Two recent speeches—one by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference in February and the other by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January—paint two vastly different pictures of the world. Rubio’s challenge to the rules-based international order contrasts with Carney’s effort to salvage it; Rubio’s insular worldview contrasts with Carney’s cosmopolitan one. But from the vantage point of the global south, they paint similar pictures.
Rubio’s speech in Munich sought to reassure European allies after the more confrontational rhetoric of last year’s speech by U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance at the same conference. However, in painting the West’s golden era as a period when colonialism and imperialism thrived, it was far from reassuring for the global south. Rubio lauded the “five centuries” before the end of the Second World War as a period when the “West had been expanding” to “build vast empires extending out across the globe” while the period that followed was one of “terminal decline,” accelerated by “anti-colonial uprisings.”
