\n<\/p>\n
Rubio traced the intellectual and cultural foundations of the West from ancient Athens through Rome and Christian Europe to the founding of the United States. He argued that these traditions remain vital as the West confronts geopolitical competition, war, terrorism, migration, economic challenges and emerging technologies.<\/p>\n
Praising Greece as a model ally of the United States, Rubio called for stronger transatlantic cooperation while defending national sovereignty and the pursuit of national interests. He also urged Europe to increase its defence capabilities, strengthen its industries and reclaim the confidence he said had once defined Western civilisation.<\/p>\n
Speaking before the Parthenon, Rubio presented ancient Greece not simply as a chapter in history, but as a continuing source of Western identity and inspiration.<\/p>\n
FULL TEXT HERE:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n SECRETARY RUBIO:<\/strong>\u00a0 There are great ruins all across the world.\u00a0 In many cases, they are places where history seems to have exhausted itself: remnants of distant cultures that have long passed beyond living memory.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n But the Acropolis is different.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n For thousands of years, the civilization that built what stands behind me has captivated the imagination of the Western world.\u00a0 Generations of our statesmen, artists, and philosophers have looked to it \u2013 they\u2019ve looked to it with wonder and they\u2019ve looked to it with awe.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Now time has a tendency to dull the senses: great victories and catastrophic defeats, they seem to\u00a0 shrink to becoming like a footnote in a textbook, another fact for our schoolchildren to memorize and forget.\u00a0 But the Greeks of antiquity, they seem to have an almost mystical hold on our memory.\u00a0 They call us back to them, again and again.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n 480 years before Christ, the armies of Xerxes arrived in this city and they put its sanctuaries to the torch.\u00a0 Most Athenians had by then evacuated by ship to a nearby island.\u00a0 But there was a handful of them that refused to leave their home.\u00a0 So instead, they barricaded themselves in the rocky fortress of the Acropolis to fight an extraordinary last stand, heaving massive stones down the cliffs onto the Persian invaders and holding the greatest empire of the age at bay for days.\u00a0 They were eventually overwhelmed.\u00a0 The Persians plundered the temples, burned the shrines, and razed the Acropolis to the ground but when the Athenians returned, they gathered the broken remains of the old Acropolis and buried them in the hill where it had stood.\u00a0 And decades later, under Pericles, they raised the Parthenon.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n For 25 centuries since, the Parthenon has stood.\u00a0 Empires have risen and fallen beneath its shadow.\u00a0 And the progeny of the men who built it \u2013 the sons of Athens and Rome \u2013 have carried their civilization with them to the ends of the Earth.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Two and a half centuries after the founding of the American republic halfway across the world from where I stand now \u2013 I stand here today as the Secretary of State of that republic, and a great-grandson of settlers who arrived in the new world from Spain \u2013 I stand here to testify to a debt that no lapse of time, no distance of space can ever extinguish.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The history of America, the history of my country, is covered with the fingerprints of antiquity.\u00a0 Greece is literally carved into the architecture of our government: in the towering columns, in the domes and the monuments across our capital city.\u00a0 The city where our Constitution was born \u2013 Philadelphia \u2013 is itself a Greek name.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The men who founded my country were fascinated by the heritage we inherited from yours.\u00a0 They were exceptionally well-read in history \u2013 they were vividly aware of their unique place in it \u2013 but no other age of the past held their attention or their imagination quite like that of antiquity.\u00a0 Many, many people are surprised to learn that the most commonly cited author in the Federalist Papers was not an Enlightenment philosopher or political theorist.\u00a0 No, the most commonly cited author in the Federalist Papers was Plutarch, the Greek biographer of Greece and Rome\u2019s great men.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Now, much has been written and said about the influence of ancient Greece on the ideas of the American Founders \u2013 and, for that matter, on all of the Western philosophers and statesmen that preceded them.\u00a0 Most of us are familiar with the basic history.\u00a0 Athens gave us democracy.\u00a0 Plato and Aristotle gave us Western philosophy.\u00a0 Our ideas of law, of virtue, of citizenship, and republican government were shaped in the Greek city-states.\u00a0 Even much of our political vocabulary \u2013 words like democracy, tyranny, the word \u201cpolitics\u201d itself \u2013 found its origins here.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Now, all of that is true.\u00a0 But the things we owe to this place \u2013 as Americans, and as Westerners \u2013 are actually far far deeper.\u00a0 These institutions and ideas \u2013 these institutions and ideas were the outward expression of more fundamental qualities we see in the ancient Greeks \u2013 qualities that can\u2019t be reduced to any particular political system or theory.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Here, in Athens, we found the first full realization of all the essential traits that would come to define the West: fierce individuality and relentless ambition; daring exploration and invention; a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory.\u00a0 An insatiable curiosity about the world and the principles by which it operates, a hunger to know the mysteries of nature and grasp the secrets of the cosmos.\u00a0 An impatience with the notion of impossibility, chafing at all boundaries and limits, straining to peer into the depths of the unknown.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n These were not just the formulas or precepts of a particular school of philosophy.\u00a0 They were the characteristic of a people \u2013 expressed in their traditions, their stories, their imagination; in the qualities they demanded of their citizens; in the things they lived and fought and died for.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n To know them is to know ourselves.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n What blossomed here in this place was the Western desire to uncover all that ignorance, darkness, and distance had kept hidden from the mind of man.\u00a0 The Greeks did not just shape history; the Greeks gave us history itself.\u00a0Much about \u2013 much of what we know about many ancient civilizations comes almost entirely from the records of Greek explorers and historians, explorers and historians who didn\u2019t just chronicle the histories of their own people, but ventured outwards to observe and record the sagas of foreign peoples and cultures all across the world.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Where others looked inward, the Greeks were the first to direct their focus outward, to chase the thrill and glory of seeing all that was strange and new.\u00a0 It was this trait \u2013 it was this trait that would push the West to create and build things that others could not, marking us out from so many other cultures and civilizations where stability and subsistence were the highest ends of life.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n But it is not just the ambition to explore the unknown that we inherit from the Greeks; it is the conviction that the unknown canbe known.\u00a0 The confidence that the world can be charted and measured and mapped and understood \u2013 and that there is a rational order to the cosmos, governed by certain fundamental laws, laws that men can observe and the mind can come to understand.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n This was the foundation of the Western mind: our math, our science, our medicine.\u00a0 Our philosophy, ethics, and religion.\u00a0 It paved the way for the gospel of Jesus Christ to find fertile soil in Europe and flourish into the empire of Christendom. It was the foundation of the riches of Christian theology \u2013 of Augustine and Aquinas and the whole tradition of natural law.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n It gave birth to a civilization marked not just by a common culture, it was marked by a common anthropology \u2013 a common view of man and his place in the universe.\u00a0 Its descendants would share not just the idea of a natural order, but a distinctive understanding of virtue; of destiny and fate; of truth, goodness, and beauty; of a code that dictates how men ought to live; of objective standards and ideals to strive towards.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n For the Greeks of antiquity, the pursuit of excellence was the very principle of man\u2019s existence.\u00a0 They organized all of civic life around contest, ambition, competition: in philosophy and poetry, in sculpture and drama, in athletics and art, in war and statecraft.\u00a0 The classical Greek city was an arena for great men to test and prove themselves, to hone their potential through perpetual struggle \u2013 to be the best, the strongest, the most beautiful, straining to inch ever closer to perfection.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Now I know that to modern ears, what I just described, this way of life, may sound odd; it may even sound cruel.\u00a0 The ideal of many ideologies in our time has, frankly, become a world of perfect safety, devoid of risk or failure, with neither the glory of victory nor the shame of defeat.\u00a0 Too often these days, we build downwards. We design our standards to ensure no one will lose; we preoccupy ourselves more with the comfort of the worst than the potential of the best.\u00a0 We hold the most exceptional things among us hostage to the average, the ordinary, the mediocre.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The men who made the Parthenon, they built upwards.\u00a0They held that the highest and most noble aspiration in life was to surpass all others, to strive to be the best in all things.\u00a0 The ancient Greek city-states were filled.\u00a0 They were filled with intense passion and rivalry and faction and conflict.\u00a0 But from that constant struggle for distinction \u2013 from that came the great flowering of art and philosophy and political and intellectual energy that would transform a collective of Mediterranean cities into the birthplace of the greatest civilization in the world.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The thumos, as the ancient Greeks called it \u2013 the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride \u2013 is the heart of great civilization.\u00a0 And without it?\u00a0 Without it, nations lose their will to fight, the will to strive, the will to survive.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Today, too much of the West has forgotten this quality.\u00a0 Over time, we in the West came to feel ashamed of the very things that made us exceptional.\u00a0 We felt embarrassed that our achievements set us apart from the rest of the world.\u00a0 Our prosperity somehow became a source of guilt.\u00a0 We no longer believed we deserved and had earned our greatness.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The word \u201cnationalism\u201d became a dirty word.\u00a0 And so we tore down our monuments; we condemned our own history.\u00a0 And in too many places, we taught our children to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit.\u00a0 In the process, we opened our borders and outsourced our industry, and allowed our militaries to wither and to decay.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n And with every passing year, we seemed to outsource more of our sovereignty, transferring our decisions to global bureaucracies far beyond the reach of our control.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n But others were all too happy to fill the vacuum that we left \u2013 the vacuum left behind by our weakness.\u00a0 And as the West\u2019s confidence faltered, its adversaries and its rivals only grew more assertive, building up their own wealth and their own power in our stead.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n And now, today, we find ourselves at a crossroads.\u00a0 Because the next decade and the decisions we make will write the story of the next century.\u00a0 The course we take will determine whether the West maintains its place at the head of the world or resigns itself to a future of atrophy and servitude and decline.\u00a0 We will either choose to act now or lose the choice to act at all.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Under President Trump, the United States has made its choice.\u00a0 We choose the unapologetic pursuit of national power: to take back control of our critical supply chains, to reindustrialize our economy, to rebuild our defense, to fight for dominance of the technologies and industries of the future.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n We choose to reach for new frontiers: in advanced manufacturing and super intelligence; in drones, weapons, and warfare; in chips, minerals, cyber, and every other domain of human possibility.\u00a0 To unleash our energy, to rebuild our factories, to return our astronauts to the moon and launch a new age of exploration in space.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Now for all their lofty ideals, the ancient Greeks were not naive.\u00a0 They understood that nations have interests.\u00a0 They understood that statecraft requires prudence and diplomacy, but they also understood that it requires the ability to wield force when prudence and diplomacy fail.\u00a0 They understood that power requires not only having the means to defend yourself, it requires the credibility that you are willing to use it.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n This is the classical understanding of politics and of statecraft that the Trump Administration hopes to reclaim \u2013 reclaim not just for our country, but for the whole of our civilization.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n We believe that Europe can awaken from its long slumber and rekindle the fire that was lit here millennia ago.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Across this continent, we are witnessing what we hope will be the beginnings of a generational shift: skyrocketing defense spending, a flurry of new partnerships and programs, expanded manufacturing and production, following on the historic defense commitments made last year in The Hague.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Greece has been at the center of this shift.\u00a0 The people of this nation have proved themselves once again to be an indispensable friend to Europe and to the United States alike, on everything from energy to migration to defense, where Greece has been a model ally.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n And it\u2019s our sincerest hope that all of Europe will follow your example.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Though passions may, at times, have strained the bonds of affection between the United States and Europe, it must not be allowed to break them.\u00a0 Together, we must strengthen an alliance capable of confronting threats of our age.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n And we can.\u00a0 Because we do not believe the transatlantic friendship should be zero sum.\u00a0 Quite the opposite: our vision is of an alliance whose strength is greater than the sum of its parts.\u00a0 It is a vision we saw in action just last month, in an unprecedented new agreement between the United States, Denmark, and Greenland \u2013 an agreement that will reshape the Arctic and bolster the security of all of NATO.\u00a0 All three partners in that deal emerged victorious.\u00a0 All of Europe \u2013 and NATO and the United States emerged safer, stronger, and more secure because of it.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n We want to win together.\u00a0 We must win together.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Now it\u2019s has become fashionable today to believe that enlightened foreign policy means prioritizing the global community over one\u2019s own people.\u00a0 And I think here, too, we have much to learn from the men of ancient Greece because they knew that there was nothing selfish or wrong about loyalty to your nation, nor anything selfish or wrong about fighting to defend its interests above all else.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n They believed \u2013 fiercely \u2013 in the ideal of the great man: the exceptional individual who obtains immortality through his own deeds.\u00a0 But they believed that glory and fame, those things were won through striving, sacrificing and achieving greatly for something larger than yourself.\u00a0 The recurring hero of the ancient Greek world was the man who was willing to pay any cost for a cause worthy of his loyalty.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n We see this in Socrates, who refused to abandon the inquiry into truth even at the cost of his own life.\u00a0 We see it in the legendary stand of 300 Spartans \u2013 surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered by the vast armies of Persia \u2013 who refused the chance to save themselves, choosing to fight to the last man rather than abandon their post or abandon their duty.\u00a0 And we see it in the epic myth of Achilles, who is offered the choice to return home and live a long and peaceful life \u2013 but chooses instead to remain at Troy and perish in pursuit of eternal glory.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n These \u2013 these are the qualities that would shape the Western moral imagination.\u00a0 From the Christian martyr who refused to betray his faith to the patriot who gave his life for his country; from Saint Thomas More to the Battle of the Alamo, running through the immortal closing words of the Declaration of Independence of the United States which says, \u201cWe mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n It is from the Greeks that the West inherited its sense of duty \u2013 an unbreakable loyalty to one\u2019s code, one\u2019s cause, one\u2019s country.\u00a0 Our heroes, the heroes of the West are those who choose to remain faithful to their duty precisely when it is most difficult and painful to do so: the man who is bound by his word, the soldier who will not abandon his post, the captain, the proverbial captain, who goes down with his ship.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n This is wholly different from what we see, even now, for example from fanatics like the radical mullahs of Iran, whose cult of death hails child suicide bombers as national heroes, and portrays martyrdom as an end to itself.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Our heroes \u2013 our heroes may be willing to die for their cause; but our heroes do not worship death.\u00a0 It is precisely because we value life that we come to recognize the heroism in those who would sooner sacrifice it than to betray their principles.\u00a0 Now, we take the West\u2019s conception of these things \u2013 heroism, honor, duty \u2013 we take these things for granted.\u00a0 We assume that these somehow are universal to all people in all times and in all places.\u00a0 They are not.\u00a0 They are the product of a distinct character, a distinct character which arose here and shaped the whole story of the civilization that came after it.\u00a0 A civilization that we must fight to defend today with the same passion as our forefathers did.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The men who built the Parthenon were succeeded by the architects of European Christendom, who raised the cathedrals of Milan, Cologne, and Florence.\u00a0 The quest to perfect the human form that moved the ancient Greek sculptors found a new expression in Michelangelo.\u00a0 The Greek philosophers\u2019 search for the structure of the universe was inherited by Copernicus, and then Galileo, then Kepler, and in Newton.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The hunger for new knowledge, that\u2019s what gave birth to Magellan\u2019s first expedition around the world, to Columbus\u2019 discovery of the Americas, and ultimately to Apollo 11\u2019s journey to the moon.\u00a0 And the qualities that led Alexander to conquer the entire known world reappeared in Caesar, then Charlemagne, and Cortes.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n And in America, that same tradition rediscovered itself anew.\u00a0 An open and wild land became the site of a great revival of Western imagination and ambition.\u00a0 The Greek aspiration for new horizons became the American frontier spirit.\u00a0 The civilization of Athens and Rome transformed an infant seaboard republic into a continental empire.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The greatest Americans of every generation have carried the unmistakable features of their forefathers \u2013 born in Athens, formed by Rome, baptized in Christendom, hardened in the furnace of medieval Europe, endowed with the English genius for liberty, and then carried across the Atlantic to be reborn on the shores of a new world.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Together, we must now rediscover that spirit.\u00a0 We are at an inflection point \u2013 an inflection point not only in the history of my nation, but an inflection point in the whole of our civilization.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The threats we face today are every bit as real as they were on the dramatic stage of antiquity.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n National interests did not vanish in the face of international institutions.\u00a0 War did not disappear simply because we preferred peace.\u00a0 Other states continued to arm, to seek influence, to compete for territory, and technology, and resources, and markets, and energy, and power.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n And now, there is war again.\u00a0 There is new competition between great powers again.\u00a0 There is vulnerability, aggression, terrorism, a whole universe of new threats and attacks again.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n And so we must rebuild our institutions and our alliances to face these threats together \u2013 understanding that the purpose of these things is not to abolish the sovereignty of the nations that constitute them; it is to defend them.\u00a0 And that nations need not abandon their distinct identities in order to recognize their common interests.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n We have built a model of that with our partners here in Greece.\u00a0 In our defense partnerships, in energy and technology, in our shared ambition to secure Europe\u2019s borders from the threats of mass migration.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Our friendship dates back to the earliest years of my nation.\u00a0 When Greece rose in 1821 to recover its independence after centuries of Ottoman rule, Americans recognized something familiar in that struggle.\u00a0 Three years later, the great American statesman Daniel Webster, he delivered a famous address to Congress, helping bring the cause of the Greek Revolution before the representatives of the young American republic.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n And he began by calling their attention to everything around them.\u00a0 This is what he said in his speech; he said:\u00a0 \u201cThis free form of government, this popular assembly\u2026 this practice of free debate, and public discussion, the contest of mind with mind\u2026 even the edifice in which we assemble, these proportioned columns, this ornamented architecture, all remind us that Greece has existed, and that we, like the rest of mankind, are greatly her debtors.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Those words are as true today as they were when he said them. \u00a0And all of us \u2013 not just Americans, but Europeans and our friends across the West \u2013 must relearn the lessons our forefathers took from this place and from its history.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The history of Greece \u2013 the history of Greece does not just offer us a glimpse \u2013 it does not offer a glimpse of our institutions in their earliest forms.\u00a0 The history of Greece shows us an image of ourselves.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n It shows us that ours is the inheritance of great heroes, and that we should be proud \u2013 that we should be intensely proud \u2013 of where we come from.\u00a0 We should marvel at what our forefathers carved out of this countryside.\u00a0 The story of our civilization is the greatest story ever known to man.\u00a0 And it began here, with the first men and women of the West.\u00a0 From them \u2013 from them \u2013 we can rediscover the virtues, the courage, and the strength to confront the dangers that we face in our time.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Thank you.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n