The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, the United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio reminded his European audience at last month’s Munich Security Conference, because, as he put it, “godless communist revolutions and anti-colonial uprisings” had transformed the world. Against this backdrop, Rubio argued, “many came to believe that the West’s age of dominance had come to an end and that our future was destined to be a faint and feeble echo of our past.”

Urging his European colleagues to reject such a dismal view of the future of the “Christian West”, Rubio assured Europe that President Donald Trump’s project to make America Great Again (MAGA) was in fact a strategy to ‘Make the West Great Again’. “The United States and Europe, we belong together,” he reassured his European hosts. “America was founded 250 years ago, but the roots began here on this continent long before. The men 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 went on to declare: “We are part of one civilisation – Western civilisation. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilisation to which we have fallen heir.”

The United States is connected with Europe, Rubio said, “not just economically, not just militarily. We are connected spiritually and we are........

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