The Old Playbook, Repackaged for a New Cold War
Same playbook, different decade: Marco Rubio, speaking in Munich, presented the 'Make the West Great Again' doctrine, emphasizing shared heritage with Europe and warning against mass migration. This echoed Vice President Vance’s speech from the prior year, though Rubio’s delivery was smoother, earning applause rather than shock. Together, these addresses articulate a vision of national sovereignty
and military power, shorn of the 'delusion' of a rules-based international order. This is hardly novel. The rhetoric of a besieged 'Western civilization' has been a recurring theme in US foreign policy since at least the Cold War, often deployed to justify interventionism and unilateralism. Take John Foster Dulles’s 1950s warnings against Soviet expansion, framing it as a clash of fundamental
values. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was similarly framed by some as a defense of Western democratic principles against 'barbarism,' a venture that ultimately destabilized the region and cost trillions of dollars without achieving stated goals. Rubio’s unspoken target, China, benefits from this narrow, 'civilizational' framing. By lamenting deindustrialization and the perceived unfairness of global
trade, Rubio is recycling arguments that prioritize US economic dominance under the guise of protecting 'Western' values, while conveniently ignoring the structural advantages built into the post-WWII economic order that benefited the West for decades. This shift demonizes economic competition as an existential threat, much as the 'Red Scare' demonized ideological competition. The current 'great