WEB Du Bois wrote in 1903 that “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the colour-line”. He didn’t just mean prejudice, but a global hierarchy between the darker and lighter peoples of the Earth. A century and a quarter later, that hierarchy is reasserted as doctrine by the representatives of the US. At the Munich Security Conference (on Saturday 14 February), Marco Rubio stood before Europe’s governing class and offered them a junior role in a Western bloc defined in civilisational and racial terms. The hall answered with a standing ovation.
Strip away the atmospherics and his message was simple: the era of US stewardship over a “rules-based global order” – however illusory it was – is over. What replaces it is a civilisational consolidation: a Western bloc that polices its borders at home while mobilising collective power abroad, a unified effort to secure dominance over markets, resources and political space across the Global South. At its core is a story of civilisational victimhood. Western decline, Rubio suggested, is self-inflicted – the result of moral weakness, misplaced guilt, and indulgence towards outsiders.
To appease a “climate cult”, he argued, Western governments have adopted energy policies “impoverishing our people”, even as competitors exploit hydrocarbons. More revealing still was his warning that mass migration threatens “the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people”. Then came the historical key. For five centuries, Rubio said, the West had been “expanding” – missionaries, soldiers, explorers building “vast empires extending out across the globe”. After 1945, it began “contracting,” accelerated by “godless communist revolutions and anti-colonial uprisings”.
In this articulation of colonial nostalgia elevated to statecraft, decolonisation and sovereignty are not rights to be secured but threats to be reversed. As Corey Robin has argued, reactionary politics does not just defend hierarchy; it recasts it as victimhood. The powerful present themselves as the injured party. Privilege becomes persecution. Dominance becomes self-defence. Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff, has called postwar migration “reverse colonisation” and welfare states vehicles for transferring wealth from “native citizenry” to foreigners. In that telling, the West did not extract from the world; it was exploited by it. Empire becomes generosity. Decolonisation becomes dispossession. Migration becomes invasion. Rubio’s Munich speech gives these inversions diplomatic form.
For three decades after the Cold War, American power was exercised through contradiction. The US reserved to itself the right to violate international law, wage war and deploy sanctions as siege – while simultaneously invoking universal values. The hypocrisy was functional. Hegemony requires a moral language that recruits others into subordination. But Trumpism abandons that performance. It does not pretend to serve humanity. It insists that it serves a “West” less defined by political orientation than by skin colour. This is empire without universalism. Its internal logic is demographic consolidation; its external logic is coordinated economic and military dominance.
In this context, Rubio indicated that rivalry with China can be “manage[d]”. Interests will “often not align”. The task is preserving Western cohesion so it can compete with China as a bloc for markets, supply chains and control across the Global South. Multipolarity is tolerable (perhaps only for now) – so long as the Western core is secured. But secured against whom? And at whose expense? To see how the doctrine operates, look not to China but Cuba.
For more than 60 years, the US has maintained an economic blockade of the island. A 1960 State Department memo made its objective explicit: to produce “hunger, desperation and overthrow of government”. Under Trump, this siege intensified. Cuba was designated a “state sponsor of terrorism”. Financial channels were constricted. Fuel supplies tightened. Migration from the island was then cited as evidence of failure. In his second term, Trump has escalated further – kidnapping Venezuela’s president, in part, to prevent oil reaching the island from its ally, hijacking fuel tankers, and threatening tariffs against any country supplying the island with energy. The consequences are prosaic and brutal: stalled buses, darkened hospitals, rationed electricity, empty pharmacies.
Rubio closed his speech by invoking his ancestry – from Seville and Piedmont – as proof that the US and Europe are bound by blood and civilisation. Notably absent was any reference to Cuba, from which his parents emigrated in 1956. In a speech lamenting the West’s “contracting” after 1945, the Caribbean does not appear as a site of anti-colonial sovereignty but as terrain lost to rupture. Lineage flows towards Europe; discipline towards Havana.
The message is not only for Cuba. It is for any state that seeks to trade, develop or align outside the Western bloc. Access to markets, finance and energy remains conditional. That discipline requires accomplices. The Trump doctrine does not demand ideological enthusiasm from Europe. It demands compliance – alignment in sanctions, trade, finance and supply chains – so that the West can act as a unified economic instrument against others.
If Trumpism can accommodate spheres of influence in Eurasia, it remains uncompromising in what it considers its own hemisphere. With the Monroe Doctrine revived, the Caribbean and Latin America are not a “zone of peace”, as regional leaders declared in Havana in 2014, but a sphere of US domination. This is what “America First” means in practice: a racialised imperial core, surrounded by managed peripheries, policed with allied assistance – a hierarchy in which Western states enjoy stratified sovereignty while post-colonial states exercise it at the pleasure of the core. Liberty for white-majority states; limitation for black and brown ones. Why would Europe applaud?
Partly because Rubio sugared the pill, invoking shared heritage and familial ties. Partly because European leaders recognise in his economic critique their own anxieties: deindustrialisation, supply-chain fragility, strategic vulnerability. But there is a deeper convergence. Europe has already constructed hardened borders, outsourced deterrence and normalised migrant suffering as administrative necessity. Rubio offered these policies strategic coherence.
For the UK, this is not abstract. The offer is membership in a fortified civilisation: align domestic and foreign policy with Washington’s agenda and remain inside the circle. The temptation in Westminster will be to treat this as theatre and cling to the old reflex – junior partner, interpreter, fixer. That reflex has already diminished British sovereignty and bound it to violent projects it does not control. Du Bois understood that the colour-line was geopolitical – the architecture through which wealth was accumulated and order enforced. Rubio’s dismissal of “atonement” is a declaration that hierarchy requires no justification. Empire without universalism dispenses with hypocrisy.
The choice facing Britain is not a sentimental “Europe” against “America”, but whether we attach ourselves to a dehumanising racial project – and import its logic home: harsher borders, narrower belonging, diminished dissent. The problem of the 21st century remains the problem of the colour-line – now expressed in sanctions regimes, migration walls and force projection. Munich unveiled a white empire, stripped of disguise. And Europe applauded.
[Further reading: Can American democracy survive Trump?]
Content from our partners
Related
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment