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Secretary of State Marco Rubio will deliver a speech in Greece on Wednesday calling for the renewal of Western civilization and urging allies to join the United States in rejecting the decline of the West.
The renewal of the West has been a theme during Rubio’s tenure at the helm of the State Department. He has often railed against what he views as an erosion of the values upon which Western civilization was built.
And his speech Wednesday will build on that. The remarks will commence at 11:30 a.m. ET, 6:30 p.m. local time in Greece, and is set in the ancient ruins of the citadel Acropolis.
“Secretary Rubio will deliver an address from the birthplace of Western civilization, where he will call upon Americans and Europeans alike to join together in a great renewal of the Western spirit – an inheritance stretching from Athens and Rome to Christendom to the founding of the American Republic,” Dylan Johnson, the State Department’s assistant secretary for global public affairs, told Fox News Digital.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks to media as he meets with Greek Foreign Minister Giorgos Gerapetritis during a visit on Oct. 7, 2026, in Athens, Greece. According to the State Department, the U.S. delegation focused on strengthening cooperation between the countries on defense, regional security and energy security. (Milos Bicanski/Getty Images)
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“Against the backdrop of the Acropolis, Secretary Rubio will look to the history of ancient Greece as the first full expression of the qualities that would come to define the West: curiosity, courage, ambition, and a restless spirit of exploration and discovery of the unknown,” Johnson added.
“He will warn that too much of our civilization has forgotten these essential qualities and urge our allies across the West to join the United States in rejecting decline, defending our shared heritage, and confronting a new era of great-power competition together.”
During his visit, Rubio announced a new counterterrorism partnership between the U.S. and Greece.
He emphasized the strategic importance of Greece on Wednesday, calling it a “source of stability in an unstable world.”
“As you see a world that faces these destabilizing events, you recognize how important this alliance with Greece is to the United States,” Rubio said. “It is a source of stability in an unstable world.”
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio meets with Greek Foreign Minister Giorgos Gerapetritis during a visit on Oct. 7, 2026, in Athens, Greece. According to the State Department, the U.S. delegation focused on strengthening cooperation between the countries on defense, regional security and energy security. (Milos Bicanski/Getty Images)
At the Munich Security Conference in Germany in February, Rubio delivered a speech on the topic that earned him a standing ovation from European leaders, and racked up millions of views online. One popular X user described it as “one of the greatest” speeches by a Secretary of State in decades.
Many others insisted the speech upped Rubio’s potential 2028 presidential chances.
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Rubio described that the for the five centuries before the end of World War II, the West had expanded across the globe, building “vast empires.” But, he said, after the war, Europe was in ruins, and “godless communist revolutions” in Europe caused people to believe that the West’s dominance was forever finished.
“Against that backdrop, then, as now, 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. But together, our predecessors recognized that decline was a choice, and it was a choice they refused to make,” he said.
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Rubio urged the European leaders to reinvigorate that spirit.
“This is why we do not want out allies to be shackled by guilt and shame,” he continued. “We want allies that are proud of our culture and our heritage, and understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization and who together with us, are willing and able to defend it.”
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“And this is why we don’t want allies to rationalize the broken status quo, rather than what is necessary to reckon with what is necessary to fix it. For we in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline. We do not seek to separate, but to revitalize an old friendship and renew the greatest civilization in human history.”
