Introduction

Marco Rubio went to the Pnyx in Athens on 7 October 2026, with the Acropolis behind him and an illegal American war against Iran still casting its shadow across international politics, to give what amounted to a theological justification for aggression masquerading as a lesson in history.

 

The US Secretary of State did not merely praise the achievements of Athenians, Spartans or philosophers writing in Greek; he comically proclaimed the existence of an almost hereditary Western character, born in one corner of the southern Balkans, carried through Rome and Christendom, rediscovered by the European conquerors of the Americas and finally entrusted to the United States. Its alleged owners, in this account, uniquely understood discovery, reason, courage, duty and even the historical imagination itself. Persia entered his speech not as a civilisation with institutions, texts, ethical traditions and an immense intellectual afterlife, but as the sinister military opponent required to make his preferred heroes shine. Modern Iran appeared as the contemporary moral opposite of his idealised West. The result was an extraordinary feat of historical illiteracy [1]: an American foreign minister, representing a state whose president had threatened to return Iran to the Stone Age, delivered a sermon about the custodianship of civilisation by erasing one of its indispensable architects (Rubio, 2026).

 

His most revealing pronouncement was the extraordinary assertion that the Greek-speaking peoples of antiquity did not merely contribute to humanity's understanding of the past, but ‘gave us history itself’. He proceeded to portray their curiosity as humanity's first serious attempt to understand foreign societies, while presenting Greek philosophical enquiry as the origin of ‘our math, our science, our medicine’. In doing so, Rubio effectively dispossessed numerous civilisations of their intellectual achievements and bestowed them upon the ancient Greeks, disregarding the fact that the civilisations of Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Phoenician cities had flourished long before the emergence of the classical Greek city-states. The Greeks themselves were beneficiaries of older intellectual traditions: they adopted and adapted the Phoenician alphabet, learnt mathematical knowledge from Egyptians, and drew upon centuries of Mesopotamian astronomical observation and calculation. Far from emerging in intellectual isolation, Greek scholarship developed within a wider Asian and north African world in which knowledge circulated through trade, migration, conquest and sustained cultural influence. The achievements of Babylonia, Egypt, Phoenicia, Persia, India and China cannot simply be absorbed into a Greek genealogy of human civilisation, still less appropriated as the exclusive inheritance of the modern West. Yet this is precisely the effect of Rubio's account: the intellectual accomplishments of numerous peoples, including civilisations that preceded the classical Greek city sates by centuries or millennia, are retrospectively credited to a single tradition. His repeated possessive pronoun ‘our’ completes the appropriation, transforming humanity's collective intellectual inheritance into the supposed property of a Western civilisation whose modern political identity did not exist in the ancient world. The assertion is not bold scholarship; it is amateur historical revisionism with a diplomatic passport.

 

At the centre of Rubio's performance lies an old trick of nomenclature. He repeatedly invites his audience to imagine ‘Greece’ as an ancient, coherent political actor passing down an unbroken national tradition. No such sovereign state existed in the fifth century BCE. Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes, the Thessalian communities and Macedon did not take their orders from a government called Greece; they belonged to shifting political worlds of independent cities, leagues, aristocracies, democracies and monarchies, and were frequently enemies. Conversion of competing poleis into one ‘Greece’ supplies the indispensable first deception in the subsequent tale of a united West facing an eternal East (Suren-Pahlav, 2020a; Hansen, 2006; Hamilakis, 2007). I shall use ‘Greek-speaking’ for the cultural or linguistic field, and name the actual political communities when their conduct is at issue.

 

The analysis that follows proceeds chronologically, examining Rubio's address in the precise sequence in which his arguments were delivered, rather than rearranging them into separate thematic categories. This approach allows his historical assertions, selective interpretations, omissions and political analogies to be scrutinised within their original rhetorical context, while tracing how his invocation of antiquity develops into a justification for contemporary American aggression. Only after the speech has been examined in its entirety does the article consider the cumulative purpose of these representations, particularly the mechanisms of propaganda through which a selectively constructed Greco-Roman inheritance is transformed into a purportedly continuous Western political identity, with Iranians assigned the role of its historical and contemporary adversaries.

 

 

A New Hollywood Movie Script: The United States, the Torchbearer of Human Civilisation

Rubio begins by distinguishing the Acropolis from the ruins of other ancient civilisations. ‘There are great ruins all across the world’, he observes, yet in many of them ‘history seems to have exhausted itself’. He then delivers his judgement with remarkable certainty: ‘But the Acropolis is different.’ For Rubio, the civilisation responsible for the monuments behind him occupies an exceptional place in Western historical memory, while the ruins of other ancient peoples appear to represent cultures whose significance has supposedly faded into oblivion. This distinction, offered without any meaningful historical justification, establishes the premise upon which he proceeds to construct his account of civilisation.

 

Rubio’s opening is an extraordinary display of historical arrogance, declaring that the ruins of other ancient civilisations represent cultures whose history has supposedly ‘exhausted itself’, while singling out the Acropolis as something exceptional. Exceptional by what conceivable measure? When placed beside the monumental achievements of ancient Iran and Egypt, the Acropolis, for all its architectural elegance, begins to resemble a poor man's house adorned with a handful of stone columns. Persepolis, the ceremonial centre of the Achaemenid Empire, possessed an immense engineered terrace, monumental palaces, sophisticated subterranean drainage networks, water-supply channels and elaborate flood-control systems, reflecting a mastery of hydraulic engineering and monumental construction that Rubio appears incapable of appreciating. Thousands of years before the Parthenon was erected, the earliest foundations of human civilisation had already been laid in Sumer, in southern Mesopotamia, where cultural roots extend back to approximately 5300 BCE, and in neighbouring Elam, in what is now southwestern Iran. These regions, together with ancient Egypt and the Indus Valley, are recognised as the cradles of human civilisation. More than two thousand years before the Parthenon was constructed, the Egyptians had already erected the great pyramids of Giza, monuments of extraordinary architectural and engineering sophistication (Lehner, 1997; Mousavi, 2012; Saatsaz and Rezaei, 2023). Equally significant was ancient Elam, one of the earliest centres of civilisation in the world, whose sophisticated urban culture, religious institutions and monumental architecture long preceded the emergence of the Greek city-states of the southern Balkans, including Athens. Its magnificent ziggurat at Chogha Zanbil, erected around 1250 BCE, stood some eight centuries before the Parthenon, a testament to the achievements of an ancient Iranian civilisation (Carter, 1998; UNESCO, n.d.). Yet Rubio stands before the Parthenon and speaks as though it were humanity’s sole civilisational achievement.

 

There is, however, one point on which Rubio may inadvertently be correct: generations of Western statesmen and intellectuals have indeed gazed upon the Acropolis with awe. But their admiration does not establish its civilisational supremacy, much less confer ownership of its achievements upon the modern West. The Acropolis deserves recognition for what its builders actually accomplished, not for the inflated importance subsequently assigned to it by generations of Eurocentric and Hellenocentric alike historians and politicians. The United States, whose Secretary of State now presumes to pronounce judgement upon the antiquity and achievements of other peoples, is a republic scarcely two and a half centuries old. Its political existence cannot remotely compare in antiquity with the civilisational histories of Iran, Egypt, China or India. The American continent itself possesses ancient Indigenous civilisations, but they offer Rubio no convenient genealogy for his preferred mythology of Western descent. Perhaps the old proverb supplies the most appropriate explanation for his enthusiasm: ‘In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.’ The Acropolis may appear to Rubio as the unsurpassed pinnacle of civilisation because his understanding of human history scarcely extends beyond the monuments that Western historical mythology has instructed him to worship.

 

What makes his opening particularly offensive is the casual dismissal of other civilisations as historically exhausted. Iran did not cease to exist with the destruction of Persepolis, any more than Chinese civilisation vanished with the fall of the Shang dynasty and the destruction of its ancient capitals. Their cultural and intellectual histories continued long after their ancient monuments had ceased to fulfil their original purposes. Rubio's distinction between the supposedly living legacy of the Acropolis and the allegedly exhausted histories of other peoples is therefore not an archaeological observation but a statement of cultural prejudice masquerading as historical judgement. His ignorance would be merely embarrassing were it confined to a tourist's impressions. Coming from the American Secretary of State, who claims the authority to speak about the historical achievements of other nations, it becomes something considerably more objectionable: the provincial conceit of a comparatively young political power presuming to decide which ancient civilisations matter and which should be consigned to historical oblivion.

 

Rubio next summons the events of 480 BCE, when, as he recounts, ‘the armies of Xerxes arrived in this city and they put its sanctuaries to the torch’. He describes the Athenian defenders making ‘an extraordinary last stand’, before declaring that ‘The Persians plundered the temples, burned the shrines, and razed the Acropolis to the ground’. The subsequent construction of the Parthenon becomes, in his telling, a testament to a civilisation whose supposed descendants, ‘the sons of Athens and Rome’, later ‘carried their civilization with them to the ends of the Earth’. It is a carefully staged account of destruction, endurance and Western inheritance, but one whose moral simplicity depends upon the conspicuous absence of the historical circumstances surrounding the conflict.

 

It becomes more interesting as Rubio presents this carefully staged account of destruction, endurance and Western inheritance as another chapter in his romanticised mythology of antiquity, while conspicuously excluding the historical circumstances surrounding the conflict. His description of the defenders hurling stones at the advancing Persian imperial forces, their eventual defeat and the burning of the sanctuaries is drawn substantially from Herodotus (Histories, VIII.51–53). But what Rubio offers is not a serious account of the events. It is history stripped of its causes, rearranged into a theatrical confrontation between heroic Athenians and destructive Persians, and delivered with the solemnity of a statesman who appears entirely unaware that the same ancient sources he relies upon also dismantle the convenient morality play he is performing.

 

Let us begin with what Rubio neglects to tell his audience. Nearly two decades before Emperor Xerxes entered Athens, the Athenians engaged in a number of skirmishes in the western Persian territories, particularly in 498 BCE, when an Athenian contingent attacked Sardis, the principal administrative centre of Persian power. The city was looted and set ablaze, and, according to Herodotus, the fire consumed the sanctuary of Cybele, an Anatolian mother goddess. Herodotus explicitly records that the Persians subsequently invoked this destruction as grounds for burning sanctuaries in the Greek-speaking world (Histories, V.97–102).

 

This part of history establishes something far more inconvenient for Rubio: the Achaemenid campaign did not materialise out of some uniquely Persian appetite for war or for destroying Athens. It arose within an existing history of rebellion, retaliatory violence, constant looting and pillaging of Persian cities. To describe the burning of the Acropolis without acknowledging the earlier burning of Sardis is to present retaliation without the preceding conflict, consequences without causes, and one people's suffering as though history had begun on the morning they suffered it (Herodotus, 1922, V.97–105).

 

Nor was Emperor Xerxes confronting a ‘united Greek nation’, for no such political entity existed. The southern Balkan peninsula was divided among independent city-states, monarchies and regional communities, whose interests and allegiances frequently conflicted. Some opposed Achaemenid influence; others accommodated Persian authority or actively supported the Persian Empire. Thebes and influential Thessalian authorities, among others, aligned themselves with Persia. The Persian imperial forces also included contingents drawn from Greek-speaking communities already incorporated into its dominions. Even the Spartan monarchy, subsequently elevated into a symbol of perpetual resistance to Persia, supplied Xerxes with one of his most remarkable advisers: Demaratus, the deposed Spartan king who had found refuge and imperial patronage at the Achaemenid court and accompanied the expedition of 498 BCE in the hope of reclaiming the crown and sitting on Sparta’s throne. Herodotus records his conversations with Xerxes concerning the military capabilities of the Spartans and describes Spartans taking part in an expedition against their own people (Histories, VII.101–105). The historical reality was thus considerably less accommodating to Rubio's deluded, romantic imagination than his tale of two supposedly irreconcilable civilisations: Persian authority and Greek-speaking political communities were entangled through diplomacy, exile, patronage, military service and competing dynastic interests. Rubio has mistaken a fragmented political landscape for a unified nation and a complicated imperial war for a confrontation between two eternal civilisational enemies. These are precisely the Eurocentric and Hellenocentric distortions through which Achaemenid history has repeatedly been reduced to the adversarial perspective of selected so-called Greek literary sources (Suren-Pahlav, 2020).

 

More revealing still is what Rubio leaves out of Herodotus's account of the Acropolis itself. Immediately after describing the destruction of the sanctuaries, Herodotus records that Emperor Xerxes ordered Athenian exiles accompanying his army to ascend the Acropolis and perform sacrifices according to their own religious customs. Herodotus offers two possible explanations: the King of Kings had experienced a troubling dream, or he regretted the burning of the sacred precinct (Histories, VIII.54). Neither explanation can be established as the Emperor’s actual motive. Nevertheless, it is part of the very narrative from which Rubio extracts his dramatic account. A Persian emperor who had authorised or permitted the destruction of a sanctuary subsequently ordered its customary religious observances to be performed by Athenians themselves. That detail disrupts the crude depiction of Persians as people incapable of acknowledging the sanctity of another community's religious traditions. One might expect a high-level politician delivering a speech about the lessons of history to find such a contradiction worthy of consideration. Rubio prefers the flames, the fallen defenders and the conveniently uncomplicated villain.

 

His account of the debris from the destruction and the later construction of the Parthenon is no less revealing of his preference for dramatic simplicity over historical precision. He describes the returning Athenians gathering the shattered remains of the old Acropolis and burying them in the hill, as though the archaeological sequence were a straightforward act of collective remembrance followed by the triumphant reconstruction of the sanctuary under Pericles. In fact, the archaeological evidence is considerably more complicated. Andrew Stewart's reassessment of the Acropolis deposits demonstrates that much of the material conventionally associated with the Persian destruction belongs to later construction fills associated with the fortification and rebuilding programmes of approximately 467–430 BCE. The material record does not support Rubio's sentimental condensation of the entire process into a single moment of burial and rebirth (Stewart, 2008). He has turned a complex archaeological history into an American comic-book illustration.

 

But the most extraordinary omission comes from what happened approximately a century and a half later, when Alexander III of Macedon entered Persepolis in 330 BCE. The Macedonian conqueror seized and burned the ceremonial palaces of the Achaemenid emperors, destroying one of the greatest monumental achievements of the ancient world. Diodorus Siculus recounts a tradition in which the burning occurred during a drunken celebration and was explicitly encouraged as revenge for the earlier destruction of sanctuaries in the Greek-speaking world (Library of History, XVII.72). The details and motives remain disputed, but the destruction itself is beyond serious doubt. Where, one wonders, does this event belong in Rubio's carefully curated moral universe? If the burning of Athenian sanctuaries in 480 BCE represents an enduring indictment of Persian conduct, why should the burning of Sardis in 498 BCE or the Achaemenid imperial palaces in 330 BCE not receive equivalent condemnation? Did the destruction of Persian architecture cease to be savagery because its perpetrator was a Macedonian conqueror subsequently appropriated into an elusive Western civilisational history? Were the monumental achievements of Iranian architects, craftsmen and engineers somehow less worthy of preservation than those of Athens? If destroying the Acropolis was an outrage against civilisation, destroying Sardis and Persepolis was an outrage against civilisation. The identity of the arsonist cannot determine the moral character of the fire. Yet it is precisely this elementary consistency that disappears whenever Achaemenid history is narrated through the selective indignation of Hellenocentric political mythology (Diodorus Siculus, 1963, XVII.72; Suren-Pahlav, 2020).

 

Rubio declares that time reduces great victories and catastrophic defeats to textbook footnotes, while the so-called ancient Greeks retain an almost mystical hold upon Western memory. Perhaps he should ask who constructed that memory, whose histories were privileged in its formation and whose achievements were omitted to preserve its flattering narrative. The memory of Athens is not inherently more sacred than the memory of Sardis or Persepolis, nor does the suffering of its inhabitants acquire a superior moral status because later Europeans chose to make their struggle a founding legend of Western identity. What Rubio calls the mystical attraction of antiquity is, in this instance, the entirely recognisable machinery of historical appropriation: selected victories become evidence of civilisational virtue, selected defeats become sacred tragedies, and the violence of the opposing side is isolated from the political conditions and reciprocal acts that gave rise to it. The fundamental dishonesty of Rubio's account is not that he invents the burning of the Acropolis. It is that he tells just enough of a semi-truth to make the omission of the rest appear like history. His speech is less an exercise in remembrance than an illustration of how historical memory can be manipulated by a politician whose ideological convictions seem considerably stronger than his command of the evidence.

 

Rubio then turns to the United States, declaring that he has come to Athens ‘to testify to a debt that no lapse of time, no distance of space can ever extinguish’. He maintains that ‘Greece is literally carved into the architecture of our government’, and that America's founders were ‘fascinated by the heritage we inherited from yours’. His account becomes increasingly categorical: ‘Athens gave us democracy. Plato and Aristotle gave us Western philosophy.’ By presenting the intellectual foundations of the American republic as a largely exclusive inheritance from ancient Athens, Rubio constructs a civilisational genealogy in which the contribution of other ancient peoples receives scarcely any acknowledgement. The difficulty, however, lies not in the debt he wishes to recognise, but in the considerable historical debts his selective account leaves unmentioned.

 

The difficulty lies not in the debt he wishes to recognise, but in the considerable historical debts his selective account leaves unmentioned. He declares that, standing before the monuments of ancient Athens, he has come to acknowledge a civilisational debt that neither time nor distance can extinguish. It is a grand declaration, delivered with all the solemnity of a man who has apparently mistaken selective historical memory for intellectual inheritance. Yet the most revealing feature of his tribute is not the debt he acknowledges, but the debt he conveniently forgets. For while Rubio travels halfway around the world to celebrate the supposed intellectual ancestry of a republic barely two and a half centuries old, the documentary record of that republic's own founders reveals an acquaintance with Iranian political and religious thought which his carefully constructed genealogy has no room to accommodate.

 

Thomas Jefferson, principal author of the American Declaration of Independence, possessed a four-volume edition of Xenophon's Cyropaedia, or Education of Cyrus, published in Glasgow in 1767. His copy survives in the Thomas Jefferson Library Collection at the Library of Congress. Xenophon, himself a Greek-speaking author and disciple of Socrates, devoted this influential work not to the glorification of Athenian democracy but to the education, leadership and political accomplishments of Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid Empire. His Cyrus is presented as a ruler whose extraordinary achievement lay in governing diverse peoples, securing their cooperation and inspiring loyalty across an immense imperial domain (Xenophon, 1767; Library of Congress, n.d.). Xenophon's portrayal contains literary idealisation and cannot be mistaken for a straightforward biography. That does not diminish the significance of the work's intellectual history. A celebrated Greek-speaking thinker considered the Iranian monarch sufficiently important to make him the central figure of an extended philosophical examination of government. Centuries later, the book occupied a place in the library of one of America's principal founders. Rubio's supposed debt to antiquity begins to look remarkably fraudulent when the very intellectual tradition he claims as exclusively Western had itself looked towards Iran for an exemplary model of political leadership.

 

Jefferson's possession of the Cyropaedia does not, by itself, establish that the American Constitution was derived from Cyrus, and no serious historical argument requires such an invention. Jefferson, moreover, was in France when the federal Constitution was drafted in Philadelphia in 1787. But Rubio's claim is not a narrowly constitutional one. He invokes an enduring intellectual and moral inheritance. The documented presence of Xenophon's account of Cyrus among Jefferson's books is therefore directly relevant, particularly when considered alongside another piece of evidence from the American founding generation, one which Rubio's civilisational mythology cannot so easily assimilate.

 

On 13 January 1772, Benjamin Franklin wrote to Ezra Stiles concerning the recently published French translation of the Zend-Avesta, the sacred literature of Zoroastrianism, by Anquetil-Duperron. Franklin described the work as containing the theological, philosophical and moral ideas attributed to Zoroaster, stated that he had examined its religious portions and remarked that it appeared to contain a ‘nice Morality’. He even offered to procure the volumes for Stiles, before adding that arrangements had been made for a copy to be sent (Franklin, 1976, pp. 30–32). Franklin did not claim to have adopted Zoroastrian doctrine, and his letter proves no direct borrowing into America's founding documents. It proves something sufficiently damaging to Rubio's selective historical imagination: a leading figure of the American politicians were intellectually curious about ancient Iranian religion, recognised moral value in its literature and participated in the circulation of that knowledge. Rubio has crossed the Atlantic to acknowledge a debt to Athens while ignoring evidence of intellectual engagement with Iran among the very men whose republic he represents.

 

What, then, was this Iranian moral philosophy that Franklin found worthy of attention? The Gāθās, the oldest and most sacred compositions of the Zoroastrian tradition, articulate an ethical order in which human beings possess the capacity and responsibility to discern and choose between truth and falsehood, righteousness and wrongdoing. Yasna 30.2 summons its hearers to listen, reflect and make their choice through understanding. This is not obedience reduced to submission before an unquestionable authority. Moral responsibility presupposes the capacity to choose, and choice acquires its ethical significance through the exercise of wisdom. In my studies of Zoroastrian free will and moral agency, I have examined how this principle extends from individual religious conscience to communal allegiance and the responsibilities governing human relationships (Suren-Pahlav, 2021).

 

The contrast becomes particularly embarrassing for Rubio when the position of women enters the historical record. In Yasna 53.3, Zarathustra directly addresses his daughter Pouručistā in the context of marriage and calls upon her to deliberate through her own xraθu, her capacity for wisdom and discerning judgement. The subsequent verses address women and men within a reciprocal moral relationship governed by aša, truth and righteousness. The philosophical importance of this passage lies in recognising a woman as a morally responsible person whose judgement matters to one of the most consequential decisions of her life. The chronology of Zarathustra remains debated, although influential scholarship places him in the second millennium BCE. The passage's significance does not depend upon assigning him an exact year or pretending that ancient Iranian society possessed modern legal equality (Suren-Pahlav, 2010).

 

Now compare that ethical recognition with the celebrated Athens whose intellectual inheritance Rubio has travelled so far to claim. Women in classical Athens were excluded from the Assembly and from participation in its political decision-making institutions. Their legal and economic independence was significantly constrained by male guardianship (Pomeroy, 1975). Nor should we forget the extraordinary philosophical contempt expressed in Plato's Timaeus (90e–92c), where men who have lived cowardly or unjust lives are imagined as being reborn as women, while other forms of intellectual deficiency are associated with rebirth as animals (Plato, 1929). Here is one of the most celebrated philosophers of the Athenian tradition portraying womanhood as a degraded reincarnation of morally deficient manhood, while an ancient Iranian sacred hymn places a named young woman's own wisdom at the centre of her matrimonial decision. The comparison does not make every ancient Iranian institution just or every Athenian thinker contemptuous of women. It does, however, demolish the assumption that moral enlightenment was the exclusive invention of the world Rubio has chosen to worship. Athenian democracy's celebrated liberty was restricted to a comparatively narrow body of male citizens. Its achievements deserve recognition, but its exclusions should not be concealed beneath the reverential language of civilisational superiority.

 

The distinction is not merely philosophical. Contemporary Achaemenid administrative records, examined in Maria Brosius's study of women in ancient Persia, reveal women exercising economic authority, controlling resources and managing substantial workforces. Irdabama, for instance, emerges from the Persepolis documentation as a woman of considerable economic standing, hardly the passive creature imagined in conventional representations of an entirely submissive Persian society (Brosius, 1996). Neither the surviving religious literature nor the administrative evidence establishes universal equality between the sexes. They demonstrate that ancient Iranian moral and social history possessed complexities, achievements and concepts of agency which cannot honestly be dismissed to preserve a flattering portrait of Athens.

 

Rubio's invocation of his descent from Spanish settlers adds another layer of unintended irony. The fact is that his parents came from Cuba, and it seems he is ashamed of that, claiming they came from Spain. Yet no matter where he came from, his ancestry does not confer upon him a hereditary claim to the accomplishments of an Athenian city-state, any more than his office makes the American republic the legitimate custodian of everything that preceded it. The central absurdity lies in the assumption that American nationality somehow establishes a historical, ancestral or civilisational connection to ancient Athens. This applies to most Americans, whose ancestors came from Africa, Latin and South America, Asia and the Pacific, with no ancestral connection to the ancient Athenians. Yet somehow, merely holding an American passport is treated as sufficient to establish that imaginary link. What Rubio fails to comprehend is that one cannot inherit another's achievements by declaring oneself their successor. But the bitter irony is that most Midwestern Americans known as ‘rednecks’ and ‘hillbillies’ do not even regard him as human because of his brown skin, let alone as an American, much less an heir to ancient Athenian city state. And the phrase ‘new world’, so casually employed in his declaration of settler ancestry, is itself a reminder of whose historical perspective he has adopted: those lands were new to arriving Europeans, not to the Indigenous peoples whose societies, histories and cultures long preceded them.

 

Rubio is perfectly entitled to admire ancient Athens. What he is not entitled to do, at least not without inviting historical ridicule, is to turn that admiration into a fiction of exclusive descent while suppressing the evidence of other civilisations' contributions to the intellectual world inherited by his own republic. Jefferson's Cyropaedia and Franklin's correspondence concerning the Zend-Avesta survive as material and documentary witnesses to a broader intellectual horizon than the one Rubio is prepared to acknowledge. His predecessors were capable of looking beyond Athens. Their Secretary of State apparently cannot.

 

If Rubio has come to Athens to discharge a debt to the ancient world, he should first learn to read the account correctly. A man who publicly acknowledges only those creditors who flatter his political mythology is not settling a debt. He is falsifying the ledger.

 

Rubio goes further, transforming the intellectual and political achievements of particular ancient communities into the supposedly inherited characteristics of an entire civilisation. Ancient Athens, he claims, gave the West ‘fierce individuality and relentless ambition; daring exploration and invention; a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory’. These qualities, he insists, were not merely philosophical ideas but ‘the characteristic of a people’. He concludes with the extraordinary declaration: ‘To know them is to know ourselves.’ What began as an expression of admiration for ancient Athens has now become something altogether more presumptuous: the suggestion that a distinctive human character emerged among Greek-speaking peoples and has somehow survived as the defining identity of the modern West.

 

Rubio now abandons even the pretence of historical argument and ventures into something altogether more revealing: the manufacture of a civilisational personality, supposedly born in ancient Athens and transmitted across two and a half millennia to the modern United States. ‘Fierce individuality’, ‘relentless ambition’, ‘daring exploration’, ‘risk and glory’ and an insatiable curiosity about the natural world are presented as the defining characteristics of a people whose spiritual descendants, we are invited to believe, constitute the West. This is not history. It is an exercise in collective self-flattery, dressed up as political philosophy and delivered with the intellectual confidence of a man who appears not to understand the difference between historical inheritance and ideological invention. Rubio has taken qualities found in human societies across every continent and assigned them exclusive civilisational ownership, as though ambition were unknown to the Achaemenid Iranians, scientific curiosity foreign to the Egyptians, intellectual discovery absent from India, or invention beyond the capabilities of China. He then compounds this absurdity by describing these attributes as the ‘characteristic of a people’, thereby transforming the diverse and frequently antagonistic communities of antiquity into a single, imaginary human personality whose alleged descendants now reside conveniently under the American flag. Yet the very concept of ‘the West’ as a collective political and civilisational identity belongs to a much later intellectual history. As Varouxakis (2025) demonstrates, its emergence and subsequent transformations were shaped by modern European political debates, not by some uninterrupted consciousness extending from classical Athens to Washington. Rubio is projecting a modern geopolitical identity backwards through history and mistaking the resulting fiction for an ancestral truth.

 

But suppose, for the sake of argument, that Rubio's chosen characteristics really do constitute the inheritance he claims. What follows is considerably less flattering than he imagines. ‘Relentless ambition’, unrestrained by moral responsibility, can just as readily describe conquest, enslavement and the annihilation of political communities. ‘Risk and glory’ are hardly innocent virtues when the risks are imposed upon unwilling victims and the glory is purchased with their blood. Indeed, one need not travel beyond the ancient Athenian world that Rubio so enthusiastically romanticises to discover how these supposedly admirable qualities operated in practice. In 416 BCE, Athens attacked the island of Melos, whose inhabitants had attempted to remain outside the conflict between Athens and Sparta. Thucydides records the chilling arguments advanced by the Athenian representatives, who asserted the realities of superior power over appeals to justice, and describes the subsequent fate of the island: the captured adult men were executed, the women and children enslaved, and the territory occupied by Athenian settlers (History of the Peloponnesian War, V.84–116). Here, then, is Rubio's ‘relentless ambition’ stripped of its rhetorical perfume. The same political community celebrated for philosophical enquiry and artistic achievement could also destroy another community for refusing submission. Athens was not uniquely brutal by the standards of antiquity, nor were its intellectual accomplishments imaginary. But neither was it the nursery of an inherently virtuous human character. Its political freedom coexisted with slavery, coercive domination and the exclusion of women and resident foreigners from the sovereign citizen body (Kamen, 2013). The liberty of an Athenian citizen did not necessarily mean liberty for those who lived under Athenian power. One might have expected a Secretary of State invoking the moral inheritance of antiquity to understand so elementary a distinction.

 

Rubio's historical fairy tale becomes positively grotesque when his celebrated qualities are carried into the European centuries that supposedly inherited them. If he wishes to discuss adventure, ambition and the willingness to transcend boundaries, perhaps he might consider the medieval crusades, conducted under the sanction of Christian religious authority and accompanied by massacres, pillage and the conquest of other peoples' lands. The capture of Jerusalem in 1099 brought extensive slaughter, while the Fourth Crusade culminated in the sack of Constantinople in 1204, when Latin Christian forces plundered one of the greatest cities of the Christian world itself. The victims of that latter catastrophe were largely Greek-speaking Christians, whose cultural and religious inheritance ought, according to Rubio's invented civilisational family tree, to have placed them among the beneficiaries of Western solidarity (Tyerman, 2006). Evidently, the supposed kinship of civilisation offered little protection when ambition encountered wealth and military opportunity. Medieval Europe also produced substantial philosophical, artistic and institutional achievements, but recognising them does not require us to pretend that its religious wars and organised persecution were incidental blemishes on an otherwise spotless moral inheritance. The civilisation Rubio imagines was not a continuous procession of enlightened adventurers advancing towards human freedom. Its history contains sustained periods in which religious certainty authorised coercion and the sword was treated as an instrument of spiritual salvation.

 

The European colonial enterprises that followed supplied an even more devastating illustration of where the unrestrained pursuit of ‘discovery’, ‘adventure’ and ‘glory’ could lead. What Rubio celebrates as daring exploration frequently meant invasion to those whose lands were being explored without their consent. European monarchies, commercial enterprises and settler societies acquired territories through warfare, dispossession and the destruction or subordination of existing political communities. The conquest of the Americas was followed by the development of colonial regimes whose claims to religious and cultural superiority provided justification for exploitation and extreme violence (Stannard, 1992; Walter, 2017). The Atlantic slave trade, conducted over centuries within an expanding system of imperial commerce, forcibly transported millions of Africans across the ocean, transforming human beings into commodities within an international economy that enriched European and American greed. The scale was immense: Eltis and Richardson (2010) estimate that approximately 12.5 million Africans were embarked on transatlantic slave voyages between 1501 and 1867. Were these, too, expressions of the Western genius for crossing boundaries and overcoming the impossible? The enslaved crossed oceans, certainly, but they did so in chains. Their captors accumulated fortunes, extended commercial networks and demonstrated formidable organisational ingenuity. If achievement alone establishes civilisational virtue, then even the slave ship becomes a monument to progress. That is the moral obscenity concealed beneath Rubio's vocabulary: he celebrates the ambitions of those who possessed power while remaining remarkably incurious about the human beings upon whom those ambitions were exercised.

 

Nor did the supposed maturation of European civilisation bring any permanent abandonment of these habits. The Napoleonic Wars carried revolutionary rhetoric alongside imperial conquest and devastating military campaigns whose consequences reached far beyond Europe (Mikaberidze, 2020). The industrial and scientific advances of the nineteenth century furnished European powers with extraordinary productive capabilities, but also with increasingly destructive instruments of warfare and colonial domination. The twentieth century then witnessed Europe's descent into two world wars, the first of which shattered empires and consumed millions of lives, while the second brought destruction on an unprecedented global scale (Stevenson, 2004; Evans, 2009). At its centre stood Nazi Germany and the Third Reich, a modern European state whose racial ideology, administrative sophistication and industrial resources were mobilised for aggressive war and systematic mass murder. The Holocaust, in which six million Jews were murdered, alongside the Nazi regime's persecution and mass killing of other targeted populations, did not occur in some distant civilisation supposedly untouched by Western learning. It took place in the heart of a Europe that had produced celebrated universities, philosophers, scientists and composers. The perpetrators were not ignorant of European civilisation. Many were educated within it. Their crimes do not invalidate Europe's intellectual achievements, and the resistance of other Europeans to Nazism demonstrates the danger of treating any civilisation as morally homogeneous. But they make Rubio's portrait of an essentially noble Western character intellectually indefensible. A civilisation is not absolved of its atrocities by pointing to its philosophers, any more than a criminal is acquitted because he possesses a library. The Third Reich was not the inevitable fulfilment of Athenian philosophy, but neither can it be removed from European history simply because its existence embarrasses those who wish to convert that history into a certificate of moral superiority.

 

The United States, which Rubio now presents as the latest custodian of this supposedly glorious inheritance, did not merely observe the European imperial tradition from a safe historical distance. It developed its own forms of continental conquest, racial slavery, territorial expansion and overseas domination. The dispossession of Indigenous peoples accompanied the republic's territorial growth; the enslavement of Africans and their descendants became embedded in its economic and political institutions; and after emancipation, systems of racial segregation continued to deny Black Americans rights that the republic proclaimed to be universal (Stannard, 1992; Woodward, 1974). At the turn of the twentieth century, American forces waged a brutal war in the Philippines, where the language of civilisation and political tutelage served to justify the suppression of another people's struggle for independence (Kramer, 2006). By 1945, the United States possessed a destructive capability unknown to any previous empire and became the first, and remains the only, state to have used nuclear weapons in warfare, against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The military and diplomatic calculations surrounding those decisions remain subjects of historical debate, but their consequences for civilian populations are not imaginary (Hasegawa, 2005). American power had acquired the capacity to annihilate whole urban populations through a single weapon. Rubio's cherished ‘impatience with the notion of impossibility’ had found a technological expression of which the architects of Athens could scarcely have conceived. To describe this history as the progressive triumph of Western civilisation requires a remarkable capacity to confuse increasing destructive power with moral advancement.

 

The central dishonesty is not that Rubio admires courage, curiosity, ingenuity or intellectual achievement. These are qualities worthy of admiration wherever they appear. It is that he assigns them to a fictitious civilisational bloodline, celebrates their exercise by conquerors and imperial states, and quietly abandons moral scrutiny whenever their consequences threaten the flattering narrative. His account is so intellectually impoverished that he cannot even recognise the distinction between the ability to accomplish something and the moral legitimacy of accomplishing it. The conqueror who destroys a city has demonstrated ambition; the engineer who develops a more efficient instrument of mass killing has demonstrated ingenuity; the colonial official who devises a sophisticated system of racial domination has exercised organisational intelligence. None of these achievements becomes virtuous merely because it required determination, invention or the rejection of established limits. Without a serious account of justice, Rubio's celebrated characteristics are morally empty. Worse, when detached from moral restraint and placed at the service of state power, they can become the language through which aggression congratulates itself.

 

His final declaration, ‘To know them is to know ourselves’, therefore deserves to be taken considerably more seriously than he intended. If the United States truly wishes to claim the inheritance of ancient Athens and the subsequent history of what Rubio calls the West, let it have the intellectual courage to acknowledge the whole inheritance rather than merely its most flattering fragments. Let it remember the victims of Melos alongside the philosophers of Athens, the massacres of the crusades alongside medieval scholarship, the slave ships alongside the voyages of discovery, the colonial conquests alongside the rhetoric of progress, the trenches of the First World War, the Holocaust and the crematoria of Nazi Germany, and the Indigenous dispossession, racial segregation and imperial wars that accompanied America's rise to global power. These events do not constitute a single uninterrupted tradition, and no serious historian would pretend otherwise. Their significance is that they belong to the history Rubio insists upon claiming while refusing to examine its contradictions. He wants the glory of inheritance without the burden of historical honesty.

 

Rubio's closing sentence is therefore more revealing than he realises. ‘To know them is to know ourselves.’ Indeed. But if his supposed Western inheritance is to mean anything at all, he must be prepared to recognise not only the philosophers and architects, but also the conquerors, enslavers, colonial administrators, racial ideologues and architects of industrialised slaughter who inhabit the same historical record. He cannot claim civilisation as an ancestral entitlement while treating its victims as irrelevant footnotes. What he calls the spirit of the West is little more than an imperial appetite furnished with a flattering vocabulary, and what he presents as historical remembrance is the deliberate sanitisation of that appetite. Rubio has not discovered the moral character of Western civilisation. He has merely demonstrated how easily the language of civilisation can be recruited to excuse the exercise of power.

 

Rubio takes his historical appropriation to an altogether more audacious level when he declares: ‘The Greeks did not just shape history; the Greeks gave us history itself.’ He further claims that much of humanity's knowledge of other ancient civilisations derives ‘almost entirely from the records of Greek explorers and historians’, before asserting that ‘Where others looked inward, the Greeks were the first to direct their focus outward’. Nor does his claim of exclusive intellectual inheritance end with historical enquiry. He proceeds to announce: ‘This was the foundation of the Western mind: our math, our science, our medicine. Our philosophy, ethics, and religion.’ In this remarkable reconstruction of humanity's intellectual development, the achievements of older civilisations are pushed into the background, while the Greek-speaking world becomes the supposed originator and rightful custodian of knowledge itself.

 

Rubio's historical illiteracy now reaches a level that would be embarrassing in an undergraduate examination, let alone in a speech delivered by the Secretary of State of the United States. Having appropriated the architectural achievements of ancient Athens as the supposedly exclusive inheritance of the West, he proceeds to make the astonishing declaration that ‘the Greeks did not just shape history; the Greeks gave us history itself’. It would be difficult to manufacture a more blatant falsification of the human past. History, according to Rubio, apparently did not exist until Greek-speaking peoples discovered the intellectual generosity to bestow it upon the rest of humanity. The Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Iranians, Indians and Chinese, whose civilisational histories extend far beyond the emergence of classical Athens, must presumably have spent the preceding millennia wandering through an intellectual wilderness, incapable of recording their experiences, investigating their surroundings or contemplating their place in the universe. This is not merely Hellenocentrism carried to an absurd extreme. It is the wholesale confiscation of humanity's intellectual achievements and their reassignment to a civilisation which Rubio has invented retrospectively for the political convenience of the modern West.

 

The historical evidence makes nonsense of his assertion. More than two thousand years before Herodotus composed his Histories in the fifth century BCE, Mesopotamian societies had already developed sophisticated traditions of recording political events, organising royal succession, preserving collective memory and interpreting the significance of the past. The Sumerian King List, originating in the early second millennium BCE and drawing upon earlier traditions, organised rulers and dynasties into a continuous conception of historical succession. Royal inscriptions, chronological year-names, narratives of military campaigns and accounts of dynastic upheaval belonged to established scribal cultures long before the emergence of Greek historiography. The Babylonian chronicle tradition subsequently developed methods of arranging events chronologically and recording political and military developments with considerable precision. These texts were not identical in purpose or method to Herodotus, nor should they be judged deficient for failing to imitate a literary genre that had not yet appeared. They demonstrate that the intellectual activity of organising and interpreting the human past was flourishing centuries before the celebrated Greek-speaking historians whom Rubio has promoted into the inventors of history itself (Glassner, 2004; Michalowski, 2011).

 

Ancient Egypt provides another devastating contradiction. Egyptian royal annals, king lists, monumental inscriptions, biographical records and commemorations of military and political events reveal a sustained engagement with historical memory stretching back into the third millennium BCE. John Baines has demonstrated that the absence of an Egyptian equivalent to the extended historical prose familiar from Herodotus does not signify an absence of historical consciousness. Egyptian society possessed its own conventions for representing the past, preserving political legitimacy and transmitting historical knowledge across generations (Baines, 2011). Rubio's apparent inability to distinguish the existence of history from the existence of a particular Greek literary form is a basic methodological failure. Herodotus did not invent humanity's capacity to remember, investigate or record the past. He contributed to a distinctive tradition of historical storytelling and enquiry within a world already possessing centuries of historical writing. His achievement deserves recognition, but recognising it does not require abolishing the intellectual existence of everyone who preceded him.

 

The falsification becomes still more objectionable when Rubio declares that much of what humanity knows about ancient civilisations comes ‘almost entirely’ from Greek explorers and historians. This is a statement that might have enjoyed some currency among nineteenth-century European classicists before the decipherment and systematic study of vast bodies of ancient Near Eastern documentation transformed historical scholarship. Today, it is indefensible. The history of Achaemenid Iran is reconstructed through imperial inscriptions, Babylonian chronicles, Egyptian evidence, Aramaic documents, archaeological discoveries and administrative archives, alongside Greek and other literary traditions. Darius the Great's monumental inscription at Behistun, composed in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian, recorded his accession, the rebellions against his authority, the campaigns undertaken to suppress them and the ideological principles through which he justified his kingship. Its historical importance extends beyond the events it records, for its multilingual character also proved instrumental in the modern decipherment of cuneiform writing. The Persepolis Fortification Tablets, meanwhile, preserve extensive contemporary evidence concerning imperial administration, the movement of personnel, the distribution of commodities and the operation of a sophisticated bureaucratic system. Richard Hallock's published edition alone contains more than two thousand texts, providing direct access to the workings of the Achaemenid state without requiring a Greek narrator to explain its existence (Hallock, 1969; Kuhrt, 2007). These documents are not incidental supplements to a supposedly authoritative Greek history. They are primary evidence generated within the societies being studied.

 

The underlying problem is precisely the historiographical distortion I have examined in After Orientalism? Hellenocentrism, Persophobia and the Persistence of the Greek Gaze in Achaemenid Historiography. The survival of extensive Greek-language narratives has encouraged the reconstruction of Achaemenid history through the political experiences, literary conventions and cultural assumptions of communities situated outside the imperial centre. The consequences are profound. Iranian history becomes significant principally where it intersects with Athens, Sparta or Macedon; Achaemenid political decisions are interpreted according to their consequences for Greek-speaking societies; and imperial institutions that governed territories stretching across western Asia and beyond can disappear behind a succession of military episodes selected for their importance to classical European memory. This is not an argument for discarding Greek sources. It is an argument against treating their survival and later prestige as evidence that other peoples possessed no comparable intellectual agency. Rubio has elevated precisely that source imbalance into a theory of civilisational superiority (Suren-Pahlav, 2020).

 

His next assertion is even more preposterous: ‘Where others looked inward, the Greeks were the first to direct their focus outward.’ Quite apart from the immense geographical knowledge required to govern the Achaemenid Empire, Rubio might profit from reading Herodotus himself. In Book IV, chapter 44, Herodotus records that Darius I commissioned an exploratory expedition to investigate the course of the Indus and its connection to the sea. The expedition, associated with Scylax of Caryanda and other trusted participants, proceeded down the river and undertook an extensive maritime voyage whose results informed Persian imperial knowledge and activity in the region. Herodotus explicitly associates the enterprise with Darius's desire to acquire geographical information (Histories, IV.44). Here was an Iranian monarch commissioning an organised investigation of distant territories and waterways, employing a Greek-speaking navigator within an imperial enterprise. The expedition combined geographical enquiry with strategic objectives, as exploratory projects undertaken by states have so often done. Nevertheless, it demonstrates the very curiosity, ambition and determination to overcome geographical ignorance that Rubio claims were uniquely Greek. The irony is exquisite: the classical author whose intellectual tradition Rubio worships records a Persian king financing and directing the exploration of the unknown. Apparently, even Herodotus would have struggled to satisfy Rubio's requirements for the historical invention of Western curiosity (Herodotus, 1921, IV.44).

 

The suggestion that non-Greek civilisations regarded ‘stability and subsistence’ as humanity's highest aspirations is equally revealing. It reproduces one of the oldest prejudices of Eurocentric historiography: the supposed contrast between an energetic, inventive, outward-looking West and a passive, static, intellectually incurious East. Such a distinction bears little resemblance to the historical world it claims to describe. Achaemenid Iran established a vast imperial administrative and communications network connecting peoples, territories and economic systems across three continents. Egyptian engineers mastered monumental construction and hydraulic technologies long before the Parthenon was conceived. Mesopotamian mathematicians developed advanced numerical procedures, including sophisticated calculations involving quadratic problems, while Babylonian astronomers pursued systematic observations of celestial phenomena over extended periods. Otto Neugebauer's foundational study of ancient mathematical and astronomical sciences demonstrated the extraordinary depth of Egyptian and Babylonian intellectual traditions and their importance to the subsequent development of mathematical astronomy (Neugebauer, 1969). More recent research by Mathieu Ossendrijver has shown that Babylonian astronomers employed sophisticated geometrical procedures to calculate Jupiter's movement, using methods whose conceptual sophistication unsettles conventional assumptions about the historical origins of mathematical astronomy (Ossendrijver, 2016). Were these scholars merely pursuing subsistence? Were they looking inward while waiting for the Greek-speaking world to reveal that nature could be investigated through reason?

 

Rubio's declaration that the Greeks bequeathed to humanity the conviction that the universe possesses a rational and discoverable order is no less historically untenable. Long before classical Athens, the peoples of Mesopotamia investigated regularities in celestial phenomena, developed mathematical techniques for prediction and constructed intellectual systems through which the apparent disorder of experience could be interpreted. Ancient Iranian religious philosophy, particularly the Zoroastrian conception of aša, also articulated an understanding of truth, order and the relationship between human conduct and the structure of existence. This was a moral and cosmological conception rather than an anticipation of modern experimental physics, and it would be equally mistaken to collapse the distinction between the two. Nevertheless, it demonstrates that the conviction that reality possesses an intelligible order did not originate exclusively in the intellectual culture of the Greek-speaking city-states. Indeed, the relationship between Iranian religious thought and Greek-language philosophy is itself a subject of scholarly investigation. Phillip Sidney Horky's research on Plato's associates and the Zoroastrian Magi examines ancient traditions of intellectual contact between Persian religious specialists and philosophical circles associated with Plato, demonstrating that the philosophical world Rubio imagines as essentially self-generated was considerably more receptive to external ideas than his civilisational mythology permits (Horky, 2009).

 

But Rubio's most breathtaking act of intellectual appropriation comes when he announces: ‘This was the foundation of the Western mind: our math, our science, our medicine. Our philosophy, ethics, and religion.’ The possessive pronoun is doing extraordinary ideological work. ‘Our’ mathematics, ‘our’ medicine, ‘our’ science, as though knowledge were an ancestral property belonging to a particular civilisation rather than the cumulative and frequently collaborative accomplishment of humanity. Mathematics does not acquire a civilisational nationality from the language in which a theorem happens to be written. Nor does a medical discovery become Western because a European physician subsequently adopts it. Scientific knowledge advances through transmission, criticism, adaptation and original investigation across geographical and linguistic boundaries. Rubio's claim can survive only by removing those boundaries from the historical record and replacing them with the fiction of a continuous Greco-Western intellect.

 

Consider the Iranian mathematician Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, whose ninth-century mathematical works contributed decisively to the systematic development of algebra and to the transmission of Indian numerical methods through the Arabic scholarly tradition into Latin Europe. The word algebra derives from the al-jabr of his mathematical treatise, while algorithm developed from the Latinised form of his name. His achievements did not emerge from a supposed exclusively Greek intellectual inheritance, nor were they created by religious doctrine. They arose within a multilingual scholarly environment in which Iranian, Indian, Mesopotamian and Greek intellectual traditions interacted, and whose scholars made original contributions rather than merely preserving the discoveries of their predecessors (Rashed, 2009). The distinction matters because this formative scholarly world was not an intellectual waiting room between classical antiquity and the European Renaissance. It was an arena of innovation in its own right.

 

The same is true of Abū Rayḥān al-Bīrūnī, the Iranian polymath whose investigations encompassed mathematics, astronomy, geography, chronology and the cultures and religious traditions of India; Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn Zakariyyā al-Rāzī, whose medical writings and clinical reasoning profoundly influenced subsequent medical scholarship; Ibn Sīnā, or Avicenna, whose philosophical and medical works became central to intellectual life in both the Persianate world and Latin Europe; ʿUmar Khayyām, whose achievements in algebra and astronomy have too often been overshadowed in the European imagination by his poetry; and Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, whose mathematical and astronomical investigations contributed to the transformation of planetary theory. These men were not interchangeable representatives of a single intellectual school, and their accomplishments should not be appropriated through another crude civilisational mythology. They belonged to specific scholarly environments, worked with inherited knowledge from several traditions and made distinctive contributions of their own. Yet their geographical, intellectual and institutional connections to the Iranian and Persianate worlds are indispensable to any serious history of scientific development. The transmission of their work into Latin Europe helped shape medieval learning and the intellectual conditions from which later European scientific developments emerged (Gutas, 1998; Saliba, 2007).

 

In my study Why 'Islamic Science' Is a Misnomer, I have challenged the equally misleading practice of assigning the scientific achievements of Iranian and other scholars to an abstract religious civilisation merely because they worked under Muslim-ruled dynasties or composed their treatises in Arabic. The Arabic language was frequently the medium through which knowledge circulated, not an adequate explanation of its origins or intellectual content. Scientific traditions were sustained by institutions, trained scholars, patronage networks and the accumulated achievements of earlier cultures, including those of pre-Islamic Iran and Mesopotamia. The same methodological objection applies to Rubio's appropriation from the opposite direction. He attributes mathematics, science and philosophy to the ‘Western mind’ by selecting a prestigious ancestral language and treating its intellectual tradition as the sole legitimate owner of everything subsequently transmitted through it. To describe Iranian scholarship as merely Islamic because it was frequently written in Arabic is a distortion; to describe the later European use of that scholarship as proof of an exclusively Greek intellectual inheritance is another. Both procedures conceal the historical agents who actually produced the knowledge (Suren-Pahlav, 2015).

 

Rubio's invocation of Augustine, Aquinas and Christian natural law exposes the weakness of his genealogy still further. Christianity originated within the Jewish religious world of Roman-controlled Judaea, not in the sanctuaries of classical Athens. Its subsequent intellectual development involved Greek philosophical vocabulary and Roman institutions, but also the biblical traditions of the ancient Near East, Syriac Christian scholarship, North African theology and later intellectual exchanges involving Jewish, Christian and Iranian thinkers working across the Mediterranean and western Asia. Augustine was a North African intellectual whose theology cannot sensibly be reduced to the supposed national temperament of ancient Greek-speaking peoples. Aquinas, whom Rubio specifically celebrates, engaged extensively with the philosophical achievements of Ibn Sīnā. Jon McGinnis's scholarship demonstrates the importance of Avicennian philosophy to Latin Christian scholasticism, including the work of Albert the Great, Aquinas and Duns Scotus (McGinnis, 2010). Rubio praises Aquinas as an expression of Greek intellectual inheritance while overlooking an Iranian philosopher whose work helped shape the very scholastic tradition he invokes. One cannot seriously claim to understand the intellectual foundations of Christian theology while erasing the Iranian philosophical contributions that its greatest medieval representatives studied, debated and incorporated into their own reasoning. Rubio's history is not merely selective; it mutilates the genealogy of the intellectual achievements he professes to admire.

 

Nor does his final celebration of the ancient Greek-speaking city as an arena of ‘great men’ struggling towards excellence rescue the argument. Competition in philosophy, poetry, drama and athletic performance undoubtedly occupied an important place in the civic culture of certain city-states, and their achievements in these fields are real. But the elevation of this particular social ideal into the defining principle of human existence is an ideological preference, not a historical discovery. Intellectual and artistic excellence flourished in societies organised around different political institutions and ethical assumptions. The civilisations of Iran, Egypt, India and China produced philosophers, physicians, astronomers, administrators, poets and engineers without first adopting the political arrangements of classical Athens. Rubio's argument depends upon the preposterous proposition that one distinctive social culture discovered humanity's essential capacities while the rest remained content with mere survival. It is especially ironic that he invokes a supposedly universal ideal of excellence through a civic world in which political participation was denied to women, enslaved people and other inhabitants excluded from citizenship. His ‘great men’ were not humanity. They were a particular, privileged section of particular ancient communities.

 

What Rubio offers, then, is not an account of the intellectual history of civilisation but a political mythology constructed by stripping knowledge of its actual geographical and cultural origins. Historical writing becomes Greek because he has decided that Herodotus invented it. Mathematical reasoning becomes Western because he refuses to confront its Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Indian antecedents. Scientific discovery acquires a Greek ancestry even when the relevant developments arose within Iranian and other scholarly traditions. Christian theology becomes the offspring of Athens, although its religious foundations originated in the ancient Near East and its philosophical development depended upon intellectual exchanges that extended far beyond Europe. Rubio has confused the history of intellectual transmission with the ownership of knowledge, and transformed a civilisation's contribution into a claim of civilisational monopoly.

 

The irony is that the genuine accomplishments of Greek-speaking thinkers require none of this dishonesty. Herodotus, Thucydides, Hippocrates, Aristotle, Euclid and their intellectual contemporaries made substantial and sometimes transformative contributions to historical enquiry, philosophy, medicine and mathematics. Their achievements are not diminished by acknowledging those who came before them, those from whom they learned or those who later extended and corrected their ideas. It is Rubio's invented Western ancestry, not their intellectual stature, that collapses when the wider historical record is restored. A serious student of civilisation asks how knowledge was created, exchanged and transformed. Rubio asks how much of it he can claim for his political tribe. That distinction exposes the fundamental fraud of his speech: a politician standing before ancient monuments, not to illuminate the complexity of human history, but to manufacture a flattering genealogy for contemporary Western power. His understanding of civilisation begins where his ideological prejudices permit it to begin, and everything outside that narrow boundary is condemned to darkness. The darkness, however, is not to be found in the civilisations he has excluded. It lies in the historical ignorance of the man delivering the speech.

 

Having presented competition, ambition and the pursuit of excellence as the foundations of Western civilisation, Rubio acknowledges that the way of life he celebrates ‘may sound odd; it may even sound cruel’. Yet rather than examine the moral implications of that admission, he turns his criticism upon modern societies for pursuing ‘a world of perfect safety, devoid of risk or failure’. He complains that ‘we preoccupy ourselves more with the comfort of the worst than the potential of the best’, before declaring: ‘We hold the most exceptional things among us hostage to the average, the ordinary, the mediocre.’ The argument has now moved beyond historical interpretation into a troubling conception of human worth, in which the protection of the vulnerable and the ordinary is presented as an impediment to the ambitions of the supposedly exceptional.

 

Rubio now arrives at perhaps the most revealing passage of his speech, where the romanticisation of ancient competition gives way to a philosophy in which human worth appears to be measured by the pursuit of greatness, the humiliation of defeat and the willingness to accept cruelty as the necessary price of excellence. He concedes that his idealised way of life may sound ‘cruel’ to modern ears, only to dismiss concern for safety and the prevention of suffering as symptoms of mediocrity. He complains that society has become preoccupied with ‘the comfort of the worst’ at the expense of ‘the potential of the best’, before declaring that exceptional achievement is being held hostage by ‘the average, the ordinary, the mediocre’ (Rubio, 2026). Such language might be dismissed as the adolescent bravado of a motivational speaker were it not coming from the chief diplomat of a state whose historical record raises rather more serious question

 

 

 

 

s about the consequences of unrestrained ambition. When the representative of a country built through territorial conquest and possessing an unparalleled capacity to project military violence begins lecturing humanity about the virtues of struggle and the dangers of excessive concern for safety, the appropriate response is not admiration. It is to ask whose safety he considers expendable, whose suffering he proposes to tolerate and who, exactly, is entitled to determine which human beings qualify as exceptional.

 

The historical irony is almost beyond satire. Rubio represents a republic founded upon the proclaimed universality of liberty while its territorial expansion proceeded through the systematic dispossession of the peoples who had inhabited North America for thousands of years before European settlers arrived. The continent was not an empty wilderness awaiting the transformative ambitions of exceptional men. It contained established Indigenous nations with their own political institutions, diplomatic relationships, agricultural systems, commercial networks, laws and cultural traditions. The expanding American republic acquired their territories through military campaigns, systematic mass-slaughter of the indigenous population, coerced treaties, forced removals and the deliberate destruction of communities that resisted dispossession. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 provided the legislative framework for the expulsion of numerous Indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands, including the Cherokee, whose forced removal became known as the Trail of Tears. Jeffrey Ostler's research demonstrates how the development of American expansionism were intertwined with Indigenous dispossession and forms of violence that, in particular cases, warrant examination through the concept of genocide (Ostler, 2019). What Rubio celebrates as the exceptional individual overcoming obstacles acquires a rather different meaning when the obstacle happens to be another people exercising the elementary right to remain upon their own land.

 

The catastrophe in California offers an even more damning illustration. Benjamin Madley's detailed examination of the California Indian catastrophe between 1846 and 1873 documents organised massacres, forced expulsions, state-supported killing campaigns and the involvement of federal and state authorities in the destruction of Indigenous communities. During that period, California's Indigenous population fell from approximately 150,000 to 30,000, through a combination of killings, disease, displacement and other catastrophic conditions. Madley demonstrates the extent to which public funds and governmental authority supported campaigns of exterminatory violence (Madley, 2016). Here, then, was a particularly murderous expression of America's territorial ambition. The settlers and political authorities who sought land, wealth and expansion frequently regarded Indigenous peoples as obstacles to be overcome. Their victims were not defeated because they lacked civilisation, courage or the desire to survive. They were confronted by an expanding state whose military and material advantages enabled it to dispossess them. If Rubio wishes to celebrate the shame of defeat and the glory of victory as organising principles of human existence, he might explain precisely what glory attaches to the destruction of communities whose principal offence was to stand in the path of American expansion.

 

The violence was not an unfortunate episode that the United States permanently abandoned upon completing its continental conquest. After the Second World War, American military and political power acquired an unprecedented global reach, accompanied by a continuing willingness to intervene in the affairs of other sovereign states. The scale of this activity is not a matter of rhetorical exaggeration. In their peer-reviewed study, Sidita Kushi and Monica Duffy Toft (2023) identify almost 400 American armed invasions between 1776 and 2019, approximately half of them occurring between 1950 and 2019, with more than a quarter taking place after the Cold War. These acts of violence were war of conquest, not 400 separate declared wars, and their scale, circumstances and legal character varied considerably. The distinction is essential, but it scarcely makes the documented frequency of American war of conquests less revealing. The Congressional Research Service independently records hundreds of instances in which American combatant forces operated abroad in situations involving actual or potential military conflict, a compilation that does not encompass the full history of covert operations or the continuous military violence accompanying continental expansion (Torreon and Plagakis, 2023). A republic scarcely two and a half centuries old has accumulated a record of aggression on a global scale, one that puts even the Third Reich to shame; yet its Secretary of State stands before the world warning that modern humanity has become excessively reluctant to embrace risk, struggle and defeat. One wonders how much more warfare would be required before Rubio considered humanity's appetite for conflict sufficiently restored.

 

And what, exactly, did this exceptional American expansionism accomplish when turned against sovereign nations whose political choices displeased Washington? In 1954, the CIA orchestrated the overthrow of Guatemala's democratically elected president, Jacobo Árbenz, whose programme of agrarian reform threatened the privileges of entrenched domestic elites and the geopolitical and commercial interests of Washington (Gleijeses, 1991). Nearly two decades later, Chile became another victim of Washington's determination to crush governments unwilling to subordinate their national interests to American geopolitical and economic dominance. Following Salvador Allende's democratic election in 1970, the Nixon administration authorised covert operations to destabilise his government, financed political opposition and hostile media, and sought to undermine the Chilean economy. On 11 September 1973, the Chilean armed forces, led by General Augusto Pinochet, overthrew Allende, bringing an end to Chile's constitutional democracy and inaugurating a military dictatorship notorious for torture, political executions, disappearances and systematic repression. Declassified American documents establish Washington's extensive campaign against Allende (Harmer, 2011; Kornbluh, 2013). Thus, while Washington proclaimed its devotion to liberty and democracy, it helped destroy the political independence of nations whose electorates had exercised precisely the democratic freedom that American leaders claimed to champion. Their real offence was not the rejection of democracy, but the audacity to exercise it in defiance of Washington’s interests. These inhumane and unlawful operations, constituting acts of aggression and terrorism at the level of state power, warrant the designation ‘super-terrorism’: a system of political domination in which an overwhelmingly powerful state employs, or threatens to employ, its exceptional military, technological, economic and institutional capabilities to terrorise populations, coerce sovereign nations and impose its geopolitical objectives through every available means of coercion and aggression. Super-terrorism differs from conventional terrorism not merely in the scale of violence or the magnitude of destruction, but in the institutionalisation of terror as an instrument of international domination, frequently legitimised through historical mythology, ideological fabrication and claims of moral exceptionalism. These operations reflect the pursuit of American self-interest and greed at the expense of humanity, regardless of the catastrophic consequences. War, bloodshed and destruction are no longer merely instruments of American power; they have become the very essence of American existence (Suren-Pahlav, 2026c).

 

The Korean War (1950–1953) provides an earlier illustration of the devastating human consequences of American military power. During the war, the United States dropped approximately 635,000 US tons (576,000 metric tonnes) of bombs on Korea, overwhelmingly on the North, including 32,557 US tons (29,535 metric tonnes) of napalm. The scale of bombardment exceeded the tonnage dropped by American forces throughout the entire Pacific theatre during the Second World War. Historian Charles K. Armstrong estimates that approximately 1.2 to 1.5 million North Koreans were killed during the war, although the precise number of deaths directly attributable to American aerial bombardment remains uncertain. The destruction of North Korean cities, civilian infrastructure and communities was extensive, leaving consequences that endured long after the cessation of hostilities (Armstrong, 2009). North Korea's response to the devastation it suffered during the Korean War offers a lesson to nations across the world subjected to American aggression. Having experienced the mass slaughter of civilians and the overwhelming destructive capacity of American terrorism, the North Korean state subsequently pursued nuclear weapons as a means of deterring another American attack. Yet, in seeking to protect itself against a repetition of that catastrophe, the victim has come to be branded a ‘rogue state’, while the aggressor, the very power whose military aggressions inflicted such devastation, continues to proclaim itself the leader of the free world.

 

Vietnam provides anotehr devastating illustration of the human cost of American super-terrorism in the pursuit of geopolitical domination. The United States committed enormous military resources to a war justified principally through Cold War strategic calculations, while the societies of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia suffered extraordinary destruction. American military operations included extensive aerial bombardment and the use of incendiary and chemical weapons, with consequences extending far beyond the battlefield. John Tirman's study of civilian suffering in American wars examines the profound disparity between the attention devoted to American military casualties and the relative neglect of the far larger losses suffered by populations exposed to American military operations (Tirman, 2011). The same problem returned with the invasion of Iraq in 2003, justified through what the evidence reveals to have been deliberate lies about weapons of mass destruction, and followed by years of occupation, political and territorial fragmentation, civil war and immense civilian suffering. Kofi Annan, then Secretary-General of the United Nations, publicly stated that the invasion was not in conformity with the UN Charter (United Nations, 2004). The argument that American military power can be exercised for legitimate defensive or humanitarian purposes does not erase these episodes. It makes scrutiny of each intervention, its justification and its human consequences indispensable.

 

Rubio, however, speaks as though the great moral danger confronting civilisation is not the abuse of power but the possibility that powerful people might be restrained by obligations to others. His complaint that society has become overly concerned with preventing failure and protecting the ordinary is particularly disturbing when considered against the unequal distribution of risk in the actual world. American presidents, cabinet secretaries and military strategists can speak eloquently about courage, sacrifice and the necessity of struggle from offices protected by the immense resources of the state. They can authorise interventions, impose sanctions, approve military operations and declare geopolitical objectives whose consequences fall upon populations that have no vote in American elections and little influence over American policy. The families who lose their homes to bombardment, the children who grow up amid ruined infrastructure and the civilians whose livelihoods collapse under prolonged conflict do not enjoy the luxury of contemplating suffering as an abstract test of excellence. For those who command military power, risk can become a matter of strategic calculation; for those living beneath its weapons, it is frequently a question of survival.

 

There is something profoundly revealing in Rubio's contempt for the ‘average’ and the ‘ordinary’. An ordinary human life is not a failed attempt at greatness. The labourer, the farmer, the physician, the teacher and the countless people who desire nothing more extraordinary than security, dignity and the opportunity to raise their children without fear of violence are not inferior human beings obstructing the ambitions of exceptional individuals. Their lives are not disposable material from which conquerors and political leaders may manufacture their preferred historical legacy. Nor is the prevention of unnecessary suffering a confession of weakness. It is one of the purposes for which political institutions can claim moral legitimacy. A state that cannot distinguish between legitimate courage and the reckless imposition of danger upon others has no business presenting its pursuit of power as evidence of civilisational superiority.

 

Rubio's language also exposes a contradiction within the American political tradition he claims to represent. The Declaration of Independence announces that governments exist to secure rights, among them life and liberty. The constitutional order subsequently established mechanisms intended to restrain arbitrary authority, even if those protections were initially denied to large sections of the population. Yet Rubio's celebration of exceptional individuals overcoming limits risks treating restraint itself as an obstacle to greatness. The moral difficulty arises when the exceptional ambitions of political leaders conflict with the ordinary person's right not to be killed, displaced, impoverished or deprived of self-government. If the measure of civilisation is simply the magnitude of achievement, then conquest becomes admirable whenever it succeeds and destruction becomes an acceptable by-product of ambition. If, instead, political power must be judged by the justice of its purposes and the consequences of its exercise, Rubio's rhetoric demands far closer scrutiny than he appears willing to give it.

 

One need not pretend that every American military intervention was identical, that every American political leader acted from the same motives or that the United States possesses a monopoly on imperial violence. Other states have conducted aggressive wars and committed atrocities, and the American historical record also contains movements that challenged slavery, racial domination, colonial expansion and the misuse of military power. None of this excuses the documented actions of Washington, still less does it confer upon American officials a special exemption from the standards by which they judge other governments. It is precisely because the United States professes fidelity to freedom and human dignity that the contradiction between those principles and its history of coercive intervention deserves to be confronted without euphemism.

 

Rubio imagines that he is defending excellence against mediocrity. What his argument neglects is the question that ought to precede every exercise of power: excellence at what, and at whose expense? A military machine can become exceptionally efficient at destroying cities. An intelligence service can demonstrate extraordinary ingenuity in destabilising foreign governments. An expanding state can display remarkable organisational talent in removing entire populations from coveted territories. None of these accomplishments constitutes moral excellence merely because it required ambition, discipline or technical sophistication. The capacity to dominate is not proof of a right to dominate, and the successful exercise of violence is not evidence of civilisation. The historical record of the United States should make that distinction especially familiar to its Secretary of State.

 

If Rubio believes that another age of unrestricted ambition and geopolitical competition represents the path towards civilisational renewal, the consequences deserve examination before his romantic vocabulary is mistaken for a moral argument. In a world already possessing nuclear arsenals and weapons capable of devastation far beyond anything imagined by the conquerors of antiquity, the celebration of power without equal emphasis upon restraint is hardly reassuring. Another half-century of international politics conducted on the assumption that the ambitions of powerful states take precedence over the security and sovereignty of weaker societies would offer little cause for optimism about what might remain of those societies. The danger does not arise from humanity becoming too attached to peace or too concerned with protecting ordinary lives. It arises whenever those entrusted with extraordinary power begin to regard such concerns as evidence of weakness.

 

Rubio's contempt for mediocrity therefore misses its proper target. The failure that ought to concern an American Secretary of State is not the reluctance of ordinary people to die for another man's glory, but the repeated failure of powerful governments to recognise the humanity of those who must live with the consequences of their decisions. After a history of Indigenous dispossession, overseas conquest, regime-change operations and destructive wars, Washington scarcely needs another sermon about the virtues of ambition. It needs a reckoning with what its ambitions have already cost the rest of the world.

 

The political destination of Rubio's historical narrative now begins to emerge. Invoking the ancient Greek concept of thumos, which he describes as ‘the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride’, he warns that without it nations ‘lose their will to fight, the will to strive, the will to survive’. He attributes the West's alleged decline to weakened nationalism, diminished military power and the surrender of sovereignty to international institutions. The argument then arrives at its contemporary purpose: ‘Under President Trump, the United States has made its choice. We choose the unapologetic pursuit of national power’. Rubio reinforces the message by insisting that statecraft requires ‘the ability to wield force when prudence and diplomacy fail’. After this declaration, the political purpose of his earlier historical excursions becomes considerably harder to disguise.

 

Here, at last, the elaborate historical masquerade begins to disclose its political purpose. Having spent much of his speech inventing a continuous Western civilisation, appropriating the achievements of antiquity and transforming the competitive culture of certain Greek-speaking city-states into the supposedly hereditary character of the modern West, Rubio arrives at the destination for which the entire performance appears to have been constructed: the glorification of Donald Trump's programme of American power. The Parthenon has served its purpose. Ancient philosophy has been reduced to a political slogan. The language of civilisation now gives way to the vocabulary of industrial supremacy, military expansion, technological dominance and the willingness to use force. What Rubio presents as a return to the principles of classical statecraft can be read, with considerably greater historical justification, as an attempt to furnish contemporary American hegemony with an antique certificate of moral legitimacy. His speech is not primarily about the people who built the Parthenon. It is about the government in Washington, the power it wishes to exercise and the historical mythology through which that exercise of power is to be justified (Rubio, 2026).

 

Rubio invokes thumos, which he describes as the fire of courage, passion, strength and pride, and declares it the essential quality without which nations lose their will to survive. His interpretation is revealing, not least because he has detached the concept from the philosophical restraints that gave it meaning in one of the very intellectual traditions he claims to revere. In Plato's Republic (IV.440b–441a), thumos, the spirited element of the soul, is distinguished from appetite and represented as the potential ally of reason, not as an independent licence for aggression. Its proper function depends upon its relationship with judgement and the recognition of justice. Rubio retains the passion, the pride and the willingness to fight, while leaving reason and moral restraint conspicuously outside his political formulation. It is an extraordinary appropriation of classical philosophy: take a concept concerned with the ordered human soul, remove the intellectual discipline that qualifies it, and present the remainder as justification for the unapologetic accumulation and exercise of national power. One might almost admire the audacity of the manoeuvre were its implications not so serious. Plato's spiritedness is not a philosophical permission slip for Washington to impose its will upon the rest of humanity.

 

The historical dishonesty becomes more pronounced when Rubio laments that nationalism has become a ‘dirty word’, attributing the alleged decline of the West to open borders, shame about national achievement and the abandonment of cultural confidence. Such language is particularly astonishing from the Secretary of State of a republic whose very existence emerged from migration, European colonial settlement, forced labour and the dispossession of the Indigenous inhabitants of North America. The United States did not descend fully formed from the Acropolis, nor did its population originate from a single ancient nation possessing an exclusive civilisational inheritance. Its society developed through successive movements of people from different parts of the world, including voluntary settlers, indentured labourers, religious refugees, transported convicts and, most consequentially, Africans forcibly carried across the Atlantic and enslaved. A. Roger Ekirch's research documents the transportation of approximately 50,000 British convicts to the American colonies between 1718 and 1775, many of whom were consigned to compulsory labour. They were one component of a much more varied colonial population, not the entirety of its founders (Ekirch, 1987). What Rubio celebrates as a continuous national inheritance was, in historical reality, a political society assembled from diverse populations under conditions ranging from voluntary migration to outright coercion.

 

The supreme irony, however, lies in the relationship between that settler society and the peoples whose ancestral territories became the United States. The Indigenous nations of North America were neither immigrants nor late arrivals requiring permission to inhabit their homelands. They possessed established societies, political institutions, diplomatic relationships and territorial rights long before European colonisation. Yet the expansion of the American republic progressively dispossessed them through warfare, coerced treaties, forced removals and the destruction of their communities. Patrick Wolfe's analysis of settler colonialism identifies the elimination of Indigenous political and territorial presence as a structural feature of settler expansion, rather than merely a succession of accidental frontier conflicts (Wolfe, 2006). Benjamin Madley's investigation of California documents the involvement of federal and state authorities in campaigns of mass killing and dispossession, during which the Indigenous population fell from approximately 150,000 in 1846 to 30,000 by 1873 (Madley, 2016). The survivors of these processes were frequently confined to reservations, subjected to restrictive federal authority and deprived of much of the effective control they had previously exercised over their territories. Indigenous peoples born in the United States were not universally recognised as American citizens until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, while restrictions upon their political and territorial rights persisted thereafter. Today, federally recognised Indigenous nations possess important rights of self-government and their members are American citizens, but their sovereignty remains constrained by federal law (Bureau of Indian Affairs, 2017; United States Congress, 1924). The historical contradiction is nevertheless unmistakable: a republic established through the settlement of other peoples' lands now presents immigration as a civilisational danger, while the descendants of the continent's original inhabitants have spent generations struggling to preserve the remnants of their own sovereignty. Rubio wishes to defend the inheritance of the settler without confronting what the settlement cost those who were already there.

 

His assertion that Western nations have somehow become ashamed of the prosperity they ‘deserved and had earned’ is no less revealing. Prosperity is not an inherited certificate of moral superiority, and economic achievement does not erase the historical conditions under which wealth was accumulated. American development involved extraordinary human ingenuity, labour, technological innovation and industrial organisation. It also involved Indigenous dispossession, plantation slavery, territorial expansion and access to commercial networks sustained by colonial inequalities. To recognise those histories is not to deny the genuine accomplishments of American society. It is to reject Rubio's demand that historical achievement be treated as an occasion for collective self-congratulation without serious examination of its human costs. A country that acknowledges slavery or colonial violence has not thereby renounced its history; it has begun to examine that history rather than merely celebrate its preferred fragments. The controversy surrounding public monuments is similarly not reducible to national self-hatred. It concerns whose achievements were commemorated, whose suffering was excluded and whether public honour should remain permanently attached to figures whose historical conduct is now subjected to closer scrutiny. Rubio mistakes historical accountability for civilisational surrender because his conception of national pride appears to require an unusually selective memory.

 

There is also a fundamental distinction between nationalism understood as a commitment to political self-determination and nationalism transformed into a claim of ethnic or cultural superiority. The former can sustain struggles against imperial domination; the latter can become an instrument for excluding those who do not conform to an officially approved image of the nation. Rubio slides between these meanings without acknowledging the danger. He celebrates a plural American republic while appealing to an allegedly continuous Western identity, and condemns the erosion of national sovereignty while endorsing a foreign policy founded upon maintaining American dominance over other sovereign nations. The contradiction cannot be concealed by invoking the Parthenon. If sovereignty means the right of a people to determine its political future, it cannot be a privilege reserved for Washington and its favoured allies. Iranians, Cubans, Venezuelans and every other people possess the same claim to national independence that Rubio demands for Americans. A nationalism that recognises the sovereignty of one's own country while treating the sovereignty of others as conditional upon American approval is not a consistent doctrine of national self-determination. It is the language of imperial privilege.

 

The contradiction becomes even more glaring when Rubio complains that Western governments have surrendered authority to international institutions and ‘global bureaucracies’. He portrays sovereignty as something stolen by distant centres of power, yet conspicuously neglects the international system through which Washington itself has acquired the capacity to influence, punish and constrain the political and economic decisions of other countries. American power does not operate solely through aircraft carriers, military bases or formal alliances. It also operates through the central position of the United States within global financial networks, the international role of the dollar, access to banking and payments infrastructure, technology supply chains and the extraterritorial consequences of American sanctions. Farrell and Newman (2019) describe how states occupying privileged positions within international economic networks can transform interdependence into an instrument of coercion, enabling them to gather information, restrict access and impose costs upon foreign governments. The United States has exercised precisely such advantages. Thus Rubio condemns the supposed surrender of sovereignty to international structures while celebrating a system in which other nations can find their commercial relationships and financial transactions disrupted by decisions made in Washington. Sovereignty, in his formulation, appears to mean independence for the United States and dependence for everyone else. The global economy becomes acceptable when American institutions can use its interconnections as instruments of power, but objectionable when international obligations impose constraints upon America's freedom of action.

 

It is against this background that Rubio announces Trump's choice: the ‘unapologetic pursuit of national power’, industrial reorganisation, technological dominance and renewed military strength. There is nothing inherently illegitimate about a government seeking productive capacity, technological innovation or the means to defend its population. Every sovereign state possesses legitimate economic and security interests. The political issue arises when those interests are elevated into a claim of entitlement to global supremacy, and when the ability to wield force becomes a central demonstration of national virtue. Rubio does not merely advocate the improvement of American industry. He explicitly frames the coming decade as a struggle to determine whether the West will remain ‘at the head of the world’ or descend into decline. The language is revealing. His concern is not simply whether American citizens will enjoy security and prosperity, but whether their state and its geopolitical associates will retain a position of superiority over others. What he describes as national renewal is therefore inseparable from an international hierarchy in which some nations are expected to lead and others to accommodate their leadership. The freedom of the latter barely enters his account.

 

Rubio's closing invocation of military force makes the purpose of the preceding historical mythology unmistakable. He declares that statecraft requires the willingness to use force when prudence and diplomacy fail, presenting this proposition as an ancient political wisdom recovered by the Trump administration. Yet the mere failure of diplomacy does not establish the legal right to wage war. The United Nations Charter prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of states, subject to recognised exceptions including lawful self-defence and Security Council authorisation. The inability of a powerful government to obtain another state's compliance through negotiation is not an additional exception secretly concealed within the Charter. Diplomatic frustration is not a legal justification for aggression, and military superiority does not confer jurisdiction over the political future of another nation (United Nations, 1945, Articles 2(4) and 51).

 

The American and Israeli military assault upon Iran beginning on 28 February 2026 places Rubio's declaration in an especially disturbing contemporary context. The United Nations Secretary-General and the President of the General Assembly responded to the outbreak of hostilities by invoking the prohibition upon the use of force and calling for a return to diplomacy. Serious questions arise concerning the legal justification for the initial strikes, particularly in the absence of Security Council authorisation and a publicly demonstrated basis for lawful self-defence (United Nations General Assembly, 2026). Whatever the legitimate concerns surrounding the Islamic regime's nuclear activities, regional conduct or repression of its own population, those concerns do not in themselves abolish Iran's rights under international law. The Iranian nation is not synonymous with the government that rules it, and opposition to that government is not consent to foreign bombardment. Rubio's formulation, in which diplomacy exhausts itself and force becomes the natural expression of political resolve, threatens to reverse the fundamental principle upon which the post-1945 international legal order was constructed: military action must be justified under law, not law subordinated to military ambition.

 

The consequences of this approach are central to my analyses in The Quicksand of America: How Netanyahu Is Dragging America into Its Own Graveyard and From ‘Epstein Fury’ to the New ‘Dieppe Raid’: How Trump Is Saving the Islamic Regime from Falling and Has Taken Away the Only Lever the Iranian Nation Possessed to Topple It. Both examine the strategic contradiction created when a foreign intervention purportedly intended to weaken an authoritarian government instead supplies that government with the opportunity to portray domestic dissent as a threat to national survival.

 

My argument is that the American and Israeli war, rather than delivering the liberation of Iran, has risked transforming an internal struggle for political change into a confrontation dominated by foreign aggression, thereby allowing the Islamic regime to justify further securitisation and repression through the language of national defence (Suren-Pahlav, 2026a; 2026c). This is a strategic interpretation rather than a claim that every consequence of the conflict is already settled, but the mechanism is hardly difficult to understand. A population's opposition to its rulers does not imply a willingness to see its homeland bombed by foreign powers. Iranians may reject the Islamic regime and simultaneously reject American military intervention. Indeed, those two positions are entirely compatible for anyone who understands the difference between a nation and the political establishment temporarily exercising power over it.

 

Rubio nevertheless celebrates the pursuit of dominance in drones, weapons, warfare, cyber capabilities and advanced technology as though the expansion of destructive capacity were itself evidence of civilisational progress. The historical achievements of science and engineering deserve recognition, but the purposes to which they are put remain matters of moral and political judgement. An increasingly sophisticated military machine may protect a population against aggression; it may also enable its government to impose enormous suffering upon distant societies. The distinction depends upon conduct, necessity, proportionality and the obligations imposed by law, not upon the excellence of the engineering. The ability to destroy a country's electrical infrastructure, bridges, communications or industrial facilities does not establish the legitimacy of doing so. Nor does superiority in weapons production guarantee strategic success. Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan should have supplied Washington with sufficient evidence that military superiority cannot automatically produce political legitimacy, durable control or the consent of the governed. Iran, a country possessing a long-established national identity, substantial territory and a deeply rooted consciousness of foreign intervention, presents its own formidable strategic and political complexities. To imagine that sufficient bombardment must eventually produce obedience is to mistake the capacity to inflict damage for the ability to determine another nation's future.

 

Rubio's speech therefore ends by exposing the political meaning of everything that preceded it. The extravagant praise of ancient Athens, the invented continuity of Western civilisation, the elevation of struggle into a supreme virtue and the denunciation of historical self-criticism were never merely exercises in cultural nostalgia. They prepare the audience to regard American supremacy as a civilisational inheritance rather than a contingent political arrangement, and the use of coercive power as the restoration of ancient virtue rather than a decision requiring independent legal and moral justification. The historical costume gives contemporary policy an appearance of inevitability, as though the builders of the Parthenon had somehow anticipated the military-industrial priorities of Washington and entrusted the Trump administration with their fulfilment.

 

Rubio calls this the recovery of classical statecraft. Yet the argument he offers is much closer to the old imperial presumption that power creates entitlement, that domination constitutes leadership and that the independence of weaker nations may be overridden whenever the ambitions of stronger ones demand it. The contradiction is particularly stark in a speech devoted to nationalism and sovereignty. He demands that Americans recover the confidence to govern themselves, while offering no comparable assurance that Iranians and other peoples will be permitted to determine their futures free from American military and economic coercion. The choice is not between a West ashamed of its achievements and a West willing to fight for its survival. It is between an international order in which sovereignty and legal restraints apply to powerful states as well as weaker ones, and an order in which the strongest state repeatedly exempts itself from the principles it expects others to obey. Rubio's admiration for thumos cannot resolve that contradiction. Courage without judgement is recklessness; strength without restraint becomes domination; and a government that invokes civilisation to excuse the destruction of another people's sovereignty has turned the language of civilisation against one of the very principles it claims to defend.

 

Rubio next announces that ‘Europe can awaken from its long slumber and rekindle the fire that was lit here millennia ago’. As evidence of this supposed civilisational revival, he celebrates ‘skyrocketing defense spending’, expanding military partnerships and Greece's position as ‘a model ally’ of the United States. He also invokes an ‘unprecedented new agreement between the United States, Denmark, and Greenland’ as proof of the benefits of transatlantic cooperation, before proclaiming: ‘We want to win together. We must win together.’ Yet Rubio's enthusiastic account rests upon a questionable political assumption: that Europe's growing concern with military preparedness necessarily represents renewed confidence in American leadership, rather than an increasingly urgent recognition of the dangers of depending upon it.

 

Rubio's assertion that Europe is awakening from a long slumber contains an irony that appears to have escaped him entirely. Europe is indeed awakening, but not necessarily to the civilisational revival he imagines, nor to a renewed appreciation of American leadership. What has increasingly disturbed European governments is the discovery that dependence upon Washington carries risks of its own, particularly when the American president treats longstanding allies as economic competitors, questions established security commitments and demands concessions under the language of partnership. Europe's awakening may therefore prove to be one of Donald Trump's most consequential unintended achievements: accelerating the realisation that European security cannot indefinitely rest upon the political preferences of whoever happens to occupy the White House. Rubio celebrates the symptoms of this awakening while carefully avoiding one of its principal causes. The European rearmament he praises may strengthen NATO, but it also reflects a growing determination among European governments to develop capabilities they can command independently of the United States.

 

The evidence is not confined to diplomatic speculation. A June 2026 Pew Research Center survey found that majorities in all ten European countries examined lacked confidence in Trump to make sound decisions in world affairs. In eight of those countries, roughly three-quarters or more expressed such doubts. Only Hungary and Poland registered majorities regarding the United States as a reliable partner, while perceptions of American reliability had declined substantially elsewhere (Wike et al., 2026). These findings do not mean that Europe has collectively renounced its American alliance, and European governments continue to maintain extensive military, economic and diplomatic relationships with Washington. They demonstrate something politically more significant than a temporary disagreement: the erosion of confidence in the judgement and reliability of the power around which much of Europe's post-war security architecture was constructed. Rubio speaks of rekindling European confidence as though Washington were offering the flame. In reality, Washington's own conduct has helped convince Europeans that they need to keep their own fires burning.

 

The increase in European defence expenditure must be understood against this background. Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 exposed serious deficiencies in European military preparedness, ammunition production and strategic coordination, while successive disputes with Washington sharpened concern about reliance upon American capabilities. At the NATO summit in The Hague in June 2025, members committed themselves to spending 5 per cent of GDP on defence and broader defence-related requirements by 2035, including at least 3.5 per cent on core military needs (NATO, 2025). The European Commission's Readiness 2030 programme, meanwhile, envisages mobilising up to €800 billion to strengthen Europe's defence capabilities and industrial base (European Commission, 2026a). Rubio presents these developments as an uncomplicated triumph of transatlantic solidarity. They can equally be interpreted as an insurance policy against the possibility that the United States may become less willing, less predictable or more conditional in providing security assistance. A stronger Europe may continue to cooperate closely with America. What is increasingly open to question is whether Europeans are prepared to remain strategically dependent upon it.

 

The same concern extends beyond military affairs into the financial architecture through which American power is exercised. Washington's privileged position within the international monetary system has long provided it with advantages unavailable to most other governments, while the centrality of dollar-denominated transactions and American financial institutions has strengthened its capacity to enforce sanctions and exert economic pressure. European interest in financial autonomy is therefore not simply a matter of currency preference, but of reducing exposure to decisions taken outside European political institutions. Yet the distinction between diversification and abandonment must be preserved. International Monetary Fund figures for the first quarter of 2026 show the American dollar still accounting for approximately 57.1 per cent of allocated global foreign-exchange reserves, an increase from the previous quarter, rather than evidence of a wholesale international flight from the currency (International Monetary Fund, 2026). The dollar remains dominant. But dominance is not the same as invulnerability, and a financial system increasingly treated as an instrument of geopolitical coercion provides other governments with reasons to investigate alternatives. The irony is that a presidency devoted to restoring American supremacy may also encourage allies and competitors to reduce those forms of dependence through which American supremacy has traditionally operated.

 

There is another, less reassuring dimension to the political transformation Rubio praises. The language of national revival, threatened identity and lost greatness has acquired renewed prominence within European politics, often accompanied by hostility towards immigration, ethnic and religious minorities, and the liberal institutions intended to protect pluralist societies. In Britain, Nigel Farage's Reform UK has built much of its political identity around immigration controls, national sovereignty and opposition to established political institutions. In France, Marine Le Pen's National Rally has spent years attempting to convert an exclusionary nationalist tradition into a credible governing movement. Neither emerged because Donald Trump entered American politics; their roots are considerably older, and the histories of British and French nationalism cannot be explained through Washington alone. Cas Mudde's analysis of the contemporary far right demonstrates that the normalisation of radical-right themes was already an established political process with distinctive national causes (Mudde, 2019). What Trump has contributed is the example of those themes operating from the presidency of the world's most powerful state, giving European movements an influential transatlantic point of reference. That influence is neither uniform nor uncontested, but it raises a question Rubio conspicuously avoids: what kind of Europe is supposed to awaken when national pride becomes entangled with ethnic exclusion, resentment towards minorities and suspicion of democratic constraints?

 

There is a considerable difference between defending a nation's cultural and political independence and treating sections of its own population as threats to national belonging. European societies possess complex histories shaped by migration, regional diversity, religious change and centuries of cultural exchange. To portray this diversity as evidence of civilisational decay risks reproducing the very divisions that previously contributed to Europe's political catastrophes. Rubio celebrates the revival of national confidence without seriously examining how easily the language of national renewal can be appropriated by movements that define the nation through exclusion rather than citizenship. A continent attempting to strengthen its collective security while allowing ethnic antagonisms to undermine political cohesion could discover that its gravest vulnerabilities are not all located beyond its borders.

 

Rubio's treatment of Greece exposes a different contradiction. He presents the country as a model ally whose achievements in energy, migration management and defence should be emulated throughout Europe. Yet behind the extravagant diplomatic praise stands an economy whose structural weaknesses remain substantial and whose post-crisis recovery has depended heavily upon European institutions. Eurostat's preliminary figures for 2025 placed Greece and Bulgaria jointly at the bottom of the European Union for GDP per capita measured in purchasing-power standards, at approximately 68 per cent of the EU average (Eurostat, 2026). Greece has made progress since the sovereign-debt crisis, but the continuing distance between its economic performance and that of wealthier EU members is difficult to reconcile with Rubio's implied portrayal of the country as an exemplary model of European renewal. The European Union's Recovery and Resilience Facility allocated Greece approximately €18.22 billion in grants and €17.73 billion in loans to support reforms, infrastructure and investment (European Commission, 2026b). These are institutional financing arrangements rather than charitable handouts, with loans carrying repayment obligations and payments linked to reforms. Nevertheless, they underline the importance of European financial support to Greece's economic development.

 

Nor should Greece's weaknesses be exaggerated into the equally untenable assertion that the country possesses no productive or technological capabilities. Greek shipping remains internationally significant, and the country maintains industrial, pharmaceutical, engineering and research activities. The European Commission's 2026 digital assessment identifies continuing deficiencies in business technology adoption and specialist skills, but also documents investment in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and advanced communications (European Commission, 2026c). The serious criticism is not that modern Greece produces nothing of value. It is that Rubio's ceremonial praise disguises the enormous difference between a strategically useful ally and an economically self-sufficient model for the rest of Europe. The monuments of classical Athens do not remedy contemporary productivity problems, reduce public debt or manufacture the military equipment upon which national security depends.

 

Indeed, Greece's particular attraction to Washington has less to do with the achievements of Pericles than with geography. Its location between the Balkans, the eastern Mediterranean and the approaches to the Middle East makes it valuable for military logistics, maritime surveillance, energy infrastructure and regional operations. The American military presence at Souda Bay in Crete and the development of facilities and access arrangements involving Alexandroupolis and other Greek locations illustrate the practical basis of this relationship. The United States Department of State has itself described Greek territory as strategically important for American and NATO operations, with the Mutual Defense Cooperation Agreement providing arrangements for access, facilities and military cooperation (United States Department of State, 2022). Washington is not investing in Greece because the Parthenon has suddenly become essential to American national defence. It values Greece because its territory occupies a position of considerable military and geopolitical importance. Rubio's historical romanticism supplies an attractive public vocabulary for a relationship grounded in substantially more immediate strategic calculations.

 

This is where the distinction between partnership and dependence becomes indispensable. Greece has legitimate reasons to seek security cooperation, particularly given its longstanding disputes with Turkey over maritime boundaries, airspace and other questions of sovereignty. Both states are NATO members, and their rivalry has periodically generated serious military tensions. It would, however, be irresponsible to pronounce a future Turkish victory inevitable or assume that other European states would simply abandon Greece in the event of aggression. The Franco-Greek strategic partnership signed in 2021 contains a mutual-assistance provision, potentially including armed force, should the parties jointly determine that an armed attack has occurred against either's territory (République française, 2022). Such commitments do not guarantee the outcome of a conflict, but they plainly contradict the suggestion that Greece's security is sustained by American patronage alone. Athens maintains military capabilities of its own and has an interest in preserving both European and transatlantic relationships. The political danger lies in allowing either relationship to become so dominant that Greek strategic decisions are effectively subordinated to the priorities of an external power.

 

It is therefore reasonable to scrutinise Rubio's desire for Greece to lead Europe by example. Lead it towards what? Greater European strategic autonomy, or deeper dependence upon American weapons, intelligence systems, military infrastructure and foreign-policy preferences? These outcomes are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but they are not identical. Greece can strengthen its own defence and cooperate with Washington without surrendering political independence. Yet a relationship in which the United States becomes increasingly indispensable to its military planning and operational capabilities would inevitably increase Washington's leverage. The risk is that a government publicly celebrated for defending its sovereignty becomes progressively more constrained in the decisions it can take without American approval. Whether Greece accepts that risk is a matter for its own institutions and population, not a decision that American officials are entitled to make beneath the ceremonial cover of ancient history.

 

Rubio's invocation of the September 2026 agreement involving the United States, Denmark and Greenland is particularly revealing. He describes the arrangement as an unprecedented triumph in which all participants emerged victorious, apparently expecting his audience to forget the extraordinary tensions that preceded it. Earlier in 2026, Trump's renewed demands concerning Greenland's acquisition by the United States had alarmed European governments. A House of Commons Library briefing documented his pressure upon Denmark and Greenland, including threats of economic measures and his refusal, until 21 January, to rule out military force (Curtis and Fella, 2026). Denmark and Greenland did not welcome the prospect of an American president threatening the territorial integrity of a NATO ally. They rejected the idea that Greenland could be transferred to Washington against the wishes of its people.

 

The agreement signed on 22 September consequently deserves a less triumphalist reading than Rubio offers. It expanded arrangements for American military access and cooperation in Greenland while expressly recognising the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Kingdom of Denmark and the Greenlandic people's right to self-determination (Danish Prime Minister's Office, 2026). There were genuine security interests and negotiated concessions involved, but the outcome cannot be detached from the earlier dispute. Rubio's version of transatlantic friendship has a peculiar sequence: Washington places an ally under extraordinary pressure concerning its territory, an agreement is negotiated to manage the resulting tensions, and the American Secretary of State announces that everyone has won. One might reasonably ask whether the most valuable achievement was not the expansion of American access, but the preservation of Greenlandic self-determination against a proposal that should never have become a source of coercive pressure between allies.

 

His assurance that transatlantic friendship should not become a zero-sum relationship is entirely defensible as a diplomatic principle. The difficulty is reconciling that principle with the transactional language and conduct through which the Trump administration has approached several of its closest partners. An alliance requires more than the simultaneous pursuit of material advantage. It depends upon confidence that agreements will be respected, that differences will not routinely become occasions for threats and that political sovereignty will not be treated as a negotiable privilege granted by the stronger party. Once those expectations are weakened, increased military expenditure cannot, by itself, restore trust.

 

Rubio ends this passage by insisting that there is nothing selfish about loyalty to one's nation or the defence of its interests. Taken literally, there is nothing objectionable in that proposition. Governments have responsibilities towards the people they represent. The problem is that the same principle must apply beyond Washington. Denmark has an interest in defending its sovereignty; Greenlanders possess a right to determine their political future; Greece has an interest in avoiding becoming dependent upon any single external patron; and European countries have an interest in developing institutions and capabilities capable of protecting them even when American policy changes abruptly. If national self-determination is legitimate for the United States, it cannot become an offence when exercised by America's allies.

 

That is the contradiction Rubio cannot dissolve through appeals to ancient Athens. He celebrates European nations becoming stronger, yet the American strategic interest is not necessarily served when that strength allows them to decline Washington's demands. He praises sovereignty while welcoming arrangements that extend American military influence. He presents nationalism as a legitimate expression of collective independence without confronting the damage that exclusionary forms of nationalism can inflict upon Europe's own plural societies. Above all, he mistakes the survival of an alliance for proof that its members continue to regard American leadership as indispensable and unquestionably benevolent.

 

Europe may indeed be emerging from a long political slumber. But the most consequential lesson of its awakening may be one Rubio has no intention of teaching: that partnership with the United States is not the same as dependence upon it, that loyalty cannot be secured indefinitely through pressure, and that a continent serious about its sovereignty must possess the capacity to say no to Washington. Trump's presidency has made that distinction considerably harder to ignore. Rubio has arrived in Athens to celebrate Europe's renewed strength, without confronting the possibility that a genuinely stronger Europe might be one that no longer needs America's permission to act.

 

Rubio returns to antiquity for one of the most politically convenient legends in the Western historical imagination. He celebrates ‘the legendary stand of 300 Spartans’, who supposedly ‘refused the chance to save themselves, choosing to fight to the last man rather than abandon their post or abandon their duty’. From this romanticised account, he advances the sweeping proposition that ‘It is from the Greeks that the West inherited its sense of duty’. He then brings his argument directly into the present, denouncing ‘fanatics like the radical mullahs of Iran, whose cult of death hails child suicide bombers as national heroes’. Rubio has thus transformed a selectively remembered ancient battle into an assertion of Western moral superiority, before employing that supposed inheritance to distinguish the contemporary United States from its Iranian adversary. The historical foundations of this comparison deserve considerably closer scrutiny than his rhetoric permits.

 

He returns to one of the most exhausted and politically useful myths in the Hellenocentric repertoire: the legendary three hundred Spartans who supposedly stood alone against the armies of Persia and, through their willingness to die, bequeathed to the Western world its understanding of courage, loyalty, honour and duty. It is a story that has been repeated so frequently, embellished so extravagantly and exploited for so many ideological purposes that its familiarity has become a substitute for historical accuracy. Rubio presents it with the reverence of a man reciting sacred scripture, apparently unconcerned that the ancient account from which the legend derives tells a considerably different story. The problem is not that the defenders of Thermopylae displayed courage. They did. The falsification begins when the courage of several thousand men from different political communities is appropriated by three hundred Spartans, and their military defeat transformed into a founding moral achievement supposedly belonging to a continuous Western civilisation. What began as an episode in a conflict involving particular city-states and the Achaemenid Empire has become an ideological fable in which ancient Iranians play the hereditary villains and Sparta supplies the heroic ancestry of modern American power.

 

The celebrated account of 300 Spartans defending Thermopylae illustrates how a historical assertion, transmitted through successive generations of writing and commemoration, may acquire an authority considerably greater than the surviving evidence warrants. The precise number derives principally from the ancient literary tradition, particularly Herodotus, who was born shortly before the Battle of Thermopylae and composed his account several decades later. His reliability, however, was questioned in antiquity: Thucydides challenged the methods of entertaining historical narration, while Plutarch later accused Herodotus of prejudice, misrepresentation and deliberate falsehood. Such criticisms do not automatically invalidate his account, but neither can its numerical claims be treated as independently established facts. In the absence of contemporary military records, the celebrated figure remains a literary tradition rather than a verified military headcount. Nor were the ancient accounts entirely consistent. What has survived in popular memory, however, is the apparently unquestionable figure of 300 exceptional Spartan warriors, detached from the much larger coalition of defenders and the uncertainties surrounding the ancient evidence. The question is not whether these men displayed courage, supposing the conventional account is substantially accurate, but why the courage of one contingent should monopolise the remembrance of an engagement involving several thousand participants from different political communities. If the figure of 300 is accepted blindly, it raises a further question about the political and military decisions that restricted Sparta's initial contribution, rather than establishing the moral superiority of those selected or the cowardice of those who remained elsewhere. Rubio reproduces the familiar heroic narrative without examining its evidential limitations, thereby transforming a contested episode of ancient military history into an apparently self-evident demonstration of the exceptional moral character he attributes to the modern West (Thucydides, 1921; Plutarch, 1992; Clements, 2024).

 

Nevertheless, Herodotus's account itself contradicts the popular portrayal of Thermopylae as an exclusively Spartan defence. In Book VII, chapter 202, he identifies contingents from Tegea, Mantinea, Orchomenus, Corinth, Phlius, Mycenae, Thespiae and Thebes, alongside other Peloponnesian communities; additional Phocian and Locrian forces are mentioned in the following chapter. The Spartan contingent constituted only one element of this coalition. When the Persian forces succeeded in outflanking the defensive position, most of the surviving contingents withdrew, while the Spartans remained alongside approximately seven hundred Thespians and four hundred Thebans. Herodotus explicitly records that the Thespians chose to remain and share the fate of Leonidas and his men, whereas the Thebans, according to his account, were compelled to stay as hostages because their loyalty was distrusted (Histories, VII.202–203, 220–222). The latter claim must itself be assessed critically, given Herodotus's political and narrative preferences, but the presence of the non-Spartan contingents is not reasonably in doubt. Yet Rubio follows the established Hellenocentric practice of granting the Spartans a virtual monopoly upon the memory of the battle. The Thespians, whose decision to remain appears no less deserving of recognition, are made to disappear. Their courage is absorbed into Spartan glory, just as the wider history of the ancient world is repeatedly absorbed into Rubio's invented Western inheritance (Herodotus, 1922; Foster, 2012).

 

The fate of the Thebans exposes another uncomfortable detail. Herodotus records that, as the final engagement turned decisively against the defenders, a number of Thebans attempted to surrender, declaring that their community had already acknowledged Persian authority and that they had participated in the defence under compulsion. Some were killed while approaching the imperial forces; most of those captured were subsequently branded on Xerxes' orders (Histories, VII.233). The incident was not a triumph of humanitarian conduct, and the branding deserves no romantic justification. But neither does the evidence support the suggestion that Spartan exiles executed these prisoners according to Spartan law. Herodotus attributes the branding to Xerxes, while the surrendered Thebans invoked Thessalian witnesses to corroborate their claims. Immediately afterwards, he records Xerxes consulting Demaratus, the deposed Spartan king who had taken refuge at the Persian imperial court and served as an adviser to the Achaemenid monarch (Histories, VII.234–235). Thus, while Rubio celebrates an supposedly absolute division between heroic Sparta and its Persian enemy, the source he invokes places a former Spartan monarch within the Persian political establishment itself. Ancient allegiances were more complicated than the crude civilisational identities imposed upon them by modern politicians. Sparta was not a homogeneous embodiment of freedom, Persia was not an undifferentiated enemy of civilisation, and the political relationships between their elites cannot honestly be reduced to Rubio's sentimental morality play.

 

This is precisely the myth-making I examined in Movie 300: A Fabrication of History and an Exercise in Cinematic Absurdity, where the celebrated defenders of Thermopylae become instruments of a modern political narrative in which Sparta is idealised, Persia dehumanised and the contributions of other city-states suppressed. Rubio has effectively transferred the ideological structure of that cinematic fantasy into an official American foreign-policy speech. His choice is revealing. Sparta was a militarised oligarchic society sustained by the subordination and exploitation of the helots, whose labour supported the privileged citizen-warrior class. Its political institutions were not founded upon the universal liberty Rubio's civilisational language invites his audience to imagine. The endurance and battlefield discipline of its soldiers are historical subjects worthy of study, but neither confers upon Spartan society an inherent moral superiority over its neighbours, much less over the Achaemenid Empire (Suren-Pahlav, 2007). A state can produce formidable soldiers while maintaining deeply oppressive domestic institutions. Military discipline is not political liberty, and the willingness to die for one's ruling order does not establish that the order itself deserves moral admiration.

 

There is an essential distinction that Rubio's account nevertheless obscures. The defenders at Thermopylae were resisting an advancing Achaemenid military expedition. Their defence of territory threatened by invasion provides an intelligible basis for recognising their courage, irrespective of their social institutions or subsequent appropriation into European mythology. But Rubio extends the same moral vocabulary to Achilles, the legendary warrior who participated in an expedition across the Aegean to wage war against Troy. In the Iliad (IX.410–416), Achilles contemplates the choice between a long life without enduring glory and a short life whose martial achievements will secure his fame. This is a literary exploration of heroic values, not a documentary account of a historical soldier fighting for his country's survival. The distinction between defending one's homeland and crossing the world to assault another people is fundamental. The soldier resisting an invasion and the conqueror carrying destruction into another society cannot be declared morally equivalent merely because both are prepared to die. Courage describes a disposition towards danger; it does not determine whether the cause for which that danger is embraced is just. The courage of an aggressor does not legitimise aggression, nor does the successful destruction of another community transform the perpetrator into a benefactor of humanity (Homer, 1924).

 

An invading army may march beneath a national flag, invoke divine approval, declare its intentions honourable and describe its soldiers as heroes. None of these ceremonies alters the experience of the population subjected to its violence. From the perspective of civilians whose homes are destroyed, whose children are killed and whose country is invaded, the uniform of the aggressor offers little reassurance that the terror imposed upon them is somehow morally superior to violence committed without official insignia. There are legal distinctions between aggressive war, attacks on civilians, war crimes and terrorism, and those distinctions should be preserved rather than discarded for rhetorical effect. But the underlying moral principle is elementary: a state-issued uniform cannot convert an unlawful act into an honourable one, any more than a patriotic declaration can turn the killing of innocent people into heroism. If Rubio wishes to define heroism through fidelity to a worthy cause, the justice of the cause must be examined before the sacrifice can be celebrated. Otherwise, the same vocabulary becomes available to every invading army in history.

 

Rubio's treatment of Socrates supplies another revealing illustration of his selective understanding of moral courage. In Plato's Apology, Socrates refuses to abandon philosophical enquiry merely to escape condemnation, maintaining that obedience to what he understands as a higher moral obligation takes precedence over the demands of his accusers. The philosophical importance of the episode lies not in a cult of death, but in the relationship between conscience, truth and the individual's responsibility to resist unjust pressure (Plato, 1914, 28e–30c). Yet Rubio celebrates precisely this refusal to surrender one's principles while simultaneously praising a contemporary American foreign policy that places other nations under immense military and economic pressure to compel political submission. A genuine admiration for Socratic courage would require recognising the possibility that individuals and peoples outside the United States possess principles they are equally unwilling to abandon. The right to resist coercion cannot be confined to those whose convictions happen to coincide with Washington's geopolitical objectives. Rubio's moral universe becomes remarkably less generous once the person refusing submission is Iranian rather than Athenian.

 

The contradiction becomes impossible to ignore when he turns directly to Iran. Having celebrated Spartans willing to die rather than abandon their positions, Achilles choosing death in pursuit of glory, Christian martyrs refusing to renounce their faith and soldiers sacrificing their lives for their country, Rubio suddenly discovers that the language of martyrdom can signify something sinister when associated with the Iranian regime. His reference to the glorification of child suicide bombers raises a legitimate question concerning the exploitation of children and the religious sanctification of violence. The recruitment or deployment of children for military purposes is indefensible, irrespective of the ideology under which it occurs. But Rubio offers no coherent distinction between the sacrifice he celebrates and the sacrifice he condemns beyond the political identity of those involved. The crucial distinction should concern the purpose of the act, the freedom of the individual, the treatment of civilians and the legitimacy of the cause. Instead, he presents Western sacrifice as evidence of an extraordinary respect for life while treating Iranian martyrdom as proof of a fundamentally alien moral character.

 

More objectionable still is his habitual confusion of Iran with the clerical establishment ruling it. The Iranian nation is not the Islamic regime, and its historical identity did not begin in 1979. The country's inhabitants possess diverse political convictions, cultural and national identity and attitudes towards the clerical authorities. Many oppose the regime while resisting foreign military aggression. To reduce this population to the ideology of the ruling clerics is to repeat the same political deception through which the achievements of ancient Iran are erased and the Iranian people rendered indistinguishable from whichever regime Washington wishes to confront. An Iranian does not cease to possess a legitimate love of country because the regime ruling that country is totalitarian. Nor does resistance to foreign aggression automatically signify allegiance to the Islamic regime.

 

If Rubio genuinely wishes to identify courage in the face of overwhelming military power, he need not search among the embellished legends of antiquity. He might turn his attention to the Iranian people, who have endured and resisted more than forty seven years of Islamic regime’s totalitarian rule and seven months of illegal war of aggression by the United States and Israel began on 28 February 2026. Their country has faced the armed forces of the world's most powerful military state and its regional proxy, while ordinary civilians have borne the consequences of bombardment, economic disruption and pervasive insecurity. Their endurance should not be confused with unanimous political support for their rulers. There is no single Iranian response to the war, just as there is no single Iranian attitude towards the Islamic regime. But the courage involved in preserving ordinary life under bombardment, rescuing the wounded, caring for displaced families and maintaining one's attachment to a threatened homeland deserves recognition. A people struggling to survive the overwhelming force of a foreign aggression possesses no less claim to human dignity than the defenders of Thermopylae. Indeed, the relevant historical comparison is not between American military superiority and Spartan resistance, but between those who confront superior military force upon their own territory and those who command that force from thousands of miles away.

 

Now consider Minab. On 28 February 2026, a primary school in southern Iran was struck during the opening American and Israeli war of aggression. The authorities in Iran reported 168 deaths, a figure repeated in early international statements, while subsequent independent investigations established a more detailed, though still incomplete, accounting. An investigation reported by the Associated Press identified findings by Airwars confirming 157 victims by name, including 123 children aged thirteen or younger and 34 adults, with the overall death toll assessed as between 157 and 168. A preliminary American military investigation, reported in March, claimed that the strike resulted from a targeting error, although the administration had not publicly accepted responsibility or released its complete findings by the time of the Associated Press investigation (Human Rights Watch, 2026; Frankel, 2026). The administration has not explained why the school was struck twice by Tomahawk missiles either, despite their cameras providing live views of the targets, including children playing. These distinctions matter. There is strong evidence of American war crimes for a strike that murdered more than a hundred children, while the final military investigation and the precise circumstances surrounding the two strikes have not been publicly revealed. Deliberate murder cannot simply be presumed without evidence of intent. But this is America’s true face: brutality and aggression without the usual alibi (Suren-Pahlav, 2026; 2026f).

 

Human Rights Watch examined satellite imagery, photographs and video evidence, observing that the school was separated from the neighbouring Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) compound and that its location within the wider site did not make it a legitimate military target. The organisation called for an investigation into possible war crimes and for those responsible to be held accountable (Human Rights Watch, 2026). UNICEF condemned the killing of children and emphasised the protection owed to schools under international humanitarian law (UNICEF, 2026). Yet Rubio stands before the world celebrating the supposed Western reverence for life while condemning the Islamic regime's manipulation of martyrdom, without confronting what the bombing of a school full of Iranian children reveals about the conduct and responsibilities of his own regime. This is not an argument that the Islamic regime's use of the dead for political propaganda should escape criticism. Quite the opposite. The exploitation of the tragedy by the Islamic regime's authorities must not obscure the suffering of the families, and Washington's aggression in carrying out the strike must not be concealed behind accusations directed at Tehran. The victims belonged to their families and communities before they belonged to anyone's political narrative.

 

The parents of Minab require no Spartan legend to teach them the meaning of sacrifice. They sent their children to school on an ordinary morning and were left to confront the destruction of lives that no military victory, diplomatic explanation or financial compensation can restore. Their grief is not an abstraction for a statesman's speech. It is the permanent consequence of a war whose moral legitimacy must be examined independently of its proclaimed strategic objectives. If Rubio wishes to honour those who remain faithful to their duty despite terrible suffering, he should recognise the families who continue demanding the truth, accountability and justice for their children. Their refusal to surrender those demands is not a cult of death. It is an affirmation that the lives destroyed at Minab possess a value no less absolute than those of children in Athens, London, Paris or Washington. There is no greater obscenity in the rhetoric of civilisational superiority than the suggestion that one people's dead are sacred while another people's dead may be absorbed into the acceptable costs of geopolitical ambition.

 

The involvement of European facilities in American operations against Iran makes Rubio's claims about a common Western morality more difficult still. The British government acknowledged authorising the United States to use RAF Fairford and Diego Garcia for specified operations against Iranian missile capabilities, which London characterised as defensive measures intended to prevent further attacks (UK Ministry of Defence, 2026). The British government's legal and strategic justification must be distinguished from the American decision to begin the wider war, and neither the United Kingdom nor the rest of Europe can simply be treated as a single participant with identical responsibilities. Nevertheless, the operational involvement of allied facilities raises questions about the obligations and political accountability of governments whose territory supports military action against another state. When Rubio invokes a shared Western understanding of honour and duty, one must ask whether that understanding extends to an equally shared obligation to investigate civilian deaths, scrutinise the legality of military operations and refuse to treat the suffering of non-Western populations as an incidental inconvenience.

 

And if Rubio requires another contemporary example of courage under invasion, he might consider Ukraine. Since Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukrainian soldiers and civilians have endured immense human losses, displacement, destruction of infrastructure and continuing attacks upon their communities. The political history leading to the war includes disputes over European security arrangements, NATO enlargement, Russian perceptions of strategic vulnerability and the failure of successive diplomatic efforts. These matters deserve rigorous historical examination. They do not establish that Russia was compelled to invade Ukraine, nor do they transfer legal responsibility for that decision to the Ukrainian population or NATO. The United Nations has repeatedly identified Russia's invasion as a violation of the Charter, a position reiterated by the Secretary-General in September 2026 (United Nations, 2026). Whatever judgements one makes about Western strategic policy, the suffering of Ukrainians cannot be converted into an excuse for the violation of their country's sovereignty. Their resistance, like that of other peoples defending their homelands, requires no invented civilisational ancestry to acquire moral meaning.

 

Here Rubio's historical argument encounters its own fatal contradiction. He admires the Spartans because they resisted an invading army; he invokes Achilles because he pursued glory through an expedition against another people; he honours Socrates because he would not surrender his convictions; and he celebrates Western soldiers because they are prepared to sacrifice their lives for causes larger than themselves. These are profoundly different moral situations, united in his speech only by the willingness of the participants to risk death. Yet once Iranian or Ukrainian experiences are considered, the distinctions Rubio has suppressed become unavoidable. Defensive resistance is not the same as imperial conquest. Religious martyrdom is not automatically equivalent to violence against civilians. Courage does not establish the justice of a war, and military victory does not determine which side possessed the greater moral claim. The legitimacy of a cause cannot be measured by the nationality of the person willing to die for it.

 

What makes the passage particularly revealing is Rubio's insistence that the Western understanding of heroism is not universal, but the product of a distinct cultural character. This is the point at which historical romanticism becomes civilisational exclusion. Sacrifice for one's family, community or homeland is neither a Greek invention nor a Western monopoly. The courage of people defending their homes appears throughout recorded human history, among societies that never encountered Sparta and possessed no conception of themselves as Western. The Achaemenid Iranians, the peoples of ancient India and China, the inhabitants of the Americas before European conquest and innumerable other communities developed their own traditions of honour, obligation, loyalty and self-sacrifice. Their moral achievements cannot be annulled because an American politician has decided to award their collective ownership to Athens.

 

Rubio concludes that the civilisation he claims as his inheritance must now be defended with the passion of its forefathers. But this formulation leaves unanswered the question upon which everything depends: defended against whom, and by what means? If the defence of civilisation means protecting one's population against aggression, the principle cannot be denied to Iranians or Ukrainians. If it means preserving the capacity to dominate other peoples, compel political submission and wage wars beyond one's borders, then the appeal to ancient heroism has become an ideological disguise for the exercise of imperial power. The soldier who invades another people's homeland does not acquire moral superiority because his government calls the invasion a defence of civilisation. The civilian who refuses to abandon that homeland does not become a fanatic because the invader finds the resistance inconvenient.

 

There is no need to diminish the courage of Leonidas or the defenders of Thermopylae to expose Rubio's manipulation of their memory. Their military stand occurred within a particular historical conflict and deserves to be understood on its own terms. What must be rejected is the political appropriation through which the sacrifice of a small ancient coalition becomes evidence of a hereditary Western monopoly upon moral virtue, while the suffering of contemporary Iranians is filtered through hostility towards their ruling establishment.

 

If Rubio wishes to discover heroes, he should look beyond the marble monuments and cinematic fantasies through which he has learned to understand antiquity. He should look towards those who protect the vulnerable, defend their homes against unlawful aggression, refuse to surrender their conscience and demand accountability for the killing of innocent people. He should look at the families of Minab, whose children will never return, and at the ordinary people of Iran and Ukraine who continue to endure the consequences of war. Their courage needs no certificate from Sparta, no approval from Washington and no place in Rubio's imaginary genealogy of Western civilisation.

 

The true measure of heroism is not how eagerly a person embraces death, but what they are prepared to protect, whom their actions may harm and whether the cause for which they sacrifice possesses moral legitimacy. Rubio has confused the willingness to die with the right to kill. Until he understands the difference, his lectures on honour and duty remain a profoundly inadequate foundation for the foreign policy of a nuclear-armed state.

 

Rubio now extends his imagined civilisational ancestry across the whole of European and American history. ‘The men who built the Parthenon were succeeded by the architects of European Christendom’, he declares, before claiming that the intellectual achievements of ancient Greek philosophers found their continuation in Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton. He proceeds to associate Magellan, Columbus and Apollo 11 with the same inherited ‘hunger for new knowledge’, while maintaining that the qualities responsible for Alexander's conquests ‘reappeared in Caesar, then Charlemagne, and Cortes’.

 

The United States becomes the culmination of this remarkable procession. ‘The civilization of Athens and Rome transformed an infant seaboard republic into a continental empire’, Rubio asserts, before describing the greatest Americans as descendants of a tradition ‘born in Athens, formed by Rome, baptized in Christendom’. Conquerors, philosophers, scientists, colonial adventurers and modern Americans are thus assembled into a single supposedly uninterrupted historical lineage, whose geographical and intellectual contradictions disappear beneath the convenient fiction of an eternal Western inheritance.

 

And so, Rubio's Hollywood-style historical fantasy now reaches its most audacious stage. Having assigned the origins of human knowledge, scientific enquiry and moral excellence to the ancient Greek-speaking city-states, he proceeds to manufacture an uninterrupted civilisational genealogy in which the builders of the Parthenon somehow become the intellectual ancestors of European cathedral architects, Renaissance artists, astronomers, colonial conquerors and, eventually, American astronauts. The geographical distances, historical ruptures, religious transformations and intellectual contributions of other civilisations simply disappear. Michelangelo becomes the reincarnation of ancient sculpture, Copernicus the successor of Greek cosmology, Columbus the heir to an allegedly unique Western appetite for discovery, and Cortés the spiritual descendant of Alexander and Caesar. All roads lead conveniently to Washington, where this remarkable procession of conquerors, philosophers and architects supposedly reaches its modern fulfilment. This is not historical continuity. It is civilisational identity theft on a monumental scale, performed by a politician who confuses the selective arrangement of famous names with an understanding of history. Rubio has constructed a family tree in which everyone he admires is related, everyone he wishes to exclude has been removed, and the entire inheritance belongs to the United States (Rubio, 2026).

 

His treatment of European architecture exposes the intellectual bankruptcy of this method particularly well. According to Rubio, the men who built the Parthenon were succeeded by those who raised the cathedrals of Milan, Cologne and Florence. One might reasonably ask what architectural evidence establishes this supposed succession. The Parthenon was a fifth-century BCE temple constructed within the religious, political and architectural traditions of Athens. The great European cathedrals emerged many centuries later within Christian societies whose engineering practices developed through a complex combination of Roman building traditions, Byzantine techniques, medieval experimentation and exchanges of knowledge extending across the Mediterranean and western Asia. Gothic architecture, in particular, developed distinctive structural systems involving pointed arches, ribbed vaults and flying buttresses that cannot simply be described as the continuation of classical Athenian temple construction. Jean Bony's scholarly examination of medieval Gothic architecture demonstrates the originality and complexity of those developments (Bony, 1983). Rubio nevertheless treats the mere existence of monumental buildings in different centuries as proof that their architects belonged to an unbroken civilisation sharing some mysterious hereditary impulse to build upwards. Apparently, whenever Europeans erect a monumental structure, the credit must ultimately return to Athens, regardless of the actual engineering history.

 

The reference to Florence is especially unfortunate for him. In my study The Construction of Florence's Famous Dome Based on Eleventh-Century Iranian Knowledge and Technology, I examined the architectural parallels between the celebrated dome of Santa Maria del Fiore and earlier Iranian achievements in masonry construction, particularly the dome-building traditions associated with Isfahan, Ardestan and Soltaniyeh. The importance of those comparisons is not an invention of contemporary Iranian nationalism. As early as 1972, the Italian architectural historian Piero Sanpaolesi published a detailed comparative study of Brunelleschi's Florentine dome and the mausoleum of Öljaitü at Soltaniyeh, examining their structural and formal relationships (Sanpaolesi, 1972; Suren-Pahlav, 2020). The double-shell dome of Soltaniyeh, constructed in the early fourteenth century, preceded Brunelleschi's celebrated Florentine achievement. Iranian builders had also developed sophisticated methods of brick arrangement and self-supporting dome construction considerably earlier. The Friday Mosque at Ardestan, dating to approximately 1088 CE, provides an important example of complex spiralling brickwork, a technique discussed in modern structural research. Brunelleschi's own dome employed a different, single-spiral herringbone arrangement, and the precise extent of direct Iranian influence remains a matter of scholarly investigation. That distinction should be maintained. What cannot be maintained is Rubio's fiction that Europe's architectural genius emerged through an exclusive transmission from the Parthenon, untouched by the technological achievements of civilisations beyond his imaginary Western frontier.

 

The irony could scarcely be greater. Rubio chooses Florence as an illustration of an exclusively Western architectural inheritance, apparently unaware that the engineering history of its most celebrated monument has long generated scholarly comparisons with Iranian architecture. The question of whether Brunelleschi personally borrowed particular techniques from Iranian builders is not conclusively settled, but the existence of earlier Iranian structural precedents and the circulation of architectural knowledge across Eurasia are legitimate subjects of historical scholarship. Recent research continues to investigate those relationships and the technical exchanges connecting Iranian and European building traditions. To acknowledge them does not diminish Brunelleschi's achievement. It restores the wider intellectual and technological context within which such achievements become intelligible. Rubio's approach does precisely the opposite: it places a European monument at the summit of civilisation while rendering invisible the architectural traditions against which its innovations can be examined. He celebrates the finished dome but shows little curiosity about the history of the knowledge that made monumental masonry construction possible.

 

The same distortion governs his account of astronomy. Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton are assembled into another supposedly continuous intellectual procession, with ancient Greek-speaking philosophers serving as the original source of everything that followed. Their scientific achievements were undoubtedly substantial, and the development of European mathematical astronomy owed much to earlier Greek-language scholarship. But Rubio's genealogy collapses the moment one restores the Iranian and other non-European intellectual traditions that contributed to the history of astronomical theory. Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, the Iranian mathematician and astronomer who directed the celebrated observatory at Maragha in the thirteenth century, developed mathematical approaches to planetary motion that challenged deficiencies in inherited Ptolemaic models. The mathematical device subsequently known as the Ṭūsī couple also appears in Copernican astronomy. Historians continue to debate the precise channels through which Copernicus may have encountered comparable mathematical constructions, and similarity alone does not establish direct borrowing. Yet F. Jamil Ragep's examination of Copernicus and his predecessors demonstrates that the relationship between later European astronomy and developments within the Arabic-writing scholarly world cannot simply be dismissed (Ragep, 2007). Iranian scholars were not passive custodians of Greek intellectual property, patiently preserving knowledge until Europeans returned to reclaim it. They subjected inherited theories to criticism, devised alternatives and contributed original mathematical ideas.

 

Rubio's mistake is not that he recognises Greek contributions to European astronomy. It is that he treats those contributions as exclusive ownership of the entire subsequent history of scientific thought. A civilisation does not acquire permanent title to every discovery made by later generations who studied, criticised or modified its intellectual achievements. Nor does an Iranian astronomer become intellectually Greek merely because he investigated problems first formulated in surviving Greek-language treatises. The development of knowledge is not an hereditary monarchy in which the original claimant's descendants inherit everything accomplished by those who follow. If Rubio insists that modern science is Western because European scholars inherited Greek knowledge, then intellectual consistency requires him to acknowledge the Iranian, Indian and other scientific traditions whose work also entered that inheritance. His argument cannot accommodate this elementary historical reality because the admission would destroy the fiction of Western intellectual self-sufficiency upon which his entire speech depends.

 

But the most revealing transformation comes when Rubio moves from astronomy and architecture to overseas conquest. He declares that the same hunger for knowledge inspired Magellan's expedition, Columbus's supposed discovery of the Americas and Apollo 11's journey to the Moon. Even here, the basic historical details resist his sentimental account. Ferdinand Magellan commanded the expedition that began the first circumnavigation of the globe, but he did not complete the voyage; he was killed in the Philippines in 1521. The surviving expedition returned to Spain under Juan Sebastián Elcano in 1522, a history in which the contributions of sailors and other participants have frequently been obscured by the fame of the expedition's original commander (Kelsey, 2016). Columbus, meanwhile, did not discover an uninhabited continent. He reached lands already populated by established societies possessing their own political systems, economies, technologies and histories. His voyages were momentous in connecting the Atlantic worlds through sustained European expansion, but to describe them simply as the discovery of America is to reproduce the perspective of arriving Europeans while disregarding the existence of those who were already there.

 

The comparison with Apollo 11 is particularly dishonest in its implications. The achievement of landing human beings on the Moon deserves recognition as an extraordinary accomplishment of science, engineering and human organisation. Its astronauts did not, however, encounter an inhabited world, overthrow existing governments, enslave its population or impose a foreign sovereign upon its inhabitants. To place the Moon landing and the conquest of the Americas within the same uncomplicated narrative of civilisational progress is to obliterate the distinction between exploration and domination. The ability to reach a distant destination tells us nothing, by itself, about the morality of what is done upon arrival. Rubio prefers to celebrate the journey while remaining conspicuously silent about its victims.

 

His selection of Cortés removes any remaining doubt about the historical morality he wishes to celebrate. Rubio names Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne and Cortés as successive embodiments of a common civilisational ambition, apparently expecting his audience to regard the association as a compliment. Alexander III of Macedon, glorified by posterity as ‘the Great’, built his empire through a reign of terror marked by massacres, mass enslavement and the destruction of cities on a scale the ancient world had not witnessed since the fall of the Assyrian Empire. Ancient accounts report approximately 6,000 killed and 30,000 enslaved at Thebes in 335 BCE; some 8,000 killed at Tyre in 332 BCE, where Quintus Curtius Rufus also describes the crucifixion of 2,000 surviving defenders; and the slaughter of Gaza's male inhabitants following its capture that same year, with women and children sold into slavery. His subsequent campaigns across the former Persian Empire and into India inflicted further devastation. Although the overall death toll remains impossible to establish reliably, the title ‘the Great’ has endured far more prominently than the suffering of those subjected to his conquests (Arrian, 1976; Curtius Rufus, 1946; Bosworth).

 

Julius Caesar, revered as one of the great figures of Roman and Western history, conducted campaigns of conquest in Gaul and military invasions of Britain that involved massacres, mass enslavement and the destruction of entire communities. Plutarch attributed one million deaths and another million captives to his campaigns in Gaul, figures that cannot be independently verified but nevertheless reflect the extraordinary scale of violence associated with Caesar's expansion of Roman domination (Plutarch, 1919; Caesar, 1869; Goldsworthy, 2006). Charlemagne, celebrated in European historical tradition as a founding figure of Western civilisation, waged more than three decades of wars against the Saxons, imposed Christianity through military conquest and coercion, and reportedly ordered the execution of 4,500 captives at Verden in 782. The precise death toll of his campaigns remains unknown, but the violence of his imperial expansion stands in stark contrast to his later glorification as a civilisational hero (Collins, 1998; Barbero, 2004). Hernán Cortés's conquest of the Mexican Empire involved massacres, the destruction of Tenochtitlan and the deaths of tens of thousands of Indigenous people, while the colonial order established in its aftermath contributed to a demographic catastrophe that ultimately claimed millions of lives (Townsend, 2019; Hassig, 1994; Restall, 2003).

 

What, precisely, is the moral achievement being celebrated? The conquest of another people's homeland? The destruction of their political institutions? The plunder of their wealth? The slaughter and enslavement of their populations? Or is the conqueror's greatest virtue simply that he succeeded, regardless of the human suffering his victory inflicted? If conquest itself is the measure of greatness, then history's most ruthless tyrants become its greatest heroes. Yet, these events occurred in different historical circumstances and cannot be reduced to one identical form of conquest. Nevertheless, what unites Rubio's chosen examples is his admiration for the acquisition of power through military force, accompanied by an extraordinary reluctance to consider those who were subjected to it. This admiration is hardly surprising, given that the United States, as the world's first and perhaps last super-terrorist state, sees its own reflection in history's greatest tyrants.  After all, tyrants have always celebrated and modelled themselves on the tyrants of history.

 

Rubio cannot, however, evade this fundamental moral question by appealing to the courage or ambition of the individuals involved. A conqueror may possess courage, intelligence and exceptional organisational ability while employing those qualities in the service of destructive or unlawful objectives. To recognise the skill required for military conquest is not to grant the conqueror moral legitimacy. Nor does the invocation of Christianity transform colonial domination into an act of spiritual generosity. Cortés operated within a Spanish colonial enterprise in which religious conversion, political subjugation and the pursuit of wealth were closely intertwined. Rubio has dressed the conqueror in the language of civilisation and then invited his audience to admire the costume rather than examine the bloodstained history beneath it. That he should do so while speaking as the chief diplomat of a contemporary military superpower gives the historical selection an unmistakable political significance.

 

Then comes the sentence that exposes the ideological foundation of the entire performance: America, Rubio declares, was an ‘open and wild land’ awaiting the revival of Western imagination and ambition. One struggles to imagine a more revealing description of settler colonialism. Open to whom? Wild by whose standards? The territories that became the United States were not vacant landscapes awaiting the arrival of Europeans equipped with the civilising virtues of Athens and Rome. They were inhabited by Indigenous peoples whose histories extended across millennia and whose societies possessed established political institutions, territorial relationships, agricultural systems, commercial networks and cultural traditions. The land became available for the expansion of the American republic through colonisation, coercive treaties, military campaigns, forced removals and the dispossession of its existing inhabitants. Jeffrey Ostler has documented how American territorial expansion depended upon state-supported violence against Indigenous nations, while Patrick Wolfe's analysis of settler colonialism identifies the acquisition of Indigenous land and elimination of Indigenous territorial presence as fundamental features of the settler-colonial project (Ostler, 2019; Wolfe, 2006).

 

Rubio's language performs the familiar ideological function of making the inhabitants disappear before the settlers arrive. Once the land has been declared open and wild, conquest can be renamed settlement, dispossession becomes development and the destruction of Indigenous sovereignty is transformed into the triumphant expansion of a supposedly superior civilisation. His ‘American frontier spirit’ is the language through which the coloniser congratulates himself for occupying another people's homeland. The extraordinary achievements of the United States in industry, science, technology and political organisation are historical realities, but they do not alter the manner in which its continental territory was acquired. American history did not begin on an empty shore, and the political institutions of its Indigenous inhabitants were not extinguished merely because Rubio finds their existence inconvenient to his account of national greatness.

 

What makes the passage especially revealing is Rubio's boast that an infant seaboard republic became a continental empire through the inherited spirit of Athens and Rome. He is unusually candid about the imperial result, even while refusing to acknowledge the human cost. The republic did not simply expand across an empty continent through an irresistible cultural impulse towards discovery. Its governments, armed forces and settlers progressively displaced existing nations, asserted jurisdiction over their territories and incorporated their lands into an expanding American state. The transformation from a coastal republic into a continental power was a political and military process, not a mystical reawakening of ancient Greek ambition. By tracing it directly to Athens and Rome, Rubio effectively presents American territorial expansion as the natural fulfilment of Western history. The dispossession of Indigenous America becomes, in his telling, not an event requiring moral scrutiny but an achievement through which civilisation supposedly recovered its ancient destiny.

 

His invented genealogy reaches absurdity when he declares that the greatest Americans were born intellectually in Athens, formed by Rome, baptised in Christendom, hardened in medieval Europe and endowed with the English genius for liberty. The United States is a society shaped by populations with diverse geographical, linguistic, religious and cultural origins, including Indigenous peoples whose ancestors inhabited the continent long before European colonisation, Africans transported through slavery and migrants from across the world. Its achievements cannot be honestly reduced to the inheritance of one privileged European lineage. Even the English political traditions Rubio celebrates developed through internal conflicts over sovereignty, representation, religion and individual liberty, rather than emerging as the uninterrupted expression of an ancient civilisational character. His formulation is not a historical account of how American society developed. It is an attempt to assign a collective identity to that society while treating the contributions of those outside his preferred ancestry as incidental.

 

The contradiction is especially striking because Rubio's American civilisation apparently has room for European conquerors but remarkably little room for the peoples whose lands they conquered. Cortés is welcomed into the family; the Indigenous inhabitants of the Americas are written out of its history. Roman imperial expansion becomes a source of pride; the societies subjected to that expansion vanish into the background. The achievements of Iranian architects and mathematicians can be absorbed into European intellectual development without their origins being acknowledged, while the European figures who inherited or adapted that knowledge are presented as evidence of Western exceptionalism. Rubio's civilisation is not a historical community. It is a selective register of approved ancestors, maintained by excluding everyone whose existence would complicate the claim of exclusive ownership.

 

The final turn in his argument is therefore particularly cynical. Having celebrated Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne and Cortés, and having openly praised the transformation of the American republic into a continental empire, Rubio suddenly announces that the civilisation he represents faces threats comparable to those confronting the ancient world. The descendants of conquerors become the endangered. The inheritors of imperial expansion become the potential victims of history. Yet he does not identify, in this passage, the particular threats whose existence supposedly justifies the comparison, nor does he explain how their nature, scale and immediacy relate to the military capabilities of the United States and its allies. The manoeuvre is unmistakable: glorify conquest as the highest expression of civilisation, then invoke the fear of being conquered to legitimise the continued exercise of power.

 

This does not mean that the United States faces no genuine security threats, or that its population possesses no right to defence. It means that such threats must be identified, evidenced and assessed independently of the mythological genealogy Rubio has constructed. The existence of an adversary does not automatically make every American military action defensive, just as the possession of a superior army does not confer the right to determine another nation's political future. A government cannot establish the legitimacy of its present conduct by reciting the names of ancient conquerors and then announcing that civilisation is in danger. The lawfulness of military force and the moral responsibility of those who employ it depend upon the circumstances of each action, not upon the supposed virtues of Alexander or the architectural achievements of the Parthenon.

 

What Rubio has accomplished is a revealing reversal of historical roles. The conqueror is celebrated as a civilisational pioneer; the colonised disappear from the record; the expansion of American power is described as the fulfilment of Western destiny; and when the modern world resists the preservation of that hierarchy, the power that has spent centuries extending its reach presents itself as the threatened party. Aggression can thus be linguistically converted into self-defence, domination into leadership and the preservation of imperial privilege into the protection of civilisation. It is not necessary to deny the achievements of European science, art or exploration to expose this distortion. The question is why those achievements are repeatedly recruited to excuse conduct that possesses no necessary moral connection to them.

 

Rubio's speech began with a temple and has now arrived at an empire. The journey is entirely deliberate in its rhetorical effect. Architecture establishes an illustrious ancestry; science supplies intellectual superiority; conquest demonstrates irresistible ambition; American territorial expansion completes the historical inheritance; and the warning of approaching danger introduces the demand that this supposedly exceptional civilisation must once again defend its position. What disappears is the historical experience of everyone subjected to the ambitions being celebrated.

 

There is something almost obscene about invoking Cortés as a symbol of civilisation and then expecting the audience to fear for the safety of his supposed political descendants. The peoples who confronted colonial conquest knew perfectly well what the arrival of armed men claiming a superior civilisation could mean. They did not experience it as the flowering of human liberty.

 

Rubio's historical argument is therefore exposed at its point of greatest political usefulness. It is not enough for him that the United States should possess extraordinary military, economic and technological capabilities. He wishes those capabilities to appear as the rightful inheritance of a civilisation whose alleged superiority stretches back to antiquity. If that fiction is accepted, the international conduct of Washington becomes less a matter of legal and moral judgement than the fulfilment of a historical mission. Its adversaries can then be portrayed not merely as political opponents but as threats to civilisation itself.

 

The fraud lies in turning the history of conquest into a source of moral entitlement, while treating resistance to domination as evidence that the conqueror is under threat. Rubio has not demonstrated that America is the heir to the civilisation of Athens. He has demonstrated how readily the achievements of the dead can be conscripted into the political ambitions of the living. His heroes conquered other people's lands; his republic expanded through the dispossession of Indigenous nations; and now, standing before the Parthenon, he asks the world to regard the inheritors of that history as civilisation's endangered guardians. The transformation would be extraordinary were it not so familiar: the empire writes itself into the role of victim, and calls the resulting fiction history.

 

Rubio continues with his audacious remarks, reaching the most hilariously comical part of his speech: Having celebrated military strength and the unapologetic pursuit of national power, Rubio then abruptly adopts the language of a world besieged by threats. ‘National interests did not vanish in the face of international institutions’, he observes, before declaring: ‘War did not disappear simply because we preferred peace.’ He then announces, with an extraordinary absence of historical self-awareness: ‘And now, there is war again.’ Around this supposedly unwelcome development, he gathers the familiar vocabulary of ‘vulnerability, aggression, terrorism’, alongside intensifying competition for territory, resources, markets and power. What makes this declaration so revealing is not its acknowledgement that armed conflict persists, but the remarkable ease with which Rubio presents the United States as a disappointed advocate of peace while leaving its own record of military intervention conspicuously outside the discussion.

 

His transformation of American aggression into American victimhood now reaches a level of political absurdity that would be almost entertaining were its consequences not measured in destroyed countries and human lives. Having celebrated conquest, military supremacy and the unapologetic pursuit of national power, he suddenly announces that war has returned, that other nations continue to arm themselves and that the world is once again threatened by aggression and terrorism. One might reasonably wonder where the United States was while all this supposedly happened. Was Washington an innocent spectator, sitting peacefully on the sidelines while the rest of humanity conspired to disturb international tranquillity? Did American aircraft carriers spend the preceding decades promoting world peace through charitable visits? Were the invasions, bombardments, covert operations and military interventions conducted under successive American administrations merely unfortunate misunderstandings for which nobody in Washington bears responsibility? Rubio has accomplished an extraordinary rhetorical manoeuvre: the state that has repeatedly projected military force across the world is presented as the reluctant victim of a dangerous international environment, while the nations subjected to that force are quietly repositioned among the threats from which civilisation must be protected (Rubio, 2026).

 

The deception is concentrated in his deceptively simple observation that ‘war did not disappear simply because we preferred peace’. Who, precisely, is this peace-loving ‘we’? The United States has maintained an extensive record of overseas military intervention throughout its existence, particularly since the Second World War. Sidita Kushi and Monica Duffy Toft's systematic study identifies almost four hundred American military interventions between 1776 and 2019, approximately half of which occurred between 1950 and 2019, with more than a quarter taking place after the Cold War (Kushi and Toft, 2023). These were not four hundred separate declared wars, nor were their circumstances and legal justifications identical. But the findings demonstrate that military intervention has been a persistent instrument of American foreign policy, not an occasional departure from an otherwise uninterrupted commitment to peace. Rubio speaks as though Washington reluctantly discovered that war still existed, when the historical record shows that successive American governments had repeatedly treated armed intervention as an available instrument of statecraft. His formulation does not simply omit that record. It reverses the relationship between action and consequence, presenting the exercise of American power as an unfortunate response to a violent world rather than recognising that American decisions have themselves contributed to the conditions of international insecurity.

 

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 remains an especially instructive example of the difference between proclaimed peaceful intentions and military conduct. The United States and its principal allies invaded a sovereign country on the basis of claims concerning weapons of mass destruction that proved unfounded. The consequences included extensive destruction, political destabilisation, years of insurgency and catastrophic civilian suffering. Kofi Annan, then Secretary-General of the United Nations, explicitly stated in September 2004 that the invasion was not in conformity with the UN Charter and, when pressed, described it as illegal. The United Nations subsequently reaffirmed that this assessment represented his established position rather than a spontaneous rhetorical departure (United Nations, 2004). The governments responsible defended their legal and strategic arguments, but the absence of Security Council authorisation and the failure of the central weapons claims remain fundamental to understanding the intervention. Yet Rubio's version of international affairs leaves scarcely any room for such episodes. War simply reappears, as though generated by some external malignancy, while the governments that initiated particular wars are allowed to disappear from the account.

 

The intellectual mechanism is the one I examined in When the Mask is Off: The United States, War, Terrorism and Genocide Without Its Alibi. American military power has repeatedly been presented through vocabularies of security, liberation, humanitarian necessity and international responsibility, even when the resulting conduct has raised grave legal and moral questions. The language does not necessarily establish that every professed security concern was fabricated, or that every intervention had the same objective. Its political function, however, deserves scrutiny. It can transform a decision to employ force into an apparent obligation reluctantly accepted, while portraying those who resist or retaliate as the principal source of violence. Under the Trump administration, I argued, the increasingly explicit celebration and trivialisation of destructive power has exposed tensions within that familiar justificatory language (Suren-Pahlav, 2026). Rubio's speech supplies an instructive example of its more respectable diplomatic form: aggression becomes something committed by others; American force becomes responsibility; and the suffering produced by American operations is detached from the political decisions that produced it.

 

The present war against Iran exposes the contradiction with particular clarity. On 28 February 2026, American and Israeli forces launched military strikes against Iran, followed by Iranian retaliation across the region. The United Nations Secretary-General condemned the escalation, expressly identified the initial use of force by the United States and Israel, and called upon all parties to respect their obligations under international law (United Nations Secretary-General, 2026). This sequence is not a matter of competing civilisational mythology. It is part of the documented chronology of the conflict. The legality of particular military operations depends upon the applicable rules governing the use of force, the evidence advanced to justify them and the circumstances in which they occurred. Neither concern about the Islamic regime's conduct nor the invocation of national security automatically supplies an exemption from the prohibition upon aggression contained in Article 2(4) of the UN Charter (United Nations, 1945). Iranian retaliatory attacks, in turn, remain subject to legal requirements of their own. Yet Rubio discusses the return of aggression while representing an administration that participated directly in initiating the current war against Iran. The identity of the initiating parties has not vanished from the documentary record merely because it has vanished from his speech.

 

The contradiction becomes considerably more disturbing when compared with the public language of those directing the American military campaign. In March 2026, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth publicly used the expression ‘no quarter’ while discussing operations against Iran. The phrase possesses a specific significance under the laws of armed conflict, referring to the denial of an opportunity to surrender. Senator Mark Kelly, a former naval aviator, formally challenged Hegseth over the statement, warning that such language could suggest conduct expressly prohibited under international law and requesting clarification of the administration's commitment to lawful military operations (Kelly, 2026). The statement alone does not establish that American forces were ordered to kill surrendering combatants, but its use by the civilian head of the military was sufficiently serious to warrant a formal challenge. Shortly afterwards, Trump reportedly told NBC News that American forces might strike Iran's Kharg Island again ‘just for fun’, having already attacked military facilities there (Welker and Marquez, 2026). What conception of peace permits a president to discuss further bombardment as an amusement, while his Secretary of State stands before the world lamenting that other nations continue to embrace violence? The issue is not merely one of offensive language. It concerns the casual treatment of military destruction by officials entrusted with weapons whose use carries profound human and legal consequences.

 

Rubio's invocation of ‘terrorism’ is equally revealing for what it leaves undefined. Terrorism is a serious category of political violence, and attacks deliberately directed against civilians must be condemned regardless of the identity or professed cause of those responsible. But the legal analysis of state military conduct must also address aggression, unlawful attacks, indiscriminate violence and violations of the laws of armed conflict. Those distinctions matter because political violence cannot be evaluated solely according to whether its perpetrator wears a uniform or possesses the diplomatic protection of a powerful government. As I argued in When the Mask is Off, the selective application of moral language risks creating a hierarchy in which violence committed by declared enemies is readily condemned, while comparable questions concerning state violence are displaced into the language of operational necessity or regrettable collateral damage (Suren-Pahlav, 2026). The argument is not that every military operation is terrorism, nor that legal categories should be abolished for rhetorical convenience. It is that the civilian subjected to unlawful violence does not suffer less because the weapon was launched by a recognised state rather than a non-state organisation. Rubio's invocation of terrorism carries little analytical weight unless he is prepared to confront the conduct of American forces and their allies with the same seriousness he demands when condemning their adversaries.

 

His references to competition over territory, energy, resources, markets and power expose another omission. The United States is not an uninterested guardian standing above these struggles. It participates in them as a major military, financial and economic power, exercising influence through alliances, sanctions, commercial restrictions, military deployments and control over significant international networks. Its interests in energy security and regional influence have repeatedly shaped its policies in the Middle East. Other governments possess strategic ambitions of their own, and some have committed grave violations of international law. Russia's invasion of Ukraine, for example, cannot be excused by reference to American conduct elsewhere. But acknowledging the misconduct of other states does not absolve Washington of responsibility for its own decisions. International law cannot function as a code of obedience for America's adversaries and a collection of optional recommendations for America itself. The principle of sovereign equality loses its meaning if the strongest states may invoke it whenever they feel threatened while disregarding its constraints when seeking to impose their own political preferences.

 

What makes Rubio's passage particularly dishonest is its grammar of innocence. There is war ‘again’. There is aggression ‘again’. There are threats and attacks ‘again’. The passive, impersonal construction allows him to describe a violent international environment without identifying the decisions and actors that have contributed to it. A war becomes a condition to be endured rather than an event initiated through identifiable acts of state policy. The language relieves its audience of the uncomfortable obligation to distinguish the aggressor from the attacked, the decision to begin military operations from the consequences that follow, and genuine self-defence from the unilateral assertion of geopolitical entitlement. It also allows Washington to occupy the privileged position of observer, judge and potential enforcer in conflicts in which it may itself be directly involved.

 

Rubio is correct that national interests have not disappeared and that international institutions cannot abolish war merely by expressing a preference for peace. The United Nations Charter was not drafted on the assumption that governments would suddenly become incapable of aggression. It was adopted precisely because the catastrophic experience of war demonstrated the necessity of legal restraints upon the use of force. The distinction is fundamental. The purpose of international law is not to pretend that power politics no longer exists, but to establish obligations that constrain how states may pursue their interests. Rubio's observation that other countries continue to compete for power does not provide an argument for exempting the United States from those obligations. On the contrary, the greater a state's military capability, the more consequential its willingness to respect legal restraint becomes.

 

There is therefore a much simpler question to put to the Secretary of State than the grand philosophical questions he has been posing before the Acropolis. When American and Israeli aircraft attacked Iran on 28 February, was that an example of war returning to disturb America's peace, or was it a military decision made by the governments that ordered the strikes? When Washington invaded Iraq in 2003, was that aggression an unfortunate discovery of a violent international order, or an intervention initiated by identifiable political authorities? And when the American president publicly contemplated additional bombardment of Iranian territory ‘just for fun’, was he demonstrating the peace-loving disposition Rubio attributes to his regime?

 

Rubio wants the world to contemplate aggression without identifying the aggressor, war without examining who began it, and terrorism without submitting the conduct of powerful states to equivalent moral scrutiny. His account allows the United States to participate in military violence and subsequently describe the resulting disorder as proof that the world has become more dangerous. It is a convenient political arrangement, but a profoundly inadequate account of international affairs. The victims of military intervention do not have the luxury of forgetting who launched the missiles merely because the Secretary of State has chosen to speak in abstractions.

 

Rubio then returns to the defence of national sovereignty, insisting that the purpose of international alliances is ‘not to abolish the sovereignty of the nations that constitute them; it is to defend them’. Seeking historical legitimacy for this argument, he invokes the Greek struggle against Ottoman rule: ‘When Greece rose in 1821 to recover its independence after centuries of Ottoman rule, Americans recognized something familiar in that struggle.’ He subsequently cites Daniel Webster's celebrated address concerning the Greek Revolution, recalling the American statesman's acknowledgement that ‘we, like the rest of mankind, are greatly her debtors’. Yet beneath this apparently straightforward tribute lies another historical sleight of hand.

 

In another remarkable feat of historical invention, having manufactured an imaginary civilisation stretching uninterrupted from ancient Athens to modern Washington, Rubio declares that Greece rose in 1821 to ‘recover its independence after centuries of Ottoman rule’. Recover whose independence, exactly? The sovereign state that today bears the name Greece did not exist before the nineteenth century. There was no unified Greek nation-state whose independence had been suspended by the Ottomans and was simply restored by revolution. What emerged from the uprising of 1821 was a new political entity, subsequently recognised and constituted within the European state system through negotiations involving Britain, France, Russia and the Ottoman Empire. Rubio has confused the creation of a modern nation-state with the restoration of an ancient country that never existed in the political form he attributes to it. It is a convenient historical sleight of hand, allowing him to present the Greek kingdom founded in the nineteenth century as the rebirth of a sovereign national entity supposedly stretching back to Pericles, when the intervening two millennia tell a rather different story (Clogg, 2013; Gourgouris, 1996).

 

The elementary chronology should not require explaining to an American Secretary of State who has travelled to Athens to lecture the world on history. In antiquity, the territories subsequently incorporated into modern Greece contained independent city-states, regional federations, monarchies and communities with frequently incompatible political interests. Athens, Sparta, Corinth and Thebes were not administrative divisions of a unified Greek sovereign state. They possessed their own institutions, pursued competing foreign policies and regularly fought one another. The rise of Macedonian power under Philip II and Alexander III subjected much of the Greek-speaking political world to Macedonian hegemony, although Sparta remained outside the League of Corinth and the degree of control over individual communities varied. Following Alexander's death, the region experienced successive struggles involving the Antigonid dynasty, rival Hellenistic powers and Greek federal leagues. Rome's defeat of the Achaean League and destruction of Corinth in 146 BCE marked a decisive extension of Roman domination, although Roman political and provincial arrangements developed over subsequent decades. None of these developments involved the disappearance of a previously unified Greek nation-state, because such a state had never existed. The continuity Rubio assumes is precisely what the historical record does not establish: political institutions, sovereign authority and collective identities changed repeatedly, while the existence of shared language and cultural traditions did not eliminate those divisions.

 

Nor does the subsequent history support his convenient narrative. The territories of present-day Greece formed part of the Roman Empire and, following the increasing administrative separation of its eastern and western regions, remained within the eastern Roman polity conventionally described by modern historians as Byzantium. Constantine established Constantinople as an imperial capital in 330 CE, although the eastern empire did not suddenly become a new sovereign country called Greece. Its inhabitants generally understood themselves as Romans, and its emperors claimed Roman political legitimacy. Greek became the dominant language of much of the eastern imperial administration and intellectual life, but linguistic predominance did not transform the empire into the modern Greek nation-state projected backwards by nineteenth-century nationalism. Anthony Kaldellis has demonstrated the importance of the Roman identity maintained by the Greek-speaking inhabitants of the eastern empire, an identity that much modern historiography has obscured by retrospectively imposing national categories upon a very different political world (Kaldellis, 2019). Rubio appropriates the eastern Roman past when it suits his narrative of Western inheritance, while ignoring its political identity whenever that identity obstructs his fiction of an eternal Greece.

 

His account of Ottoman rule is similarly compressed into a nationalist formula that conceals several centuries of political complexity. Ottoman power expanded into the southern Balkans during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with the conquest of Thessaloniki in 1430, Constantinople in 1453, Athens in 1456–1458 and the remaining Byzantine territories of the Morea in 1460. The process was neither a single conquest of an already unified Greece nor the uniform subjugation of every territory subsequently incorporated into the modern state. Venetian, Ottoman and other jurisdictions coexisted and competed across the Aegean and Ionian worlds, while Crete, for instance, remained under Venetian rule until its conquest by the Ottomans in the seventeenth century. To speak loosely of centuries of Ottoman sovereignty over much of the region is legitimate; to imply that the Ottomans extinguished an independent Greek nation-state which had previously governed the same territory is historically misleading. The modern independence movement sought liberation from Ottoman sovereignty, but it did not resurrect an ancient state with continuous political institutions (Clogg, 2013).

 

The populations living within the Ottoman world also possessed identities considerably more complicated than Rubio's imagined succession of national generations. Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians preserved and developed their language, religious traditions and literary culture throughout the Ottoman centuries. Other communities spoke Albanian, Turkish, Vlach or Slavonic languages, and religious affiliation did not always correspond to the national classifications subsequently imposed upon them. Greek-speaking Phanariot elites served the Ottoman government as diplomatic interpreters, administrators and rulers of the Danubian principalities, demonstrating that the relationship between Ottoman sovereignty and Greek-speaking populations cannot be reduced to perpetual national confrontation. Turkish-speaking Orthodox communities also existed, especially among the Karamanlides of Anatolia, whose religious identity and linguistic practices resist any simplistic equation between language, ancestry and political allegiance. But this complexity does not justify the opposite fiction that the majority of the population of present-day Greece had forgotten how to speak Greek and required the language to be resurrected in the nineteenth century. Greek remained a living language, and the linguistic debates accompanying nation-building concerned its standardisation, literary form and relationship to other languages, not its recovery from total extinction. Peter Mackridge's study of the Greek language controversy establishes how the modern national language was shaped through political and intellectual struggles extending from the eighteenth century into the twentieth (Mackridge, 2009).

 

What was constructed in the nineteenth century was therefore not the Greek language or an entirely fictitious population, but a modern sovereign state and an official national identity organised around particular interpretations of the past. This distinction is fundamental. It neither diminishes the genuine suffering associated with Ottoman rule nor invalidates the aspirations of those who fought for independence. The revolutionaries of 1821 were not imaginary figures created by European diplomats, and their struggle cannot honestly be dismissed as a theatrical performance staged by foreign powers. They formed political institutions, fought substantial military campaigns and sought independence in circumstances involving internal divisions, competing regional interests and considerable violence. The historical question is how that revolutionary project became an internationally recognised kingdom, and how its modern national identity was subsequently organised around an idealised relationship with classical antiquity. Stathis Gourgouris has examined the role of European Enlightenment thought and Philhellenism in the intellectual construction of modern Greece, while Yannis Hamilakis has demonstrated how archaeology and classical monuments became central to the production of the modern nation's collective imagination (Gourgouris, 1996; Hamilakis, 2007). The modern Greek state did not emerge from the marble of the Parthenon. It emerged from a nineteenth-century revolution, European diplomacy and the political construction of a national community.

 

Indeed, the decisive international agreements make a mockery of Rubio's suggestion that an ancient national sovereignty simply reappeared after a lengthy interruption. Britain, France and Russia intervened in the conflict, their combined fleets destroying the Ottoman-Egyptian fleet at Navarino in October 1827. The London Protocol of 3 February 1830 provided the first formal international recognition of Greece as an entirely independent state. In May 1832, the three protecting powers concluded an agreement with Bavaria establishing a hereditary Greek monarchy under Otto, the seventeen-year-old son of King Ludwig I of Bavaria, while the subsequent Treaty of Constantinople settled important questions concerning Ottoman recognition and the new state's frontiers (Hellenic Ministry of Foreign Affairs, n.d.). The architects of the new kingdom's constitutional and dynastic arrangements were therefore not the resurrected citizens of Periclean Athens but nineteenth-century European powers negotiating the political settlement of a strategically sensitive region. The supposed recovery of an immemorial Greek sovereignty culminated in the selection of a Bavarian prince by Britain, France and Russia. One searches in vain for the ancient Athenian constitutional principle under which foreign monarchies appoint a German-speaking teenager to rule the descendants of Pericles.

 

The arrangement was all the more revealing because the young king initially governed through a Bavarian regency, whose imported administrators and military personnel exercised substantial influence over the new state's institutions. Otto's accession should not, however, be confused with the absence of Greek leadership before him. Ioannis Kapodistrias, a Corfiot statesman who had previously served as Russian foreign minister, governed the emerging Greek state from 1828 until his assassination in 1831. He was Greek-speaking and was no foreign German prince. The contrast is precisely what makes the historical sequence instructive. A movement seeking self-government produced indigenous revolutionary institutions and leadership, only for its subsequent monarchy to be arranged within a diplomatic framework dominated by Europe's major powers. Greece secured its formal independence from the Ottoman Empire while its dynastic settlement, territorial boundaries and financial arrangements remained heavily conditioned by foreign governments. This was not the restoration of the sovereignty of ancient Athens. It was the creation of a modern kingdom whose birth already exposed the tension between national independence and external political influence.

 

Rubio nevertheless presses Daniel Webster into service as though the American statesman had supplied an early nineteenth-century certificate of authenticity for the very historical mythology now being delivered in Athens. He quotes Webster's famous address to the House of Representatives in January 1824, in which the American politician invoked Greek antiquity, parliamentary debate and the classical architectural elements of the Capitol as reminders of humanity's intellectual debt to the ancient world. The quotation is authentic. What Rubio omits is considerably more revealing than what he reproduces. Webster immediately distinguished his admiration for antiquity from the political purpose of his intervention. He explained that his concern was with ‘the modern, not the ancient; the living, and not the dead’ (Webster, 1830, pp. 241–264). It is difficult to imagine a more damaging qualification to exclude from a speech devoted to transforming modern Greece into the political reincarnation of antiquity.

 

Webster's actual argument concerned the struggle of contemporary people seeking independence and the implications of European great-power politics for the right of nations to govern themselves. He had introduced a resolution concerning the possible appointment of an American agent or commissioner to Greece. His speech examined the conduct of European powers towards the revolutionaries and questioned doctrines of intervention through which powerful monarchies claimed the right to determine the political arrangements of other peoples. Webster was no disinterested modern historian, and his language contained the Philhellenic and Christian assumptions of his own age. Nevertheless, his central concern was the political condition of living people confronting foreign domination, not the mystical transmission of an ancient national essence. Rubio quotes Webster's reverence for Greek antiquity while passing over the distinction Webster himself insisted upon: admiration for ancient monuments does not replace the obligation to consider the sovereignty and political rights of contemporary peoples. The Secretary of State has not merely abbreviated Webster. He has selected the portion that flatters his narrative while omitting the argument that gives the passage its historical purpose.

 

The irony becomes sharper when Webster's discussion of national independence is placed beside Rubio's contemporary foreign-policy language. Webster challenged the assumption that powerful states possessed an unrestricted entitlement to interfere in the political affairs of others. Rubio, by contrast, invokes sovereignty while celebrating defence partnerships, energy arrangements, technology cooperation and the securing of Europe's borders against what he describes as the threat of mass migration. These are legitimate subjects for negotiation between sovereign states, but they are not evidence of historical continuity between ancient Athens and the United States. Their significance lies in present-day strategic interests, not in some inherited obligation supposedly transmitted through classical architecture. The modern relationship between Athens and Washington involves military access, regional security, economic interests and competing calculations about the distribution of power in the eastern Mediterranean. To present those arrangements as the contemporary expression of an ancient civilisational debt is to disguise political interest as historical destiny.

 

Rubio's invocation of sovereignty is particularly selective. He praises institutions and alliances on the grounds that they protect the independence of their member states, an entirely defensible principle when consistently applied. But the historical lesson of Greece's emergence as a modern state is not that national independence is established by appeals to shared civilisation. It is that sovereignty must be negotiated, defended and sometimes wrested from imperial authority, while the interests of external powers can continue to shape political outcomes long after formal independence has been achieved. The states that recognised Greece in 1830 were not indifferent guardians of national freedom. Britain, France and Russia pursued their own strategic interests in the eastern Mediterranean and the future of the Ottoman Empire. Their intervention contributed decisively to create Greece as an independent state, while their subsequent agreements established the framework within which the new monarchy would operate. One may acknowledge the importance of that intervention without pretending that the protecting powers acted outside the political calculations of their age. The colonial practice of carving smaller states and territories out of existing sovereign entities continued across Western Asia, the Caucasus and Central Asia [2].

 

What makes Rubio's appropriation particularly objectionable is his transformation of this complicated history into a simple morality play. Ancient Athens supposedly gave birth to Western liberty; Ottoman rule temporarily interrupted a continuous Greek national existence; America recognised its long-lost civilisational relative; and the modern alliance now embodies the recovery of an eternal historical bond. Each stage depends upon suppressing distinctions that a serious historian would regard as indispensable. Ancient cultural affinity becomes modern political sovereignty. The eastern Roman Empire becomes an unbroken Greek nation. Nineteenth-century state formation becomes national resurrection. European great-power intervention becomes selfless assistance. Webster's appeal on behalf of living revolutionaries becomes a declaration of eternal American civilisational entitlement. The history has not been explained. It has been rearranged until it produces the conclusion Rubio requires.

 

There is, moreover, an obvious difference between acknowledging the achievements of ancient Greek-speaking societies and treating the modern Greek state as their exclusive political continuation. Ancient Athens made substantial contributions to philosophy, drama, political thought and the arts. Those achievements belong to the history of humanity and can be appreciated without inventing a sovereign Greek nation-state extending uninterrupted across twenty-five centuries. Modern Greeks are equally entitled to develop a national identity that draws upon antiquity, Byzantine traditions, Orthodox Christianity and the experience of Ottoman rule. National identities are constructed through history; they are not rendered illegitimate simply because their modern political form has a date of foundation. What deserves criticism is the use of that constructed identity as evidence of an ancient political continuity that did not exist, particularly when an American official converts it into a supposed mandate for contemporary geopolitical alignment.

 

The most revealing aspect of Rubio's argument is therefore not that he admires Greece or wishes to strengthen the American alliance with Athens. Governments form alliances, pursue common interests and commemorate historical relationships. None of this requires the falsification of antiquity. What Rubio wants is something more politically useful: a narrative in which modern American strategic arrangements appear to fulfil obligations inherited from the distant past, removing them from the ordinary realm of political calculation and placing them within the elevated language of civilisational loyalty. The alliance becomes an inheritance rather than a policy choice. Its geopolitical priorities acquire an aura of historical necessity. And the people of modern Greece, whose state emerged through revolution and great-power diplomacy, are invited to see contemporary American leadership as an expression of their supposed ancient destiny.

 

Rubio could have offered a serious account of Greek independence, one that recognised the revolutionaries of 1821, the interests of the European powers, the creation of the new kingdom and the complicated history through which modern national identity took shape. Instead, he has chosen a comforting fiction in which a country that did not previously exist as a unified sovereign nation simply awakens from centuries of Ottoman sleep. His account becomes particularly absurd when the alleged restoration of ancient national independence is examined alongside the appointment of a Bavarian monarch by foreign powers.

 

The final irony is supplied by the American statesman Rubio himself has chosen to quote. Webster distinguished the ancient world from the living political struggles of his own time. Rubio has reversed that distinction, using antiquity to confer legitimacy upon present-day statecraft while obscuring the historical circumstances through which modern Greece actually emerged.

 

Daniel Webster wanted Congress to consider the independence of living people. Marco Rubio wants the dead to authenticate the political ambitions of Washington. Between those two positions lies the difference between historical remembrance and historical exploitation.

 

And finally, Rubio concludes his performance by returning to the proposition upon which his entire speech has rested: that the history of ancient Greece provides modern Western societies with an image of their own inherited identity. ‘The history of Greece shows us an image of ourselves’, he declares, before making his most extravagant assertion: ‘The story of our civilization is the greatest story ever known to man. And it began here, with the first men and women of the West.’ He urges his audience to rediscover among those supposed ancestors ‘the virtues, the courage, and the strength to confront the dangers that we face in our time.’ This final appeal, however, leaves a fundamental historical question unanswered. Which ancestors, which centuries and which examples of their conduct are modern nations expected to regard as the moral foundations of their political existence?

 

Rubio's invitation to the world to rediscover the virtues of its supposed Greek forefathers becomes even more revealing when the history of those forefathers is examined beyond the carefully selected episodes of classical antiquity. If modern Greeks are the uninterrupted inheritors of the ancient heroes he promotes, and if the history of their ancestors is supposed to provide a model for contemporary nations, then surely the centuries during which their territories and communities belonged to the Ottoman Empire deserve consideration. What exactly is Rubio inviting the world to learn from that experience? The virtues of centuries of obedience to an imperial sovereign? Political accommodation with foreign rulers? Or the practical advantages of serving the very imperial establishment that later nationalist mythology would portray as the hereditary enemy of Greek freedom? The question is not intended to disparage populations that lived under Ottoman rule, but to expose the selective absurdity of Rubio's insistence that the conduct of historical forefathers supplies a permanent moral instruction for their supposed descendants.

 

To recall the historical sequence, Ottoman expansion into the southern Balkans began in the fourteenth century, with substantial advances through Thrace during the 1360s and 1370s and into Thessaly towards the end of that century. Constantinople fell in 1453, Athens in 1458, and the remaining Byzantine territories of the Morea in 1460. Ottoman expansion continued across the islands and other territories, although the chronology varied considerably. Crete's principal Venetian stronghold fell in 1669, while most Ionian islands remained under Venetian rather than Ottoman sovereignty. Consequently, some territories incorporated into modern Greece experienced approximately five centuries of Ottoman sovereignty, while others experienced substantially shorter periods or remained outside Ottoman administration altogether (Clogg, 2013; Greene, 2015). What did not exist throughout those centuries was the independent Greek nation-state that Rubio retrospectively imagines waiting to reclaim its ancient sovereignty. The inhabitants of these territories belonged to different political and administrative arrangements, and their historical experiences cannot honestly be compressed into the story of a single nation enduring an uninterrupted occupation before its eventual resurrection in 1821.

 

More inconvenient for Rubio's sentimental account is the fact that Greek-speaking Orthodox populations did not spend those centuries engaged in a continuous war of national liberation. They obediently and subserviently lived under the Ottomans, adopted the Turkish language, negotiated privileges and even attained positions of considerable influence within the Ottoman establishment. Greek-speaking elites served as interpreters, diplomats, administrators and, through the Phanariot families, rulers of the Ottoman Empire's Danubian principalities. The Orthodox patriarchate occupied an institutional position within the Ottoman order, while merchants and other communities participated in economic networks extending across Ottoman territories. Local uprisings and resistance certainly occurred, but these episodes did not constitute an uninterrupted movement for the establishment of a modern Greek national state. Molly Greene's examination of the Ottoman centuries demonstrates the inadequacy of the later nationalist portrayal of this entire period as one unvarying experience of foreign oppression, revealing instead a history of accommodation and participation despite inequality, as well as changing relations between masters and subjects (Greene, 2015).

 

Here, then, lies a rather inconvenient problem for Rubio's doctrine of ancestral virtue. If the supposedly eternal Greek character is to be discovered in the conduct of historical forefathers, why does he select Leonidas and the defenders of Thermopylae while passing over generations of Greek-speaking subjects who acknowledged Ottoman sovereignty and conducted their affairs within its institutions? Were the latter somehow less Greek because they accommodated the realities of imperial power? Did their willingness to serve Ottoman rulers disqualify them from the civilisational inheritance Rubio wishes to celebrate? Or is he suggesting that contemporary nations should imitate their ability to adapt to the authority of a stronger state, even when that authority belonged to an empire whose interests were not their own? The selective celebration of resistance in one century and the disappearance of imperial accommodation across many others reveal the intellectual dishonesty of his approach. Historical ancestry becomes admirable whenever it supplies a convenient example of heroic defiance, but ceases to matter when the same populations' experiences complicate the mythology of permanent national courage and independence.

 

There is, of course, an inherent dishonour in the political accommodation of populations living within powerful imperial systems. Ordinary people are obliged to conduct perpetual rebellions, yet they failed to do so, thereby failing to satisfy the heroic expectations of politicians living centuries later. Having said that, survival, cultural preservation, commercial prosperity and the protection of families are legitimate human concerns; these are altogether different considerations. There is no suggestion that their experience of Ottoman rule should be reduced to slavery. The absurdity belongs to Rubio, who treats the past as though it were an uninterrupted procession of exceptional men demonstrating precisely those virtues that his present political programme requires. He invites the world to learn from historical experience while refusing to acknowledge that all of those experiences contradict his preferred image of an eternally independent, uncompromising and heroic people.

 

The irony is particularly sharp because Rubio elsewhere celebrates the sovereign equality of nations and the virtues of unbreakable loyalty to one's country. For centuries, however, many Greek-speaking inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire owed political allegiance to the Muslim sultans, not to a Greek state that had yet to be created by European powers. Rubio cannot simultaneously insist that historical loyalty supplies a timeless lesson in national virtue and then ignore the centuries during which the loyalties of his chosen ancestral population were directed towards the Ottoman state. If fidelity to one's sovereign is the measure of honour, the Greek-speaking people who served the Ottoman establishment cannot simply be erased because their allegiance embarrasses a modern nationalist narrative.

 

Rubio's final appeal is therefore vulnerable to a question considerably more serious than the ceremonial praise with which he concludes his speech. He asks Americans, Europeans and the wider Western world to rediscover the virtues of their supposed Greek forefathers, but refuses to explain which forefathers he means, which centuries count and who possesses the authority to select the admirable episodes while suppressing the inconvenient ones. The defenders of Thermopylae are elevated into universal heroic ancestors. The Greek-speaking subjects of the Ottoman Empire are rendered almost invisible. Their history is not denied outright; it is simply excluded from the civilisational portrait because it does not perform the ideological work Rubio desperately needs.

 

If modern nations must seek their political instruction from the behaviour of ancient and medieval populations supposedly connected to them by ancestry, then Rubio should at least possess the dignity and courage to acknowledge the entire record. Let him explain whether the lesson is resistance to superior force, service within an imperial administration, accommodation with foreign sovereignty or the pragmatic pursuit of survival under changing rulers. His preferred history cannot answer because it has never been concerned with understanding how people actually lived. It is concerned with manufacturing examples that flatter contemporary power.

 

The question Rubio should also have asked is not whether modern Americans can claim the courage of Leonidas or the achievements of Pericles as their ancestral possessions. It is whether the conduct of any historical population, however admired, can legitimately be transformed into a permanent moral character supposedly transmitted to people living thousands of years later. History offers examples to investigate, question and learn from. It does not provide hereditary certificates of virtue. The experience of Greek-speaking communities under Ottoman rule, no less than the rivalries of ancient city-states, demonstrates that political identities and allegiances change according to historical circumstances. Rubio's supposed continuity survives only through the selective destruction of that complexity.

 

He urges the world to learn from the Greeks. Very well. Then let him explain why his lessons begin with the heroic defiance of the alleged three hundred Spartans, leap over centuries of subordination to Ottoman sovereignty, and conclude with the obligation to accept America's preferred conception of Western leadership. If obedience to an imperial master is the lesson, his historical ancestors offer centuries of material to examine. If independence is the lesson, it belongs equally to every nation that refuses foreign domination, including those whose sovereignty Washington finds inconvenient. Libya, Venezuela and Cuba are prime examples. Rubio cannot claim one principle for his favoured imaginary ancestors and deny it to the rest of humanity. That is the selective morality of power masquerading as the wisdom of the ages.

 

Yet, if Rubio wishes to lecture others on heroism and courage in the face of foreign aggression, he might first look to his own ancestral homeland, Cuba. Since 1959, the Cuban people have demonstrated remarkable resilience and determination in the face of relentless American hostility, enduring a US-backed military invasion, decades of economic embargo and sanctions, repeated attempts at political destabilisation, and severe economic hardship aggravated by Washington's policies. Whatever one's judgement of the political system in Havana, the courage of a nation that has refused to surrender its sovereignty under such sustained external pressure deserves recognition. For more than six decades, a small Caribbean island has resisted the demands of the world’s most powerful military and economic power, situated barely ninety miles from its shores. Yet Rubio, who finds inexhaustible inspiration in the courage and resistance of men who stood against the Persian Empire more than two millennia ago, in a land thousands of miles from the United States, appears incapable of recognising comparable defiance in the history of his own ancestral homeland. Evidently, courage and resistance acquire an entirely different moral meaning when the imperial power being defied is the United States rather than ancient Persia.

 

But Rubio is a lost cause. Here is a man who summons the courage of Spartans who died more than two millennia ago, yet could not bring himself, on that occasion, to acknowledge his own Cuban roots. What sort of courage is this, when a man must reach across thousands of miles and centuries to borrow the heroism of strangers, while appearing ashamed of the very country from which his parents came? Rubio finds it easier to claim the courage of dead Spartans, to whose legacy he has no ancestral claim, than to display the courage required to acknowledge his own heritage. He is, in short, a traitor. His betrayal of his own heritage places him in the same moral company as those members of the Iranian diaspora in the United States who called for their former homeland to be bombed and openly cheered as fellow Iranians were slaughtered by American bombs (Suren-Pahlav, 2026d; 2026e). Such people may invent glorious ancestors for themselves, appropriate the heroes of other nations and construct an imaginary historical identity to conceal their own betrayal. Yet Rubio would do well to remember another figure from the very history he so enthusiastically celebrates: Ephialtes, who betrayed the defenders of Thermopylae by guiding the Achaemenid Empire's elite infantry corps, known as the Immortals, along a mountain path that enabled them to outflank the Greek-speaking defenders. Rubio may invoke the ancient Greek speakers and claim their courage as his inheritance, but his conduct invites a rather different comparison. He belongs not among the defenders of Thermopylae, but alongside the man who betrayed them. He celebrates the courage of the Spartans while displaying the political instincts of Ephialtes.

 

 

The Objective: Propaganda as Political Identity

The political significance of Rubio's address cannot be understood solely by identifying its historical inaccuracies, selective quotations and omissions. Those distortions also require examination as instruments of persuasion, particularly where the past is reconstructed to establish the moral legitimacy of contemporary power. Propaganda is not necessarily the invention of events that never occurred. It may operate more effectively through the selective presentation of genuine events, the suppression of inconvenient evidence and the repetition of interpretations until they acquire the appearance of established historical truth. Jowett and O'Donnell (2019) distinguish propaganda from ordinary persuasion through its deliberate and systematic attempt to shape perceptions and direct responses towards an intended objective. The distinction matters because a narrative can contain substantial elements of truth while remaining propagandistic in its construction and purpose. Modern psychological research identifies several mechanisms through which such narratives can acquire credibility, generate emotional allegiance and withstand contradictory evidence.

 

One of the most extensively investigated is the illusory truth effect, whereby repeated exposure to a proposition increases its perceived truthfulness without providing additional evidence of its accuracy. Hasher, Goldstein and Toppino (1977) demonstrated that participants were more likely to judge repeated statements as true, even when the statements themselves were false. Repetition can therefore influence assessments of credibility through familiarity rather than verification. A related but distinct phenomenon, commonly called the Woozle effect, concerns the accumulation of apparent authority through repeated and sometimes distorted citation. Greenberg (2009), examining citation practices within biomedical research, demonstrated how uncertain propositions could become accepted as established findings when successive publications reproduced, amplified or misrepresented earlier claims without supplying independent evidence. The distinction is fundamental: the illusory truth effect concerns the psychological consequences of repeated exposure, whereas the Woozle effect concerns the construction of evidential authority through citation. In both cases, familiarity or apparent corroboration may substitute for the independent examination of the underlying claim, although historical myth-making cannot automatically be classified as a Woozle effect without evidence of a corresponding chain of citations.

 

A second mechanism concerns the deliberate organisation of public attitudes through emotionally significant symbols and associations. Edward Bernays, whose Propaganda (1928) examined the manipulation of mass opinion, subsequently described the systematic organisation of persuasion as the engineering of consent (Bernays, 1947). His conception recognised that political influence need not depend exclusively upon convincing an audience through demonstrable evidence. Public attitudes may also be shaped by associating an intended political objective with values, memories and collective aspirations that already command emotional allegiance. An argument presented as the defence of freedom, national survival or inherited civilisation may consequently acquire moral authority before its practical implications have been subjected to independent scrutiny. This does not mean that emotion eliminates rational judgement. It means that the interpretation of political information can be influenced by associations that precede, and sometimes obstruct, its critical examination.

 

The third mechanism, described by Paul and Matthews (2016) as the firehose of falsehood, concerns an information strategy characterised by high-volume communication, rapid repetition across multiple channels, indifference to factual consistency and the circulation of mutually contradictory claims. Its significance lies partly in the burden imposed upon those attempting to verify or challenge the information being disseminated. The objective need not always be acceptance of a particular falsehood; repeated exposure to conflicting accounts may weaken confidence in the possibility of establishing a reliable account of events. However, this model describes a sustained communications operation rather than the rhetorical characteristics of an individual speech, and its application requires evidence of dissemination patterns extending beyond a single occasion.

 

The fourth mechanism involves the relationship between belief and political identity. Festinger's (1957) theory of cognitive dissonance examined the psychological discomfort associated with contradictory beliefs and the ways individuals may attempt to resolve such inconsistencies. Subsequent research into ideologically motivated reasoning demonstrates how the evaluation of evidence can become associated with the protection of social identity. Kahan (2013) found that greater analytical ability did not necessarily eliminate this tendency and could, under certain circumstances, accompany more ideologically selective judgements. When political allegiance becomes closely associated with personal identity, evidence challenging the group's preferred account may be subjected to unusually hostile scrutiny, while congenial assertions receive considerably less critical examination. The process is not confined to any particular ideology, nor does it make individuals incapable of revising their beliefs. Its political relevance arises when acceptance of a proposition becomes a demonstration of loyalty rather than a judgement about its evidential foundations.

 

Rubio's treatment of Thermopylae offers a particularly revealing illustration of how repeated historical mythology can serve such purposes. The celebrated narrative of three hundred Spartans confronting the armies of Xerxes has circulated for centuries, increasingly acquiring the character of a self-contained account of exceptional Spartan courage. Yet, as already established, Herodotus identifies several thousand defenders drawn from different Greek-speaking political communities, including contingents from Arcadia, Corinth, Thespiae, Thebes and other regions. His account also records approximately seven hundred Thespians and four hundred Thebans remaining alongside the Spartans during the final engagement, although their circumstances and those of other participants require careful historical qualification (Herodotus, 1922, VII.202–203, 220–222). The historical existence of Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans is not in dispute. What requires criticism is the selective remembrance through which the participation of other defenders has been progressively marginalised, allowing one contingent to dominate the popular understanding of the entire battle. Rubio does not explicitly assert that the Spartans fought alone, but his exclusive celebration of their sacrifice reproduces the familiar omission. A complicated military engagement involving several independent political communities becomes a singular demonstration of Spartan virtue, conveniently available for incorporation into his imaginary history of Western moral inheritance.

 

The political function of this selective remembrance becomes clearer when Rubio's account of ancient Persia is considered alongside his subsequent treatment of contemporary Iran. His narrative begins with the destruction of Athenian sanctuaries by the armies of Xerxes, celebrates the Spartan resistance at Thermopylae and eventually identifies modern Western heroism with an inherited willingness to sacrifice life for a worthy cause. Yet when he turns to the Iranian clerical establishment, the language changes abruptly: sacrifice is no longer associated with courage and loyalty but with a supposed cult of death (Rubio, 2026). The distinction between voluntary self-sacrifice and the exploitation of children for military or ideological purposes is morally significant, and condemning the latter is entirely defensible. Rubio's broader argument nevertheless places these contrasting representations within a civilisational narrative in which the Western tradition possesses an exemplary moral character, while its Iranian adversary occupies the opposing position. The effect is to transfer the emotional authority of idealised ancient heroes to contemporary Western political identity, while associating the present geopolitical adversary with a supposedly alien moral tradition.

 

Bernays's analysis of organised persuasion is particularly relevant here. Rubio invokes antiquity not merely to remind his audience of particular historical achievements, but to establish a relationship between those achievements and the political programme of the Trump administration. His declaration that the ancient Greeks gave humanity history itself, together with his attribution of scientific curiosity and intellectual discovery to an essentially Western character, creates a genealogy in which historical accomplishment appears to belong to a recognisable and continuous civilisation. Yet the idea of the West as a coherent political identity has itself undergone substantial historical transformation, as Varouxakis (2025) demonstrates. Rubio projects that later identity backwards upon ancient societies whose political allegiances, institutions and understandings of collective belonging differed fundamentally from those of modern states. The resulting narrative converts cultural influence into supposed civilisational descent, and civilisational descent into an apparent entitlement to political leadership, to legitimise war crimes and crimes against humanity. Its contemporary purpose becomes apparent when Rubio moves from the supposed virtues of antiquity to the Trump administration's declared pursuit of national power (Rubio, 2026).

 

The significance of this construction is particularly acute in the circumstances of the American and Israeli war against Iran. A military conflict whose origins, legality and human consequences demand scrutiny is placed against a historical background in which American power is identified with the preservation of Western civilisation. Iranians are undoubtedly heirs to the civilisational legacy of the Achaemenids, preceding and successive ancient Iranian dynasties. Although Rubio does not explicitly portray every Iranian as an enemy, the broader rhetorical structure of his speech nevertheless allows the ancient conflicts between particular Greek city-states and the Achaemenid Empire to be recast as a continuing civilisational antagonism through which his audience is invited to understand the contemporary conflict with Iran. The association encourages identification with American strategic objectives by presenting them as expressions of a historical duty extending far beyond the immediate decisions of the regimes concerned. It also risks obscuring the distinction between the Iranian population, the Islamic regime and the clerical authorities whom Rubio explicitly condemns. These are different political and historical subjects, and the legitimacy of illegal military aggression against a contemporary state cannot be established by invoking a selectively remembered war fought twenty-five centuries earlier.

 

The political purpose of Rubio's civilisational narrative becomes more apparent when examined alongside the arguments developed in my earlier studies of American power. In When the Mask is Off: The United States, War, Terrorism and Genocide Without Its Alibi, I examined how the familiar language of security, humanitarian necessity and international responsibility has been used to legitimise military aggression, while the increasingly explicit celebration and trivialisation of destructive force under the Trump administration exposes the contradictions within that justificatory vocabulary (Suren-Pahlav, 2026). I subsequently argued in Trump is a Symptom; the US is the Disease that the recurring resort to military coercion and crimes against humanity cannot be explained adequately through Trump's personal conduct, but must be situated within a longer history of American territorial expansion, aggression and the political institutions through which such practices have been sustained (Suren-Pahlav, 2026c). Rubio's Athens address gives that problem a further dimension. At a time when the conduct of the war against Iran has invited scrutiny of Washington's claims to moral authority, he turns to an idealised antiquity to construct an ancestry through which Americans can be associated with civilisation, heroism and historical duty. The apparent contradiction between the increasingly unrestrained language of military destruction and Rubio's elaborate celebration of Western virtue is less puzzling when their different rhetorical functions are considered. The former presents force increasingly as an entitlement of aggression; the latter supplies an inherited moral identity through which its exercise may be rendered acceptable. Neither establishes the legality or justice of the war crimes. What Rubio's historical reconstruction offers instead is a means of shifting the terms of judgement, inviting his audience to understand American expansionism through an imagined continuity of civilisational virtue rather than through the historical conduct, political decisions and legal obligations of the state exercising that power.

 

The four mechanisms should not be attributed indiscriminately to Rubio's address. The speech contains identifiable forms of repetition, symbolic association and collective identity construction, but it does not independently demonstrate either the psychological effects of repeated exposure upon its audience or the existence of a coordinated firehose of falsehood operation. Its most clearly observable propaganda-related characteristic lies in the political use of historical representation: selected episodes are endowed with exemplary significance, historical contradictions are excluded, and a modern geopolitical programme is presented as the recovery of an inherited civilisational mission. Yet, Rubio does not need to invent every historical event for the narrative to serve a persuasive political purpose. By arranging genuine achievements, selectively remembered historical events and contemporary adversaries within a continuous narrative of Western virtue, he offers his audience a framework through which the moral authority of the past can be appropriated to legitimise the atrocities committed by the United States in the present.

 

 

Conclusion

Although historically absurd, it is understandable why the United States, a republic barely two and a half centuries old, should be so eager to manufacture a prestigious ancestry linking itself to ancient Athens. The practice is hardly new. European rulers have long appropriated the achievements of antiquity to legitimise their own authority. Napoleon Bonaparte cultivated comparisons with Alexander III of Macedon, whose conquests offered a convenient model for his imperial ambitions. Subsequent rulers likewise exploited classical antiquity to glorify conquest and fabricate an illustrious lineage, rather like a man without aristocratic ancestry wearing a borrowed signet ring in the hope of passing himself off as nobility. Rubio’s attempt to claim ancient Greek civilisation as America’s rightful inheritance belongs to this same tradition of historical self-aggrandisement. What Washington cannot establish through historical continuity, it apparently hopes to acquire through historical invention.

 

Unlike Americans and Western Europeans, Iranians have no need to borrow their ancestors from Athens or search the ruins of another people’s history for a civilisational identity. Iran possesses an ancient heritage of its own; its historical signet ring is neither borrowed nor counterfeit, but bears the unmistakable seal of its own civilisation. They are heirs to one of humanity's oldest surviving civilisational traditions, rooted in more than seven millennia of history on the Iranian plateau and over two thousand years of resistance against foreign aggressors. For Iranians, the hero is Batis, the Persian commander of the imperial garrison at Gaza, who, in 332 BCE, mounted a determined resistance against Alexander’s invading hordes. Following the city’s fall after a two-month siege, Batis was taken prisoner. He refused to kneel before Alexander or plead for mercy, embodying a principle deeply rooted in the Iranian sense of national dignity: an Iranian does not kneel before a foreign invader. Alexander ordered leather thongs to be driven through Batis’s ankles and had him dragged alive behind a horse-drawn chariot around Gaza, watching as the barbaric punishment was carried out (Curtius Rufus, IV.6.26–29). This act of calculated cruelty deliberately imitated Achilles’ treatment of Hector at Troy, as recounted in Greek epic literature, with one particularly savage distinction: Hector was already dead when Achilles dragged his body behind his chariot. The episode exposes the extreme brutality and savagery of Alexander towards those who dared resist his conquest (Vorhis, 2017), and provides a grim historical parallel to the savagery of modern American aggression against those who refuse to submit to its will. Little wonder, then, that Alexander would make a fitting hero for Rubio, Trump and other American warmongers who mistake the brutal subjugation of other peoples for military greatness.

 

As the Persian proverb declares, ‘A man of noble lineage may fall from his horse, but never from his heritage.’ Modern Iran may no longer command the power of the great empires that once marked her long history, but Iranians have never accepted permanent submission to foreign conquerors. They have endured invasions, conquest, devastation and foreign aggression, as they continue to do today, yet have repeatedly regained their political independence, preserved their national and cultural identity and, on more than one occasion, transformed their conquerors into inheritors of the very civilisation they had sought to subjugate. The Macedonians came, the Arabs came and the Mongols came. Later, the European imperial powers attempted to impose their domination, but failed to reduce Iran to a formal colony. Those who conquered her eventually lost their dominion or were absorbed into the civilisation they had sought to destroy, while those who attempted to colonise her failed. Their empires rose and fell, their ambitions perished, but Iran endured.

 

Therefore, the United States should not mistake its temporary military supremacy for historical immortality. It is a republic barely two and a half centuries old, confronting a civilisation whose historical existence has outlasted successive foreign aggressors and their pretensions to eternal greatness. Washington may possess the military machinery to devastate Iranian cities and slaughter innocent children, women and men by cowardly dropping bombs from the safety of its aircraft, thousands of feet above the people whose lives it destroys, without ever having to confront its victims face to face. There is no courage in such cowardice, no honour in killing defenceless civilians, and no state in turning another nation's homeland into a battlefield while proclaiming oneself the guardian of humanity. Technological superiority does not transform cowardice into bravery, destruction into achievement or aggression into heroism.

 

If, however, the United States continues to confuse military superiority with an entitlement to commit crimes against humanity in pursuit of domination over other nations, it will join the long succession of failed aggressors whose ambitions exceeded their judgement and whose atrocities accelerated their own decline. Iranian nation has buried the ambitions of conquerors before and will do the same again. As George Santayana (1905) famously warned, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ The United States, with its recurring acts of military aggression and repeated disregard for the historical lessons of how empires have fallen through their own arrogance, overreach and destructive ambitions, offers a particularly revealing illustration of that warning. And so, Rubio would do well to remember that the ruins of history are not reserved for the enemies of the West. One day, he himself, not his children, will either bear witness to the collapse and fragmentation into warring states of the very “America” whose power he has travelled to Athens to glorify through a falsified account of history, or force a nation or a coalition of nations, tired of its never-ending wars, atrocities, bullishness, aggression and super-terrorism, to annihilate it with the very weapon of mass destruction that his malignant narcissist paedophile president threatens to use to send Iran back to the Stone Age (Suren-Pahlav, 2026; 2026c).

 

 

Footnotes:

1 – When Rubio’s master can trace the shared political heritage of the United States and Italy back thousands of years to ancient Rome, furnish George Washington’s Continental Army with airports to capture in 1775, transport the defence of Fort McHenry from the War of 1812 into the American Revolution, suggest that Andrew Jackson could have prevented the American Civil War, notwithstanding the minor inconvenience of having died sixteen years earlier, and resurrect the discredited tale of General Pershing executing Muslim prisoners with bullets dipped in pig’s blood, one begins to appreciate the extraordinary liberties with chronology and historical evidence tolerated at the highest levels of the American political establishment (Trump, 2019a, 2019b; Kiely et al., 2017; Jacobson, 2016). Rubio, however, has surpassed his master in historical illiteracy, if not in historical imagination. Where Trump merely equips eighteenth-century soldiers with twentieth-century technology and rearranges the lives of the dead, his Secretary of State has undertaken the altogether grander enterprise of dispossessing entire ancient civilisations of their intellectual achievements, crediting those achievements to the ancient Greece that never existed and then claiming them as the exclusive inheritance of a modern West that had yet to be invented. A regime prepared to devote nearly a trillion dollars annually to defence, while its highest officials cannot reliably distinguish the American Revolution from the War of 1812, the living from the dead, or the intellectual achievements of ancient civilisations from their modern political appropriation, offers a rather revealing spectacle. Washington has evidently mastered the financing of military supremacy without ensuring that those entrusted with its exercise possess even an elementary command of the history they so confidently invoke.

 

2 – The dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire contributed to the emergence of new states including Palestine, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, Iran suffered extensive territorial losses at the hands of British and Russian colonisers. The British separated territories that now form Afghanistan from Iran and partitioned Baluchistan, incorporating its eastern territories into British India, where they subsequently became part of Pakistan. Russia, through military conquest and unequal treaties imposed upon a weakened Iranian state, seized Iranian territories in the Caucasus, including Arran, Shirvan and Ganja, as well as Armenia and parts of Georgia. Arran, Shirvan and Ganja were subsequently brought together to form a new republic in 1918, which usurped the historical name Azerbaijan from the Iranian region that had borne it for centuries, thereby fabricating a historical identity that Stalin later exploited to advance Soviet territorial ambitions towards Iranian Azarbaijan. Russia also extended its imperial domination across Central Asia, including present-day Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. These acts served the wider colonial policy of divide and rule: borders were imposed or redrawn, historically connected populations were divided, and territorial disputes and rivalries were fostered, leaving neighbouring peoples with newly constructed national identities at one another's throats while colonial powers exploited their lands and natural resources.

 

 

References

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