U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood before the Munich Security Conference on February 13th and delivered what was meant to be a stirring defense of Western Civilization. It was the European continent, he declared, “that produced the genius of Mozart and Beethoven, of Dante and Shakespeare, of Michelangelo and Da Vinci, of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.” Leave aside, for the moment, the embarrassment we feel on his behalf for comparing a rock band with Beethoven. The deeper question Rubio’s speech inadvertently poses is this: What is the actual state of the civilization he claims to champion?
The answer is being provided, in excruciating and nauseating detail, on the other side of the Atlantic. This week’s Epstein revelations exposed Obama’s former White House Counsel exchanging adoring emails with a convicted sex offender, a Dubai logistics magnate corresponding approvingly about a “torture video,” and sitting members of the Trump Cabinet caught in documented lies about their ties to Epstein’s island, while the Attorney General was caught spying on Congressional research into the files and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche declared new prosecutions “unlikely.”
In Britain, the Metropolitan Police raided the home of a former ambassador over evidence he may have passed state secrets to Epstein, and the Prime Minister’s own chief of staff resigned in the fallout. This is not a scandal at the margins. This is the operating culture of the trans-Atlantic elite—the same elite that lectures the world about a “rules-based order.”
Rubio extolled five centuries of Western expansion, “its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers.” But he made no effort to distinguish the anti-imperial philosophy behind the American Revolution, from the imperial depredations conducted in the name of “the West”—such as the slave trade, the opium wars, or the looting of entire continents.
He described the post-1945 retreat of empire as a tragedy, driven by “godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings.” What he could not bring himself to say is that the imperial system he mourns has always required the kind of moral disfigurement now on display in the Epstein files: a ruling class trained to separate the exercise of power from any sense of human empathy. The British “public school” system perfected this for centuries. Was Epstein’s operation part of its American franchise?
Natural law is unforgiving on this point. You may pass whatever statutes you wish, deploy whatever armies you command, but a civilization which tolerates a leadership class oriented toward domination rather than development is a civilization in terminal decline—not because of some external enemy, but because it has hollowed itself out from within. The same disregard for human dignity that permitted Epstein’s circle to flourish is what permits a genocide to be televised in Gaza, a merciless blockade of Cuba to continue, and the threat of sustained military operations against Iran to be treated as a manageable policy option, all while the trans-Atlantic financial system is bloated beyond belief and overripe for collapse.
What would George Washington, who led a revolution on the principle of promoting the common good and the concept that government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed, make of an Attorney General who spies on legislators reviewing evidence of crimes? What would Benjamin Franklin—the brilliant printer, scientist, and diplomat—say to a Secretary of State who defines civilization as an entitlement to dominate, rather than an obligation to uplift? The question answers itself. The American republic was not founded to administer an empire. It was founded on the proposition that human beings possess inherent dignity and creative potential, and that the purpose of government is to foster both.
This year marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. If that occasion is to mean anything beyond pageantry, it must become the starting point for a reckoning—not merely with the crimes documented in the Epstein files, but with the culture that produced and allowed them. A civilization worthy of the name does not measure itself by the power it projects, but by the beauty it creates and the creativity it unleashes: in science, in infrastructure, in education, in the arts.
The question is not whether the West once produced Beethoven. The question is whether it can produce anything of comparable moral value today—or whether it has surrendered that ambition to the degraded culture now being dragged into the light, and with it, the elevated vision of the human individual on which any civilization worth defending must rest.
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