It would have been hard to improve the backdrop for Marco Rubio’s foreign policy address on October 7 in Athens, Greece. Standing on the Pnyx with the ruins of the Parthenon rising up behind him, the Secretary of State delivered a speech that won almost universal plaudits. Let me toss my vote in with the overwhelming majority and affirm that Rubio’s speech was simply splendid: robust, heartfelt, honest, masculine, and true.
Is it still permissible to praise such a public performance for being “masculine”? It was part of Rubio’s accomplishment to render that question moot. His speech was statesmanlike but also steely: confident both in manner and substance. Rubio was speaking on behalf of the greatest military and economic power on earth. He knew it. So did his audience. He did not swagger. But neither did he make any apologies for the potency he represented. Rather, he issued a series of clear-eyed affirmations. What he affirmed were the struggles—political, intellectual, martial—that defined Western civilization and made it a world-conquering and world-enriching force. That history made the spot upon which Rubio stood a sacred space. The Acropolis: that “high place” in whose shadow political liberty made its fledgling steps, where Plato and Aristotle taught, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes wrote their plays, where Pericles presided and Phidias built and sculpted.
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