Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday that the West had come to feel ashamed of the achievements that set it apart, and that it no longer believed it had earned its greatness. He spoke at the Pnyx in Athens, the hill where the assembly of ancient Athens met.
“Over time, we in the West came to feel ashamed of the very things that made us exceptional,” Rubio said. “We felt embarrassed that our achievements set us apart from the rest of the world. Our prosperity somehow became a source of guilt. We no longer believed we deserved and had earned our greatness.”
“The word ‘nationalism’ became a dirty word,” he said. “And so we tore down our monuments; we condemned our own history. And in too many places, we taught our children to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit.”
He tied that loss of pride to concrete choices. “In the process, we opened our borders and outsourced our industry, and allowed our militaries to wither and to decay,” he said. “And with every passing year, we seemed to outsource more of our sovereignty, transferring our decisions to global bureaucracies far beyond the reach of our control.”
Rubio said the turn against national loyalty had become a habit of foreign policy. “It has become fashionable today to believe that enlightened foreign policy means prioritizing the global community over one’s own people,” he said. He said the ancient Greeks “knew that there was nothing selfish or wrong about loyalty to your nation, nor anything selfish or wrong about fighting to defend its interests above all else.”
He set the Trump administration against that habit. “Under President Trump, the United States has made its choice,” he said. “We choose the unapologetic pursuit of national power: to take back control of our critical supply chains, to reindustrialize our economy, to rebuild our defense, to fight for dominance of the technologies and industries of the future.”
He listed the fields he said that choice covered: advanced manufacturing, “super intelligence,” drones, weapons, chips, minerals, cyber, energy, factories, and a return of astronauts to the moon. He called it “the classical understanding of politics and of statecraft that the Trump Administration hopes to reclaim.”
He closed by reversing the shame he had described. “It shows us that ours is the inheritance of great heroes, and that we should be proud — that we should be intensely proud — of where we come from,” he said of Greek history. “The story of our civilization is the greatest story ever known to man. And it began here, with the first men and women of the West.”
Rubio has been secretary of state since January 21, 2025, according to his State Department biography. He previously served as a U.S. senator from Florida. The department posted the Athens remarks as an official transcript on Oct. 7, 2026.