An illiberal tilt

We are witnessing a clash of civilisations with American characteristics

- SHYAM SARAN

The much-awaited speech by United States (US) Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also national security advisor, at the Munich Security Conference on February 14 may have elicited a “collective sigh of relief” from the largely European audience, but should be cause for serious alarm among postcolonial and developing countries of the Global South.

His remarks celebrated the history of conquest, exploitation, barbarity, and even ethnic cleansing, which has marked the history of Western imperialism and colonial empire-building across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. He wants this to be a source of pride and inspiration, not something to “atone for purported sins of past generations”. What is perplexing is that the history of the world after the Second World War, which is often described as an American era, is instead seen as a period of Western decline:

"But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, it [i.e. the West] was contracting.

The great western empires had entered into terminal decline accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come.”

Anti-colonial uprisings, which would include our own against British colonialism, are not celebrated as struggles for freedom and human dignity but as evidence of the abdication of the Western will to rule. Strange that this should come from a representative of a country that is celebrating 250 years of its own successful war of independence against British colonialism.

This echoes US President Donald Trump’s desire to launch America once again on a path of territorial expansion. And presumably this would include Greenland though Mr Rubio did not mention it. The Danish Prime Minister has confirmed that the threat of US takeover of the Arctic island persists.

Mr Rubio celebrated his own origins from the Spanish conquerors of Cuba: