MARCO RUBIO AND THE GREECE HE INVENTED

 

Had Marco Rubio visited ancient Athens, he would probably have been greatly impressed by Alcibiades. Ambitious, intelligent, charismatic and incurably competitive, the Athenian statesman embodied many of the virtues extolled by the American Secretary of State in his address at the Pnyx. The two might have enjoyed a lengthy discussion about the projection of power and the importance of resoluteness in international affairs. Their conversation might  however have become rather less congenial upon reaching the Sicilian Expedition, of which Alcibiades was an enthusiastic advocate. This is because Greek history has an inconvenient tendency to undermine the certainties of those who invoke it.

Rubio recently chose the site of the ancient Athenian Assembly to present a magnificent genealogy of Western civilisation. According to his account, that civilisation was born in Athens, came of age in Rome, was baptised in Christianity, forged in medieval Europe, endowed with the English genius for liberty and reborn in America. This itinerary displays an admirable geographical consistency, inasmuch as every road leads, apparently inevitably, to Washington. Greek antiquity thus becomes the glorious prologue to a historical narrative whose ultimate meaning is revealed in the exercise of American power.

Cultural inheritance, of course, transcends national boundaries. Americans are perfectly entitled to recognise Greek influences upon their political thought, just as Greeks may acknowledge the contributions of other civilisations to their own. Difficulties arise however, when cultural influence is transformed into historical succession, and then in turn, into political legitimacy. The engagement of America's founders with Plutarch and the classical philosophical tradition suggests a genuine intellectual affinity. To proceed from this observation to the proposition that contemporary American geopolitics constitutes the authentic fulfilment of the Greek spirit, however, requires a leap of logic for which history provides remarkably little assistance.

Almost entirely absent from this genealogy are the Greeks themselves. Between Pericles and Philadelphia stand centuries of Greek intellectual and cultural production. Byzantium was Roman in its political identity, Greek in its language and much of its intellectual expression, and Christian in its religious constitution. It developed through sustained encounters with the Persians, the Egpytians, the Islamic world, the Slavs and the Armenians. There followed the centuries of Ottoman rule, the establishment of the modern Greek state, the Asia Minor Catastrophe and the tragedy of Cyprus, experiences that continue to inform Greek historical consciousness and geopolitical sensitivities. Such a history sits rather awkwardly within the neat division between East and West upon which Rubio's Manichaean account depends.

Even the ancient Greek civilisation that Rubio places at the fountainhead of the West emerged through continuous interaction with other peoples.  Herodotus, with his inexhaustible curiosity about the customs, beliefs and accomplishments of foreign peoples, exemplifies an intellectual tradition whose creativity was nourished by encounters with difference. Seen in this light, Rubio's suggestion that the Greeks pursued knowledge while other civilisations remained inward-looking presupposes a rather peculiar history of humanity, one in which the rest of the world apparently waited for the Greeks to discover human curiosity on its behalf.

The transformation of Greek antiquity into an exclusively Western inheritance recalls an older European habit. During the nineteenth century, admiration for classical Greece frequently coexisted with the conviction that modern Greeks were inadequate custodians of their own ancestral civilisation. Antiquity was proclaimed the spiritual property of Europe, while living Greeks were expected to conform to the expectations of their foreign admirers. Something of the same asymmetry can be discerned in Rubio's address. Greece’s primary function is to supply historical prestige, while America reserves for itself the authority to determine its contemporary political significance.

There is, nevertheless, an element of historical truth in Rubio's interpretation. The ancient Greeks celebrated ambition, competition, courage and excellence, recognising in rivalry a creative force within their political and cultural life. The weakness of his approach lies in elevating these qualities into the defining essence of Greek civilisation, while setting aside an equally important intellectual tradition devoted to examining their consequences.

Aristotle associated virtue with practical wisdom, while the tragedians explored the limits of human ambition. Hubris encompassed the arrogant conduct of those who sought to humiliate others through demonstrations of their own superiority. The ethical problem of power consequently extended to the treatment of those subjected to its exercise. Even Achilles, whom Rubio invokes as an exemplar of heroic glory, acquires another moral dimension when, confronted by Priam, he recognises in his enemy a fellow human being capable of suffering.

The Christian tradition, which Rubio incorporates into his narrative of Western ascendancy, introduces further complications. Christianity elevated humility, compassion for the vulnerable and a profound suspicion of worldly glory. Rubio's disparagement of societies supposedly preoccupied with the welfare of their less capable members sits uneasily beside this inheritance. The encounter between Hellenism and Christianity proved intellectually fertile precisely because it involved conflict, accommodation and the reappraisal of established values. To present their relationship as an uninterrupted progression towards power is to overlook much of the spiritual complexity that gave it meaning.

The contradictions inherent in this selective reading of Greek civilisation are perhaps nowhere more striking than in the history of Athenian democracy itself. A city that grounded its political identity in the liberty of its citizens simultaneously constructed an empire serviced by slaves and sustained by the subjugation of other Greek communities. In the celebrated Melian Dialogue, Thucydides captures with chilling clarity the moment at which power claims exemption from moral restraint and liberty ceases to be a universal principle, becoming instead the privilege of those sufficiently powerful to enjoy it. “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

The modern American conception of international leadership offers some intriguing parallels with this Athenian experience. The belief that American institutions and values possess universal significance can transform the expansion of American influence into a moral obligation, while resistance by other societies is interpreted as a threat to international order. In Rubio's address, the celebration of national sovereignty coexists with the assumption that American strategic primacy is an indispensable condition of Western security. This raises a question that the interlocutors of Thucydides would have readily understood: to what extent can a great power invoke the liberty of nations while regarding its own supremacy as essential to their preservation?

When Rubio turns from antiquity to contemporary Greece, the birthplace of democracy acquires a rather more practical function. It emerges as an exemplary ally, an energy hub and an indispensable component of the Western defence architecture. Such cooperation undoubtedly serves Greek interests as well, given Athens' desire to secure American support in confronting the challenges of its region. Yet the shared invocation of democracy and classical heritage can obscure a fundamental reality. The two countries possess vastly different degrees of international influence, and their strategic priorities coincide only insofar as their respective interests permit. American policy towards Turkey offers a particularly instructive example, since Washington's determination to retain Ankara within the Western alliance may conflict with Greek objectives. The quality of an alliance, after all, may be measured partly by the freedom of its members to disagree.

Rubio's reference to the Greek War of Independence and the American philhellene Daniel Webster provides a historical illustration of the complicated relationship between national independence and the protection afforded by powerful states. American public sympathy for the Greek revolutionaries was genuine, although it produced no corresponding official American intervention. The establishment of an independent Greek state, by contrast, was decisively shaped by the intervention of the European Great Powers, whose involvement helped secure liberation from Ottoman rule while simultaneously imposing limitations upon Greek autonomy. Greek political leaders exploited rivalries among these powers, seeking support and opportunities for diplomatic manoeuvre. From its inception, therefore, the modern Greek state has confronted a persistent dilemma: how to obtain the protection of the powerful while retaining the capacity to determine its own future.

he experience of postwar Greece exposes the limitations of this purported civilisational kinship with particular force. Under the Truman Doctrine, the United States acquired a decisive influence over Greek political life, while anti-communism furnished the justification for a security apparatus that subjected substantial sections of the population to exclusion, surveillance and persecution. The crisis of July 1965, which brought down George Papandreou's democratically elected government, revealed the extent to which Greek parliamentary politics had become entangled with the calculations of the American embassy, the Palace and the country's military establishment. Washington was no disinterested spectator of the ensuing struggle for power. The dictatorship that followed in 1967, and the subsequent American accommodation with its rulers, exposed an even more profound contradiction. The country celebrated as the birthplace of democracy could remain indispensable to American strategic interests even when its democratic institutions had been extinguished. The significance extends beyond an accusation of hypocrisy. It reveals a fundamental asymmetry in the relationship Rubio celebrates: Greek antiquity could be invoked to confer moral legitimacy upon American leadership, while the political aspirations of living Greeks remained subject to the calculations of that leadership. For those whose experience of American power was shaped by the Civil War, the postwar security state and the dictatorship, the proposition that America represents the historical fulfilment of Greek democratic civilisation must have a distinctly bitter resonance.

It would, admittedly, be convenient to attribute exclusively to Rubio the tendency to employ antiquity as a means of validating contemporary political aspirations. Greeks themselves are frequently accomplished practitioners of precisely this form of historical selectivity. We invoke democracy while tolerating authoritarian practices, extol dialogue while treating disagreement as a threat, and search among our ancestors for certificates of collective superiority. Criticism of the American appropriation of Greek antiquity acquires greater credibility when accompanied by a willingness to scrutinise our own uses of history.

Alcibiades would probably have recognised in Rubio an admirer of his virtues. The Athenians, however, also discovered their cost. Perhaps therein lies the most important distinction between invoking Greek history and learning from it. The former supplies the powerful with illustrious ancestors. The latter obliges them to consider whether they themselves embody the very excesses against which Greek civilisation left us its most formidable warnings.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 17 October 2026