Rubio and Xi: Power Before the Ruins

On 7 October, from the Pnyx hill in Athens, where the citizens’ assembly once gathered, with the Parthenon in the background, Marco Rubio sought to enlist the past in an attempt to preserve the West’s standing. A few months earlier, in May in Beijing, and again on 24 September in Washington, Xi Jinping had invoked Thucydides to urge the United States to avoid confrontation with China.

Two uses of Antiquity bring us back to decisive questions.

What degree of power is needed to preserve freedom?

At what point, and to what extent, does my freedom restrict that of others?

Conquest Elevated to Virtue

Tracing a continuity spanning twenty-five centuries, from Athens to Rome, from Christianity to America, Rubio calls on Europe to emerge from its “long slumber”. More prosaically, he urges it to rediscover in this heritage the determination to regain control over its supplies, rebuild its industry and strengthen its defences.

These objectives are undoubtedly legitimate: a democracy that no longer controls its infrastructure, technologies or security exposes its freedom to the decisions of others. Yet Rubio attaches an additional ambition to them: that of retaining first place, leaving little room between command and servitude. As though relinquishing the leadership of the world necessarily meant submitting to it.

His genealogy, moreover, reveals this slippage. In his account, where Columbus appears alongside Magellan and Apollo 11, Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne and Cortés embody the same qualities. Conquest thus joins discovery and invention in a narrative of greatness. The capacity to subjugate consequently becomes a badge of honour, without any examination of the freedom of those who were subjugated.

An inheritance may certainly inspire a political vision, but it confers no right to command. The defence of a community becomes a justification for its domination when fidelity to a civilisation turns into an obligation to remain pre-eminent.

Rights Have No Ancestry

The West has a cultural history of which our institutions are an integral part. Their value, however, does not depend on the nobility of their lineage, but on the guarantees they provide, including protection against those who claim to speak in the name of that heritage.

Although Athens undoubtedly bequeathed us political experience and the means to debate it, its democracy nevertheless rested on the exclusion of women, slaves and metics. We are not — and refuse to be — mere appendages of the ancient order, because our freedoms have been built through centuries of reforms and ruptures.

Individual rights enforceable against the state, like universal suffrage, have value only if their protections are not reserved for the heirs of a particular civilisation. Thankfully, no one needs Greek, Roman or Christian ancestry to claim them. In our societies, the same rights are recognised for human beings whose histories differ.

The Price of Empire

Xi Jinping has clearly understood the anxiety over declining status that runs throughout Rubio’s speech. In May, he therefore asked Donald Trump whether the two countries could overcome the “Thucydides Trap”, a phrase popularised by Graham Allison to describe the fear that Athens’ rise inspired in Sparta. On 24 September, Xi asserted that the trap could be avoided, in a brilliant but disingenuous invitation aimed at ensuring that a redistribution of power — in China’s favour and at the West’s expense — would not lead to war.

China’s rise is a reality to which Washington — and we Europeans — must adapt. Yet not all resistance to Beijing stems from an obsession with retaining first place. It may also concern the freedom of those upon whom China seeks to impose its decisions. In this respect, Taiwan makes it impossible to evade the distinction, and the people of Taiwan have a political will that dialogue between great powers cannot disregard.

Rubio’s heroic vision of Greece is therefore missing an essential part of the story: the Athenian power that turned against itself. The same Thucydides allows us to trace the transformation of a protective alliance into an instrument of coercion. The Sicilian Expedition of 415–413 BC shows what a power risks losing when it extends its ambitions beyond its means. From 412 BC onwards, Sparta concluded agreements with the Persia of Darius II, whose financial support would sustain the fleet of Lysander that triumphed at Aegospotami in 405 BC.

An alliance with an old enemy may serve immediate interests. A power may make itself useful to those seeking to resist it, who may in turn purchase their deliverance at the price of another dependency.

An Alliance Does Not Require Allegiance

Rubio’s speech does not explain how the pursuit of national primacy can be reconciled with an alliance whose members must retain the freedom to make their own decisions. An alliance must distribute burdens and require each member to honour its commitments. Yet it becomes fragile when disagreement is treated as disloyalty, when protection becomes a means of pressure, or when the interests of the strongest alone determine what others must accept. Partners then seek additional guarantees. Emancipation requires the ability to refuse the demands of several powers, rather than replacing one protector with another.

Ruins preserve a work of art, but they also bear witness to the disappearance of the order that produced it. Greek thought survived Athens’ pre-eminence: that is why Xi can quote Thucydides. A civilisation can enrich the world without its heirs retaining command of it.

A policy that makes first place the condition of freedom turns the security of some into a threat to others, and will produce the very coalition it sought to prevent.

The ruins remind us that domination can destroy the very power it claims to serve.