I saw only snippets of the speech given today by Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Greece, with the mighty Parthenon dwarfing him in the background. But today, Marco Rubio was a giant, delivering a speech that I doubt even Ronald Reagan could have articulated.
In this speech, Rubio traced the roots of America’s independence and liberties to the Glory that was Greece, and asks the nations of the West to return to the principles and pursuits of that ancient but glorious civilization.
I am providing a link below so you can reach his entire speech in its magnificence, but here are some highlights:
- Here, in Athens, we found the first full realization of all the essential traits that would come to define the West: fierce individuality and relentless ambition; daring exploration and invention; a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory. An insatiable curiosity about the world and the principles by which it operates, a hunger to know the mysteries of nature and grasp the secrets of the cosmos. An impatience with the notion of impossibility, chafing at all boundaries and limits, straining to peer into the depths of the unknown.
- But it is not just the ambition to explore the unknown that we inherit from the Greeks; it is the conviction that the unknown can be known. The confidence that the world can be charted and measured and mapped and understood – and that there is a rational order to the cosmos, governed by certain fundamental laws, laws that men can observe and the mind can come to understand.
- The men who made the Parthenon, they built upwards. They held that the highest and most noble aspiration in life was to surpass all others, to strive to be the best in all things. The ancient Greek city-states were filled. They were filled with intense passion and rivalry and faction and conflict. But from that constant struggle for distinction – from that came the great flowering of art and philosophy and political and intellectual energy that would transform a collective of Mediterranean cities into the birthplace of the greatest civilization in the world.
- And now, today, we find ourselves at a crossroads. Because the next decade and the decisions we make will write the story of the next century. The course we take will determine whether the West maintains its place at the head of the world or resigns itself to a future of atrophy and servitude and decline. We will either choose to act now or lose the choice to act at all.
Rubio’s speech, rather than a rebuttal to the EU and its leaders for their slide into socialism and retreat from the values that build greatness, was a call to action, to wake up from the slumber of appeasement and of their growing denigration of bold thinking and action.
Marco Rubio for president.
