reading of history lies not only in the representation it offers of relations between civilizations. It lies above all in the foreign policy it seeks to legitimize. Behind the exaltation of Western greatness, Marco Rubio’s speech defends a conception of international relations in which unilateralism and brutality take precedence over cooperation and respect for international law. A worldview in which great powers would no longer seek ways to coexist, but would instead impose their will.

The real issue is not the recognition that the international order inherited from 1945 is undergoing profound transformation, but how the Trump administration intends to respond to this shift. Founded on the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, and a security architecture largely structured around the United States, this order is experiencing a growing crisis of legitimacy and effectiveness. China’s rise, Asia’s growing influence, the emergence of regional powers, and the demands of countries of the Global South have profoundly altered the balance of power on which Western preeminence rested.

These transformations require institutions, rules, and collective security mechanisms to adapt. They could pave the way for an order more representative of the new balance of power, in which multipolarity would not necessarily be synonymous with instability, but could also foster a new equilibrium based on cooperation among powers. Yet rather than negotiate the terms of this balance, the Trump administration favors economic pressure, diplomatic coercion, and, when these measures are insufficient, the use of force to preserve American supremacy.

America First, or the End of Solidarity Among Allies

This conception of international relations concerns not only the United States’ adversaries, foremost among them China and Iran. It also transforms Washington’s relations with its historical partners. When every relationship is assessed in terms of the immediate advantages it brings the United States, security commitments and bonds of solidarity built over decades are called into question as Washington’s interests shift.

The agreement announced on October 9 between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin on Russian diesel exports offers an illustration. While the war continues in Ukraine, Washington lifted restrictions on Russian diesel exports in order to lower fuel prices. On October 16, Donald Trump went further by suspending the implementation of new economic and trade sanctions against Russia, even though these had been provided for in a law he himself had signed only a few weeks earlier. These decisions offer Moscow an economic and political opening while weakening Western pressure on Russia.

To serve his immediate political interests, Donald Trump did not hesitate to sacrifice the interests of Ukraine and its European allies, abruptly calling into question a Western strategy pursued for several years. More seriously still, he risks permanently undermining the credibility of American commitments without any certainty of securing the political benefits he expects. For Europeans, the message is unambiguous: their security can be sacrificed according to Washington’s political calculations. The trust on which the transatlantic alliance rests is thus shaken even further.

Saudi Arabia is now experiencing this same logic. A strategic ally of the United States for decades, it is suffering attacks by the Houthis against its territory and infrastructure, notably in Riyadh. Yet, faced with threats to the kingdom’s security, Washington is not providing the military support it expects from its principal protector. The strategic ties, arms contracts, and economic interests binding the two countries are no longer sufficient to guarantee American solidarity. For Riyadh, as for Washington’s other partners, the conclusion is troubling: an alliance spanning several decades no longer guarantees the same level of protection when American priorities change.

The situations of Ukraine and Saudi Arabia are different, but they reveal the same policy. Washington intends to retain the economic, military, and diplomatic advantages of its alliances without necessarily assuming the responsibilities they entail. It demands loyalty and concessions from its partners while reserving the right to abandon them when its interests change. This policy does not merely weaken the United States’ relations with its allies. It further erodes the credibility of American commitments, which nevertheless constitutes one of the foundations of its international influence.

America First thus takes on a new dimension: that of an America Only, in which allies’ interests matter only when they serve Washington’s. Europeans bear a particularly heavy cost. Required to align themselves with American choices, but rarely involved in decisions that affect their own security, they are increasingly treated as subordinate partners rather than sovereign allies. By continuing to accept this dependence, Europe risks losing even the capacity to defend its own strategic interests.

The War Against Iran: An American Strategic Defeat with Historic Consequences

But Donald Trump does not merely weaken his alliances. His policy of confrontation also reveals the limits of American power in the face of its adversaries. The war against Iran offers the most striking illustration: drawn into this conflict by Israel, the United States has achieved none of its principal objectives, despite its military superiority and months of bombing. It has obtained neither regime change, nor the elimination of Iranian nuclear and ballistic capabilities, nor a rupture of the links between Tehran and its regional allies, notably Hezbollah and the Houthis. The result is a major strategic failure for Washington.

More seriously still for the United States, Iranian strikes have inflicted severe damage on its network of military bases in the region. Facilities in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, and other countries have been damaged or rendered unusable, forcing the Pentagon to evacuate or redeploy some of its forces and to consider a lasting reduction in its regional presence. These attacks exposed the vulnerability of a military apparatus built over decades to ensure American preeminence in West Asia. Washington retains considerable striking power, but the war has demonstrated the limits of its ability to protect its own installations and those of its allies.

Compounding this military setback is America’s inability to guarantee the security of two of the world’s most strategic maritime passages. In the Strait of Hormuz, Iran has demonstrated that it can dictate the terms of navigation and disrupt energy exports without directly confronting the American fleet. It need only make navigation sufficiently dangerous to drive up insurance premiums, disrupt maritime trade, and cause oil prices to rise. At Bab el-Mandeb, Houthi attacks have profoundly disrupted shipping between the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, and the Suez Canal, forcing numerous shipowners to reroute their vessels and paralyzing a large share of traffic along one of the world’s principal trade routes. Tehran thus possesses, directly or through its allies, the means to exert pressure on two vital arteries of global trade that Washington has failed to neutralize.

This failure assumes an additional geostrategic dimension in the rivalry between the United States and China. As the principal buyer of Iranian oil, Beijing depends heavily on energy supplies from the Persian Gulf. After strengthening its influence over Venezuela’s oil resources, Washington sought to gain additional leverage over China’s energy supplies through Iran. But the United States has obtained neither control of Iranian oil nor control over the Persian Gulf. On the contrary, the war has weakened its military positions in a region destined to play a central role in the competition between the world’s two leading powers.

The war against Iran has also shaken the Persian Gulf monarchies’ confidence in American protection. These states, whose security has depended on Washington for decades, have discovered that the presence of American bases on their territory, far from guaranteeing their protection, could instead expose them to devastating reprisals. They now face the need to reassess their security choices and their relations with the great powers. For Washington, the credibility of its entire regional deterrence system is now in question.

Iran has paid an immense human, economic, and material price. But the United States has failed to impose its terms on it and has suffered significant damage to its own strategic positions. By seeking to demonstrate that it could still dictate the outcome of a confrontation on its own, it has revealed the limits of its power and risks accelerating the decline of its influence in one of the world’s most strategic regions.

From Proclaimed Domination to the Chaos It Unleashes

These three crises highlight the gap between the ambitions for power proclaimed by Marco Rubio before the Acropolis and the results of American policy on the ground. Far from imposing its will and consolidating its domination, the Trump administration is contributing to a growing number of crises and the destabilization of international balances. Rubio’s speech thus takes on a far more troubling dimension. It goes beyond a distorted reading of history: it elevates confrontation into a principle of international relations and provides an ideological justification for Donald Trump’s brutal unilateralism. In this worldview, adversaries must be subdued and allies ordered to fall into line. There is little room for negotiation or compromise.

Ukraine, Saudi Arabia, and Iran each illustrate, in their own way, the contradictions of this strategy. In the first two cases, the reliability of American commitments is called into question. In the third, the military superiority of the United States was not enough to avert a severe strategic defeat. Under these circumstances, how can Washington claim to continue leading the international order if it undermines its allies’ trust without managing to impose its will on its adversaries?

The historical irony would be considerable. By resorting to brutal unilateralism to preserve their hegemony, the United States is, in reality, accelerating the emergence of a multipolar world in which its allies would seek greater autonomy and its adversaries would strengthen their cooperation. But the real issue is not whether America will retain its domination. It is whether the transition toward a new world order can take place without plunging the world into a conflagration with uncontrollable consequences. Marco Rubio could nevertheless have found cause for reflection in the very history of Greece that he invokes. Thucydides saw in the rise of Athens and the fear it inspired in Sparta one of the fundamental causes of the Peloponnesian War. Twenty-five centuries later, this warning remains entirely relevant: great powers’ blindness to shifts in the balance of power can turn their rivalries into devastating conflicts. Yet the history of civilizations, which Marco Rubio invokes to justify confrontation, reminds us of an essential lesson: no power has ever been able to impose its will indefinitely on the rest of the world.

Copyright Mark Schiefelbein / POOL / AFP
Marco Rubio in front of the Pnyx in Athens on October 7, 2026