Rubio’s Munich speech affirmed white Christian supremacy, linking America’s racist founding to Europe’s imperial past and evangelical expansionism today
Joseph Massad is professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University, New York
Cross-posted from Middle East Eye
Photo: Munich Security Conference
If US President Donald Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth declared America a Christian republic at the National Prayer Breakfast in early February, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has now declared the country a white European Christian republic.
In a speech delivered last week to European heads of state at the Security Conference in Munich, Rubio declared war on all non-European non-white peoples inside the US and around the world.
Rubio made clear that America was, and should again be, a white country: “Our home may be in the Western Hemisphere, but we will always be a child of Europe.”
To the detriment of more than 140 million Americans who are not white and do not issue from Europe, Rubio unflinchingly stated: “We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization, and who, together with us, are willing and able to defend it.”
Lest Europe forget, Rubio reminded it of its own Christian identity: “The United States and Europe, we belong together. America was founded 250 years ago, but the roots began here on this continent long before. The man who settled and built the nation of my birth arrived on our shores carrying the memories and the traditions and the Christian faith of their ancestors as a sacred inheritance, an unbreakable link between the old world and the new.”
Rubio’s remarks echoed the anti-non-white immigrant policies instituted in the US since the birth of the white Christian republic and reasserted by Trump.
He spoke directly of the threat that African, Asian, and Latin American immigrants constitute to Europe, as well as to the “fabric” of white America: “But we must also gain control of our national borders. Controlling who and how many people enter our countries, this is not an expression of xenophobia. It is not hate. It is a fundamental act of national sovereignty. And the failure to do so is not just an abdication of one of our most basic duties owed to our people. It is an urgent threat to the fabric of our societies and the survival of our civilization itself.”
Rubio’s rhetoric is not far removed from the white supremacist American discourse, policies and ideology that have defined the United States since its independence 250 years ago, let alone from the time-honoured white Christian supremacist tradition of its European counterparts.
White Christian supremacy
From its founding, the US enacted laws banning non-white people from immigrating to the racist settler-colonial state.
Its first Naturalization Act of 1790 stipulated that citizenship would be granted exclusively to any “free white person” who had resided in the country for two years and to their children under the age of 21.
While Rubio proudly referenced his Italian and Spanish ancestry, he seems unaware that in the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, Slavs, Italians and Irish in the United States were considered not white. Spaniards, despite ranking higher than the Italians, were deemed “low-status” whites.
White Protestant American hostility to European Catholics could not be mitigated at the time, for fear that these “papists” might destroy America’s master-race democracy.
It is unclear whether America’s racist immigration laws, relaxed only in the 1960s, were similarly not based on “hate” but on “love”.
Regardless, the European audience applauded Rubio’s white Christian supremacy, and why shouldn’t they? This is fully consonant with their own history and present.
During the late 19th century, calls for an alliance between white Christian supremacist Europeans and white Christian supremacist Americans were legion, especially among the British. Britain’s Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain championed Teutonic racial supremacy at the time.
In a major November 1899 speech, he called on the US and Germany to form a “Teutonic” alliance with Britain.
Not to be outdone, in speeches in 1933 and 1934 and in a letter sent to the Daily Mail on 4 September 1937, Adolf Hitler also proposed an accord between the three empires of “white people” and of “Germanic” origin – Britain, the US and an expanded Germany.
During the 1930s, Britain pursued an anti-Soviet alliance with Hitler on the basis of Teutonic Christian commonality and capitalist solidarity – identified antisemitically in the West since the Russian Revolution of 1917 as a struggle against a “Judeo-Bolshevist conspiracy” – by signing the Anglo-German Naval Agreement in June 1935 and, in 1936, acquiescing in Hitler’s remilitarisation of the Rhineland in violation of the Versailles Treaty.
The September 1938 Munich Agreement between Nazi Germany, Britain, France and Italy ultimately freed Hitler to expand eastwards, prompting the Soviet Union to sign a non-aggression pact in an effort to delay invasion.
Before the agreement was signed, US ambassador to France William C Bullitt, who considered Russians “Asians”, had asserted the importance of halting “Asiatic despotism” and saving “European civilization” from a fratricidal war that the Nazis might launch but that could end in an Asiatic triumph over Europe.
Settler-colonial pride
In Munich, Rubio declared to America’s white European allies that had it not been for the Americans and Western Europe, Soviet communism – not Nazism and fascism of Western Europe – would have destroyed “thousands of years of Western civilization”.
It seems that non-white immigrants and Third World countries might yet accomplish what the Soviets failed to do if Europe does not support America’s current wars against them.
The “noble civilisation” that Rubio supports and seeks to perpetuate through a rejuvenated alliance with white Europe is not only white Christian supremacy but also white settler-colonialism, a legacy that white Europeans and white Americans, he insists, should feel “proud” of rather than be “shackled by guilt and shame”.
Rubio extols the history of the barbarism that Europe and the US government visited upon their own non-white, non-Christian peoples and on the globe as a source of pride: “We want to do it together with you, with a Europe that is proud of its heritage and of its history; with a Europe that has the spirit of creation of liberty that sent ships out into uncharted seas and birthed our civilization.”
The transatlantic white alliance that Rubio seeks is “an alliance based on the recognition that we, the West, have inherited together… something that is unique and distinctive and irreplaceable, because this, after all, is the very foundation of the transatlantic bond”.
“For five centuries”, he added, “before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding – its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe”.
Indeed, it is the Protestant Scottish settlers of still-colonised Northern Ireland whom he identifies as the heroes of white and Christian America: “Our frontiers were shaped by Scots-Irish – that proud, hearty clan from the hills of Ulster that gave us Davy Crockett and Mark Twain and Teddy Roosevelt and Neil Armstrong.”
Evangelical expansionism
It is in this context that the fanatical Protestant evangelical US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, jumps in to translate what his boss at the State Department means.
In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, the right-wing pundit asked Huckabee whether “according to the Bible, the descendants of Abraham would receive land that today would include essentially the entire Middle East” and whether Israel therefore had a right to that land.
Huckabee answered: “It would be fine if they took it all.” Unlike the applause that Rubio received from white supremacist Europeans, the non-white countries of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Oman, along with more than a dozen other governments and the secretariats of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and the League of Arab States, expressed their displeasure.
They denounced Huckabee’s views as “extremist”, “unacceptable” and a “blatant violation” of international law, as well as a direct contradiction of Trump’s stated opposition to the annexation of the West Bank.
Without repudiating his claim that it would be fine if Israel “took it all”, the US Embassy in Jerusalem claimed Huckabee’s comment had been “taken out of context”, while Huckabee himself later described it as “somewhat of a hyperbolic statement”.
Rubio, meanwhile, had declared non-white citizens of the United States and Europe, as well as the non-white peoples of the entire globe, to be nothing less than “the forces of civilizational erasure that today menace both America and Europe alike”.
Whether this, too, was a hyperbolic statement remains to be seen. As for those who menace Israel, Rubio describes them as no more than “barbarians”.
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