A speech in Munich, Colonialism, and the MAGA Poison

The Munich Security Conference on Security and Policy is an annual gathering that was started in 1963. Its founding purpose was to achieve and sustain world peace through dialogue. Every year senior government officials from seventy countries, especially Europe and America, gather for a few days to engage themselves on current and future security challenges. They include Presidents, Prime Ministers, Ministers, legislators, members of international organisations such as the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), civil society and the cream of the world’s media.

On the 14th of February this year, Marco Rubio, Secretary of State of the United States of America, held the audience at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof spellbound as he delivered a 3000-word, 22-minute speech. The speech not only sought to smooth over the rough edges of the Trump administration’s troubled relationship with Europe but also gave a deep and troubling insight into the world view of the people currently in power in the USA.

Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again (MAGA) ‘revolution’ have scorched the earth of Liberal Democracy and put some of America’s most trusted institutions to the sword with lightning speed. Three men in the Trump team could be described as ‘The President’s Men’. They speak Donald Trump’s mind on different issues, ranging from the virulent culture war unleashed at home to relationships with international figures and institutions.

Vice President JD Vance is supposed to be closest to Donald Trump. He often sits in at his official meetings and occasionally interjects with pointed, sometimes rude, remarks, as in the now-famous Oval Office put-down of President Zelensky, when he accused the Ukrainian leader of being ‘ungrateful’. He often tries to out-Trumping Trump by bullying others.

The second among the President’s men is Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. He is a military veteran. He has a penchant for wearing jackets that are too tight for him. He exudes a truculent air, recalling the character of Sony in The Godfather movie – the bold hothead who reacts with brashness and is easy pickings for the enemy, unlike his calm, reflective younger brother Mike, who survives to slaughter the enemy and become Godfather himself.

The third, and the most suave of the President’s men is Marco Rubio. A son of Cuban immigrants, he was initially an adversary of Trump and an outsider to the MAGA movement. He has since been assimilated into the movement and has become the most eloquent spokesman of its world view, articulating Trumpian ideology far better than Donald Trump ever could.

Marco Rubio was at his eloquent best in Munich on this Saturday.

‘Our home may be in the Western Hemisphere, but we will always be a child of Europe’, he said, referring to the white men of the USA.

He spoke of the shared heritage of Dante, Shakespeare and Columbus. He stoked fears of civilisational erasure, caused by unrestrained Arab and Muslim immigration. Western Civilisation was superior to any other, he averred unapologetically, and he eulogised the 500 years of European Colonialism. He regretted its ‘managed decline’ which he attributed to ‘left wing politics’. He wanted Europeans to be proud of their culture and heritage, including the days of Colonialism and Empire. He saluted ‘missionaries, pilgrims, soldiers and explorers who poured out from Europe across oceans, to settle new continents and build vast empires extending out across the globe’.

He regretted that ‘great Western Empires’ had contracted after the Second World War due to ‘godless Communist revolutions’ and ‘Anti-Colonial uprisings’. Those ‘uprisings’ might have freed 750 million people across 80 countries under British German and Spanish Empires that sometimes committed genocide of millions of hapless locals. In Rubio’s book, clearly, the likes of Nelson Mandela and Kwame Nkrumah were no heroes but terrorist agitators who should have been put down. Europeans, meaning white men, should not be shackled by guilt and shame about their past actions, or feel the need to make any reparations.

‘We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization, and who, together with us, are willing and able to defend it.’

There were things he did not have to say, but which everybody in the room automatically understood. Donald Trump was already scheming to take ownership of the minerals of the DR Congo, over which an inept Congolese government was fighting M23 rebels backed by former rebel, now President of nearby Rwanda, Paul Kagame, while the Chinese constructed airfields in the jungle to fly out illegal minerals. In different parts of a supposedly free continent, leaders in poverty-driven countries were offering their rare earths to Trump, in return for lucre or for his support in unending wars against their local enemies. The unseemly pilgrimage of African leaders to the White House for public humiliation in an open conference with Trump was illustrative, in some eyes, of a subject people were ready to bow to a new Emperor. African resources, to the MAGA faithful, were too precious to be left in the hands of Africans, in much the same way as Venezuela’s oil was too important to be left to ungodly left-wingers and narco-traffickers when America hungered for the precious liquid. Great Empires, and races, died when they lost their spine. Like his President, Marco Rubio would have been astounded to hear the Prime Minister of Great Britain announce he was handing the colonial territory of Chagos Archipelago, which housed a U.S. military base, back to the indigenes of Mauritius. Indigenes did not exist, or have any rights, in the lexicon of Empire, and of MAGA.

It may be true that not every European leader who rose to give Marco Rubio a standing ovation in Munich identified with his past and future ‘Empire’ ideology.

But the message ringing out to Africans everywhere on the continent from Munich was to put their house in order, or be ready for a second Colonialism.