OPINION:
In 1095, Pope Urban II, in a speech to the Council of Clermont, urged Christians in Western Europe to help the Byzantine church and liberate the Holy Land from Muslim rule.
It was, at the time, a completely understandable sentiment. Various Muslim rulers had tormented European shipping throughout the Mediterranean for centuries, and Muslim invaders had held on to most of Spain for nearly 400 years at that point. It did not help that the Muslim rulers routinely launched raids from their posts in Spain and captured and sold Europeans into slavery.
I thought about Urban as I listened to Secretary of State Marco Rubio talk to the assembled grandees last week at the Munich Security Conference.
Mr. Rubio was, much like Urban, not really offering a collection of thoughts so much as he was sounding a call to arms. A call that was founded in the history of the West, a call that he purposefully framed as the most recent iteration of an expansive, confident West, one that started around six centuries ago, not coincidentally right around the completion of the Spanish Reconquista.
Ferdinand and Isabella didn’t just fund Christopher Columbus; they were the monarchs who oversaw the expulsion of the last of the Muslim rulers from Al-Andalus. In case the audience missed his point, Mr. Rubio specifically noted that: “For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding — its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe. But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, it was contracting.”
In other words, led by the secretary’s own ancestral leadership, the missionaries and pilgrims weren’t just conquering lands; they were also changing hearts and minds, saving souls and bringing civilization to the larger world. The implication was clear: As part of a renewed commitment to our civilization, we need to be infused with that same intensity and missionary zeal, and our efforts have to be about more than dollars or guns.
As part of his call, Mr. Rubio insisted on a necessary and welcome rejection of the postwar malaise and the attendant obsession with limits and decline that is, unfortunately, the hallmark of a modern-day Europe: a collection of tribes that can no longer even defend themselves, let alone take up the challenge of being energetic, aggressive and expansionary.
Finally, and perhaps most important, Mr. Rubio made it clear that the United States has no intention of managing the decline of the West, gracefully, quietly or otherwise.
Rather, Mr. Rubio made it clear that the United States, while prepared to go it alone, would much rather have the company of allies and friends in Europe as we turn once again to face a militant Islam, a recrudescent imperial China and, most disturbingly, some of our own citizens. As befits a secretary of state, however, Mr. Rubio was polite enough not to specifically identify which people we might be converting and/or defeating.
The Europeans, very happy just to be allowed to sit at the adult table again, if only for a few minutes, greeted Mr. Rubio’s remarks with a standing ovation.
Does that mean Europe, the birthplace of Western civilization, is ready to defend that civilization? Don’t be ridiculous; of course not. That would involve patience and work and sacrifice, and the Europeans don’t do any of that anymore.
It took the Spanish about 800 years to eject the Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula. Can anyone imagine modern man being willing to endure 30 generations of warfare to free anyone, even themselves?
What it does mean is that an American politician is finally talking clearly and powerfully about the issue facing the entire West, namely, whether we are prepared to do what is necessary to defend our own civilization (the product of 3,000 years of work and striving ) from those who would destroy it. Mr. Rubio left no doubt where he comes down on this essential question of survival.
Nor is he alone. Mr. Rubio’s remarks reflected the prayer that President Franklin D. Roosevelt offered on the occasion of the Western invasion of Europe in 1944 (D-Day). That prayer said in part: “Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity. Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.”
We are, in fact, engaged in a continual struggle to preserve our republic, our religion and our civilization. Mr. Rubio understands that. So does President Trump.
• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times.
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