Marco Rubio stood in Munich last Saturday and did something American secretaries of state haven’t done in decades: he told European allies they belong to the same civilization, used the phrase “Western civilization” without apology, and grounded the transatlantic alliance not in abstract “rules-based order” but in “the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry.”
The audience—accustomed to diplomatic euphemism—responded with unusual warmth. Several gave a standing ovation. The moderator called it “a message of reassurance.” But read the transcript closely, and you’ll notice something unusual: Rubio spent more time critiquing post-Cold War policy choices than threatening to abandon NATO. He named the problems—deindustrialization, supply chain vulnerability, mass migration, energy dependence—before offering solutions. And he framed the entire speech around a question security conferences typically avoid: “What exactly are we defending?”
The moderator was wrong. This wasn’t reassurance. It was the articulation of a doctrine of the West.
What All Doctrines Do
Every significant foreign policy doctrine redefines the unit of analysis—the thing we’re protecting. The Truman Doctrine contained communism across nation-states. The Carter Doctrine protected Persian Gulf oil supplies. The Bush Doctrine preempted terrorism before it reached American soil.
Rubio’s Munich speech redefines the unit from “the transatlantic alliance” to “Western civilization.” That’s not semantic. It changes what counts as a threat, what qualifies as defense, and who sits inside the circle of concern.
Consider his list of post-Cold War failures: deindustrialization, outsourced sovereignty, dependence on adversaries for critical supply chains, mass migration threatening “the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people.” These aren’t security threats in the traditional sense—no missiles involved. They’re civilizational threats that erode the substrate on which military alliances depend.
This explains the speech’s most peculiar line: “National security is not merely a series of technical questions—how much we spend on defense or where we deploy it... The fundamental question we must answer at the outset is what exactly are we defending, because armies do not fight for abstractions. Armies fight for a people; armies fight for a nation. Armies fight for a way of life.”
That directly challenges sixty years of NATO communiqués, which meticulously avoided discussing “a way of life” in favor of “territorial integrity” and “democratic values.” Rubio is saying the abstract version failed. We need to name what we’re actually protecting.
Permission Structure
European leaders reacted with visible relief to a speech that repeatedly criticized their choices. Rubio called their energy policies a “climate cult” that impoverishes citizens. He said they “outsourced sovereignty” and invested in “massive welfare states at the cost of maintaining the ability to defend themselves.” He described migration policies as threats to civilizational survival.
And they applauded.
He gave them permission to have the conversation. For two decades, European elites struggled to discuss immigration, industrial policy, or cultural continuity without accusations of nationalism or xenophobia. The American secretary of state showing up and saying “mass migration threatens the cohesion of our societies” doesn’t just shift the Overton window—it blows it off the hinges.
Notice how Rubio threaded this needle. He didn’t say “stop all immigration” (specific policy). He said “controlling who and how many people enter our countries... is a fundamental act of national sovereignty” (principle). He didn’t demand Europe abandon climate goals. He said energy policies shouldn’t “impoverish our people” while competitors “exploit oil and coal and natural gas” as “leverage” (framework). He provided analytical tools that lead naturally toward conclusions without declaring them.
This is how doctrine operates when it’s working. It doesn’t command; it orients. It tells you where to look and what to take seriously.
Three Tensions to Watch
If the Rubio Doctrine becomes operational, watch for three tensions:
The institution problem: Rubio said, “We can no longer place the so-called global order above the vital interests of our people and our nations.” Then he listed four crises—Gaza, Ukraine, Iran’s nuclear program, Venezuela—where the UN failed and American action succeeded. The message: multilateral institutions are subordinate to national interest, not arbiters of it.
But NATO itself is a multilateral institution. How do you defend one while subordinating others without a principled distinction? Rubio’s answer seems to be: institutions are tools, not sources of legitimacy. NATO serves civilizational defense; others don’t. That’s coherent, but it’s a massive departure from seventy-five years of policy treating institutional legitimacy as intrinsically valuable.
The boundary problem: If the unit is “Western civilization,” who’s inside it? Rubio listed: “shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry.” That’s specific. And potentially exclusionary.
Does Turkey belong? (NATO member, not Christian-majority.) Japan? (Democratic ally, different civilizational heritage.) These aren’t abstract questions—they determine who gets defense commitments and favorable trade terms. During the Cold War, the boundary was simple: communist or not? Post-Cold War tried to make it simpler: liberal democracy or not? Rubio’s framing—civilizational rather than ideological—is older, more tribal, and messier to operationalize.
The prosperity problem: Rubio focused on reindustrialization, supply chain sovereignty, competing for “market share in the Global South,” building “Western supply chains for critical minerals not vulnerable to extortion.”
This is 21st-century mercantilism: explicit industrial policy, friend-shoring, strategic economic competition. It contradicts the post-1945 consensus that prosperity comes from openness and multilateral trade.
EU–China goods trade is roughly three-quarters of a trillion euros a year, and Germany’s industrial base depends on Chinese demand. Unwinding that in favor of “Western supply chains” won’t just require new factories. It will likely mean accepting lower growth for a generation. Rubio acknowledged “long-term challenges... that are going to be irritants in our relationship with China.” In other words, deglobalization will be expensive and painful, and we’re doing it anyway.
Why This Doctrine Exists Now
The intellectual groundwork has existed for thirty years—Samuel Huntington published The Clash of Civilizations in 1993. What’s new is the evidence. Three developments made this doctrine possible:
The pandemic exposed supply chain fragility. When Americans couldn’t get masks or generic antibiotics because production had shifted to China, “comparative advantage” stopped sounding like economics and started sounding like strategic vulnerability.
The Ukraine war demonstrated European energy dependence. Germany built Nord Stream 2 to Russia, then found itself funding Putin’s war through gas purchases while lecturing allies about “rules-based order.” The war made the cost visible.
Migration flows reached levels European welfare states can’t absorb. Germany received about 334,000 asylum applications in 2023 alone. The mid-2010s crisis involved well over a million arrivals/registrations tied to asylum in Germany. Sweden, population 10 million, accepted 400,000 asylum seekers since 2015. These represent fiscal obligations and integration challenges that compound over generations.
Doctrines emerge when enough people conclude the previous framework failed. The Truman Doctrine emerged after Soviet expansion surprised policymakers. The Carter Doctrine after the Iranian Revolution demonstrated oil vulnerability. The Bush Doctrine after 9/11 revealed failed states could host attacks on the homeland.
The Rubio Doctrine emerges after three decades of policy choices produced outcomes that voting publics in the US and Europe rejected. The doctrine doesn’t argue why those publics are right. It accepts that they are, and builds a strategic framework around that acceptance.
What Changed in Munich
The most revealing moment came during Q&A about China. Rubio—known as a “China hawk”—gave a surprisingly measured answer: “The two largest economies in the world... we have an obligation to communicate... it would be geopolitical malpractice to not be in conversations with China.”
That’s not hawkishness. That’s great power realism. Rubio explicitly said, “We expect China to act in their national interest, as we expect every nation-state to act in their national interest. And the goal of diplomacy is to try to navigate those times in which our national interests come into conflict.”
Compare that to the Bush Doctrine’s freedom agenda or Obama’s “international community” framing. Rubio isn’t promising to spread values or build coalitions of the willing. He’s promising to defend a specific civilization’s interests in competition with other civilizations defending theirs.
By naming what previous doctrines left implicit—that alliances rest on shared civilizational foundations, not just shared interests—Rubio makes certain policy conclusions feel inevitable. If mass migration threatens “the cohesion of our societies,” border control isn’t xenophobia; it’s existential defense. If supply chain dependence threatens “the continuity of our culture,” reshoring isn’t protectionism; it’s strategic necessity.
You don’t have to agree with the premises to recognize how the logic operates. And whether or not this becomes formal US doctrine, the framework is now available—articulated by the American secretary of state, cautiously endorsed by European leaders, and grounded in recent historical experience that gives it explanatory power.
The closest parallel is 1947, when George Marshall announced the plan that would bear his name. That speech lasted twelve minutes and rebuilt a continent. Rubio’s lasted thirty-eight minutes and might just redefine what we’re rebuilding it for.
The doctrine that dare not speak its name has now been spoken. We’ll spend the next decade discovering what that means.