Rubio and Xi: Power Before the Ruins

On October 7, from the Pnyx in Athens, the hill where the assembly of citizens once met – the Parthenon behind him – Marco Rubio called the past to witness in an effort to preserve the West’s standing. A few months earlier, in Beijing in May and again in Washington on September 24, it was Xi Jinping who invoked Thucydides to urge the United States to avoid a confrontation with China.

Two uses of antiquity, each leading back to decisive questions.

How much power does it take to preserve freedom?

At what point, and at what stage, does my freedom begin to restrict that of others?

Conquest Raised to a Virtue

Unrolling twenty-five centuries of continuity, from Athens to Rome, from Christendom to America, Rubio calls on Europe to awaken from its “long slumber.” More prosaically, to find in that inheritance the will to take back control of its supply chains, rebuild its industry and strengthen its defense.

These aims are legitimate, to be sure: a democracy that no longer controls its infrastructure, its technologies or its security exposes its freedom to the decisions of others. Except that Rubio attaches a further ambition to them: keeping first place, which leaves little room between command and servitude. In his own words: “The course we take will determine whether the West maintains its place at the head of the world or resigns itself to a future of atrophy and servitude and decline.” As if giving up leading the world necessarily meant submitting to it.

His genealogy, moreover, reveals the slide, for – cited in a text where Columbus takes his place between 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 subdue becomes a title to glory, with no question asked about the freedom of those who were subdued.

An inheritance may certainly inspire a policy; it confers no right to command. The defense of a community turns into a justification of its dominance when loyalty to a civilization becomes an obligation of preeminence.

Rights Have No Ancestry

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

Athens undeniably handed down to us political experience and the means to debate it, yet its democracy rested on the exclusion of women, slaves and metics. We are not – and we refuse to be – mere appendages of the ancient order, for our freedoms were built through centuries of reforms and ruptures.

Rubio is explicit: heroism, honor and duty are not universal; they are “the product of a distinct character” that arose in Greece. Individual rights enforceable against power, like universal suffrage, are worth something only if they do not reserve their protections for the heirs of a given civilization alone. Thank God: no one needs Greek, Roman or Christian ancestry to claim them. Among us, the same rights are recognized for human beings whose histories differ.

The Price of Empire

Xi Jinping had perceived, well before Athens, the fear of losing rank that runs through Rubio’s speech from end to end. As early as last May, he asked Donald Trump whether the two countries could transcend the “Thucydides Trap,” a phrase popularized by Graham Allison from the fear that the rise of Athens inspired in Sparta. Only to assert, on September 24, that the trap can be overcome – a brilliant but sly invitation meant to prevent a redistribution of power (to China’s benefit and the West’s detriment) from leading to war.

China’s rise is a reality to which Washington – and we Europeans – must adapt, but not all resistance to Beijing stems from an obsession with holding on to first place. It may also concern the freedom of those on whom China intends to impose its decisions. In that regard, Taiwan makes the distinction impossible to dodge, and its inhabitants have a political will that the dialogue of the great powers cannot ignore.

Rubio’s heroic Greece therefore lacks an essential story, that of Athenian power turned against itself. The same Thucydides lets us follow the transformation of a protective alliance into an apparatus of coercion. The Sicilian expedition of 415 to 413 BC shows what a power risks losing by extending its ambitions beyond its means. From 412, Sparta concluded agreements with the Persia of Darius II, whose funding would sustain the fleet of Lysander, victorious at Aegospotami in 405.

An alliance with an old enemy can serve immediate interests. A power can make its adversary useful to those who want to resist it, who in turn can buy their deliverance at the price of another dependence. A Europe to which Washington dictated its terms would find its Persia in Beijing.

An Alliance Does Not Demand Allegiance

Rubio’s speech does not tell us how to reconcile the pursuit of national primacy with an alliance whose members must keep their freedom to decide. An alliance must share burdens and ask each member to honor its commitments, but it weakens when disagreement becomes a breach of loyalty, when protection serves as leverage, or when the interests of the strongest alone determine what the others must accept. Partners then look for additional guarantees. Emancipation requires being able to say no to several powers, rather than replacing one protector with another.

Ruins preserve a work, but they also attest to the disappearance of the order that produced it. Greek thought outlived the preeminence of Athens: that is why Xi can quote Thucydides. A civilization can enrich the world without its heirs keeping 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 meant to prevent.

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