Marco Rubio’s Colonial Nostalgia: The West’s Last Gasp
“The struggle against imperialism is a struggle against hunger, ignorance, and disease.” — Thomas Sankara The Munich Doctrine For decades, the annual Munich Security Conference has served as the premier stage for the transatlantic alliance to project unity and define the rules of the global order. However, the address delivered on February 14 by U.S. […]
“The struggle against imperialism is a struggle against hunger, ignorance, and disease.” — Thomas Sankara
The Munich Doctrine
For decades, the annual Munich Security Conference has served as the premier stage for the transatlantic alliance to project unity and define the rules of the global order. However, the address delivered on February 14 by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio will be remembered not for its diplomatic bridge-building, but for its startling ideological archaeology.
In a speech that was ostensibly about revitalising the West, Rubio inadvertently tore the veil off contemporary Western foreign policy, revealing a worldview steeped in the language and logic of 19th-century colonialism. His words were not just a call to action for Europe; they were a direct challenge to the sovereignty and dignity of the Global South.
The ‘Golden Age’ of Expansion
To understand why Rubio’s speech was so profoundly colonial in nature, one must look beyond the polished delivery and examine the historical revisionism at its core. In his address, Rubio reflected on the five centuries preceding World War II as a period when the West was “expanding,” sending forth its “missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers… to build vast empires extending out across the globe”.
By framing this era of brutal conquest, resource plunder, and genocide as a mere phase of “expansion,” Rubio effectively whitewashed the horrors of colonialism. There was no mention of the millions who perished in the Belgian Congo, the centuries of human trafficking via the transatlantic slave trade, or the systemic destruction of indigenous cultures across Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Instead, he implicitly hailed it as a golden age of Western vitality, a zenith from which the world has since fallen.
Rubio explicitly lamented the “terminal decline” of these great empires, a decline he attributes, with palpable disdain, to “godless communist revolutions and anti-colonial uprisings”. For the billions of people across the Global South, these “uprisings” are known by another name: “liberation”. They are the foundation upon which our national identities and sovereign rights are built.
The ‘Market Share’ Doctrine: Old Wine in New Bottles
This isn’t merely a matter of academic history. The colonial mindset expressed in Munich translates directly into contemporary policy. Following his speech, Rubio urged Western nations to compete aggressively for “market share” in the economies of developing countries, framing it as essential to building a “new Western century”.
At first glance, this sounds like standard economic rhetoric. However, in the context of his broader thesis, it reveals a predatory intent. This is the language of extraction dressed in modern clothing. Critics were quick to draw parallels to the English East India Company, a commercial venture that evolved into a political and military force that subjugated entire subcontinents.
When the West views the Global South primarily as a “market” to be captured, it reduces sovereign nations to mere resources to be controlled. It ignores the aspirations of these nations to industrialise, to add value to their own raw materials, and to build trade partnerships based on equality rather than dependency. As South African President Cyril Ramaphosa warned on the sidelines of the African Union summit, “We must guard against a new form of colonialism, where powerful economies once again set their sights on our minerals”.
The ‘Civilizational’ Test
Perhaps the most chilling aspect of Rubio’s address was his definition of the alliance he seeks to rebuild. He called upon Europe to join America by bonding over a shared “Western civilisation,” bound by “Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, [and] ancestry”.
In a single paragraph, Rubio outlined an exclusionary global order based on ethnic and civilisational lines. This is not the language of a rules-based international system; it is the language of a “civilisational club” that implicitly relegates the rest of the world—the majority of the world’s population—to second-class status. This framing is a direct threat to the principles of multilateralism and the United Nations Charter, which are supposed to guarantee the equal sovereignty of all states, regardless of their cultural or religious heritage.
This is the philosophical bedrock of what analysts are now calling “post-modern imperialism”—a hybrid of military coercion and financial dominance, stripped of the liberal rhetoric that once softened it. The Trump administration’s actions in Venezuela, described by Rubio as bringing its president “to justice” via a unilateral American attack, exemplify this approach, where international law is dismissed as an “abstraction”, and the sovereignty of weaker nations is rendered non-existent.
The Global South’s Response: Unity or Bust
Rubio’s speech was a wake-up call. As Ghanaian industrialist Sam Jonah wrote in an urgent open letter to African leaders following the Munich conference, Rubio’s words are “a stark reminder that in the eyes of some global powers, Africa’s independence is a historical inconvenience, and our resources remain ripe for extraction”. The Canadian Prime Minister’s warning cited in that letter rings true: “If we are not at the table, we are on the menu”.
The Global South must resist this encroachment not through isolation, but through strategic unity. The foundation for this resistance is already being laid.
First, the nations of the Global South must accelerate economic integration to escape the debt traps and conditional aid of Western financial institutions. Africa’s reliance on intra-continental trade hovers at a meagre 15%, a vulnerability that must be addressed through the full implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). By trading with each other and building regional value chains, developing nations can reduce their exposure to the whims of Western “market share” strategies.
Second, the Global South must leverage its collective geopolitical weight. The expansion of blocs like BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation demonstrates that the world is moving toward multipolarity, whether the West and its post-colonial puppet leaders across the global south like it or not.
Finally, the Global South must reclaim its narrative. Rubio’s framing of the West as the “greatest civilisation in human history” is a narrative designed to perpetuate dependency. The nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America must assert their own modernities—rooted in their traditions and histories—that do not require validation from the West. As scholar Zhang Zhipeng notes, modernisation need not mean Westernisation.
Conclusion: It is Either Freedom or Submission
Marco Rubio’s 2026 Munich speech was not a diplomatic aberration; it was a frank articulation of a worldview that has governed Nigeria’s relationship with the West since Lugard planted the flag.
But as political commentator Obi Nwakanma puts it, the choice is clear for Nigeria. Either the nation awakens to its condition as a “captured and traumatised nation that can no longer protect itself from foreign mercenaries, bandits, or economic assassins”. Or it continues its descent into what one columnist calls a “garrisoned concentration camp” where citizens are merely victims.
The struggle for Nigeria’s future will not be won in Munich, Washington, or London. It will be won on the streets, in markets, in classrooms and workplaces, where ordinary Nigerians daily confront the consequences of elite betrayal. The question is whether they will recognise that their struggle is one against both the foreign coloniser and the native puppet. The time for choosing is now because what is unsustainable cannot be sustained.