A. Wess Mitchell is a principal at the Marathon Initiative and served as assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasian affairs from 2017 to 2019. He is the author of “Great Power Diplomacy: The Skill of Statecraft from Attila the Hun to Kissinger.”
Remarks by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) at this past weekend’s Munich Security Conference didn’t just offer different policy roadmaps for the U.S. relationship with Europe. Their messages presented starkly opposing, and irreconcilable, visions of Western order.
Rubio’s speech called for a revitalization of the West as a civilizational force. He described the West not in the institutional way that that term has come to be used over the past few years, but as Christopher Columbus or Winston Churchill would have understood it: a “sacred inheritance” grounded in a shared history, faith, culture and heritage.
The secretary of state told the Europeans that this civilization was in peril from within. He pointed to years of domestic policies — open borders, deindustrialization, outsourcing of sovereignty, obeisance to the “climate cult” — that have weakened the West not just materially but spiritually. He called on Europeans to stop tinkering with a broken status quo and turn their attention to rekindling the West’s very identity and confidence as something worth defending.
Ocasio-Cortez, by contrast, called for a restoration and refinement of the international “rules-based order.” She described this order not in organic and moral terms as Rubio did but as an essentially administrative construct built in the service of certain abstract goals, which revolve around fighting “income inequality” and “social instability.”
The problem, she said, was not the construct itself but the fact that in recent years its rules have been applied unevenly, in ways that treat the West more favorably than the developing world. “What we are seeking,” she said, “is a return to a rules-based order that eliminates … hypocrisies.” She called for a return to “dozens of global compacts” that the Trump administration has “withdrawn from” and a redoubling of efforts to “stave off the scourges of authoritarianism.”
At the root of the many differences between the Rubio and Ocasio-Cortez visions lies a fundamental divergence about the purpose of order. In Rubio’s conception, which is that of historic conservatism, the chief end of order is the furtherance of a particular community of people, with a particular history, that is worth preserving in its own right. In AOC’s conception, which is that of modern progressivism, the chief end of order is a set of outcomes (equality, social justice, lower emissions) that transcend a particular community and are held to constitute universal goods.
In the first conception, democracy is valuable because it is part of the birthright of the West; in the second conception, democracy is valuable despite the fact that it is part of the birthright of the West. The heroes of Rubio’s speech — the West’s missionaries, pilgrims and explorers — are regarded by modern progressives as villains responsible for most of the world’s problems.
Rubio’s speech put its finger on what has long been a fundamental problem for the progressive vision of order: that it attaches value (indeed, the ultimate value) to institutions that are the by-product of a civilization that it holds to be uniquely and irredeemably iniquitous.
It says a lot about the underlying state of Europe today that Rubio received a standing ovation after treading boldly on many cherished progressive pieties. Many in attendance might have been relieved to hear an American reaffirmation of the Western alliance. But deep down, many present also undoubtedly know that Europe is on an unsustainable course and long to see the West flourish again in exactly the civilizational terms Rubio evoked.
Nevertheless, it is also true that most elected European leaders will be lulled by AOC’s vision. After all, she told them what they wanted to hear: that the rules of the post-Cold War era are basically right; they just need to be enforced more aggressively. And that rather than returning to a deeper cultural patrimony, as Rubio’s vision entails, they should double down on progressivism.
This would be a mistake, for two reasons.
First, because the policies that have flowed out of the policy status quo have shown themselves to be insolvent. By some estimates, nearly 30 million migrants, legal and illegal, have entered Europe over the past decade. Compliance with net-zero energy policies is projected to cost European economies $33 trillion by 2050. Europe is falling behind in innovation (it has produced 85 percent fewer tech start-ups worth more than $1 billion than the U.S. and about one-fifth as much venture capital funding). It is the manifest failure of European establishment policies that has driven the rapid growth of populist parties across much of the continent.
Second, and even more seriously, the status quo in Western policy establishments lacks a fundamental component, without which no order can endure for long: a core of meaning worth defending. An order characterized by moral worth and good laws (what the Greeks called eunomia) is the by-product of a community that is confident of its mooring in a civilization. The former flows from the latter, not vice versa. If the post-Cold War period shows nothing else, it is that an attempt to build order on procedure — even that noblest of procedures, democracy — is hollow and doomed to fail if it neglects the soul. As Rubio said in his speech, “The fundamental question we must answer is … what exactly are we defending.”
In 1949, the NATO charter answered that question when it committed members to safeguard the “freedom, common heritage and civilization of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.” For too long modern Western leaders have evoked the second half of that passage but neglected or even scorned the civilizational aspect. Rubio’s speech was a welcome corrective, and Europe would be wise to listen.
The post Rubio and Ocasio-Cortez just made cases to Europe. Only one is right. appeared first on Washington Post.
