From Plato to NATO to MAGA: Marco Rubio’s Myths & the Real "Western Alliance"

Reässessing the “West” from John Winthrop to Marco Rubio…

I see in my feed this AM that Marco Rubio is a moron. Excellent! I am always for a good Trump grifter smackdown.

The smartest and most incisive things I skimmed were by Dan Drezner: <https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/five-thoughts-about-marco-rubios> <https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/frank-talk-and-limited-action>.

But the most interesting, however, was by the extremely sharp Arthur Goldhammer:

Arthur Goldhammer: <https://arthurgoldhammer356783.substack.com/p/inventing-tradition>: ‘[Rubio’s] was an artful portrait, slyly conceived to obscure crucial features…. The history… would have taken the story too far from the Plato-to-NATO fairy tale that our national mythmaker hoped to fob off…. There once was a Western alliance. Its roots can be traced not to Solon’s or Socrates’ Greece or the garden of Gethsemane but to the aftermath of World War II. An exsanguinated Europe needed the aid of the United States…. The triumphantly ascendant United States needed Europe as a market for its wares and a bulwark against its erstwhile Soviet ally…. A similar confluence of interests could plausibly be invoked to underwrite Rubio’s apparent desire to perpetuate the postwar alliance under somewhat altered terms. His mythification of the past is unlikely to result in a new understanding, however. He might begin by asking himself whether the people he ought to be consulting about Europe’s future are Fico and Orban or Merz and Macron, Meloni and Starmer. In the MAGA… such questions cannot be asked…. Trump’s America swaggers abroad demanding fealty from its former allies, despite having proven itself to be completely untrustworthy and unreliable. To escape from this abyss will require more art than Secretary Rubio or his master is capable of…

So I find I have four points to make, dissenting in part and concurring in part:

First, I have a bone to pick with Arthur, with respect to “markets for its wares”. This phrase here is a badly thought a contemporary intellectual echo of a not-very-good theory of Belle Époque imperialism, which was a horse saddled by John A. Hobson, promoted by Rosa Luxemburg, and then ridden to exhaustion and collapse by Vladimir Lenin. This horses was then revved by not very careful and ideology-driven American new leftist historians feeling their oats, and desperate to somehow argue that evil Amerikkkan capitalism was responsible for staging the Cold War in order to turn western Europe into its-neocolony. (And I do hear a further echo of this in the