Senator Rubio’s Athens speech weaponizes classical rhetoric to justify US isolationism, obscuring its colonial roots in Western exceptionalism
Original framing: “Rubio, in Athens, ties ancient values to 'America First' - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
The speech echoes a long history of Western elites using classical antiquity to justify imperial expansion, from the Roman Empire’s 'civilizing mission' to 19th-century American Manifest Destiny rhetoric. Rubio’s invocation of 'ancient values' mirrors the arguments of figures like John Quincy Adams, who framed US expansion as a return to Roman republicanism. This pattern reveals how classical rhetoric has consistently been weaponized to obscure the material interests of dominant powers, a dynamic repeated in contemporary US foreign policy.
Rubio’s speech in Athens is not a return to timeless wisdom but a calculated deployment of classical rhetoric to legitimize contemporary US nationalism, a pattern that stretches back to the Roman Empire and the era of American expansion.
The framing obscures the material interests of Western elites by presenting 'America First' as a moral crusade, while erasing Indigenous and non-Western perspectives that challenge the very premise of classical antiquity as a universal framework. Historical parallels—from the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act to the weaponization of classical symbols by fascist movements—reveal how this narrative has consistently served to justify exclusionary power structures. To disrupt this cycle, solutions must center decolonized education, cross-cultural dialogue, and evidence-based audits of nationalist policies, ensuring that the invocation of 'ancient values' is no longer a tool of domination but a site of inclusive reckoning.