On February 14, 2026, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio addressed a love letter to the Munich Security Conference with a hegemonic message that sought to reassure European elites by asserting a renewed ‘civilisational’ purpose – to jointly roll back the consequences of decolonisation that had led to the decline of the ‘great Western empires’ of the 19th and 20th centuries.Exactly one year after Vice-President J.D. Vance’s confrontational 2025 speech at the same venue, Rubio sought to reframe the administration’s posture toward Europe and the world. Vance’s February 2025 remarks had stunned attendees by declaring that Europe’s greatest threat was “not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor” but “the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values – values shared with the United States of America.” He lambasted European leaders for suppressing free speech (by which he meant neo-fascist speech) and argued there’s “nothing more urgent than mass migration,” linking it to security risks and criticising leaders for ignoring public concerns. Vance said democracies cannot survive by dismissing voters’ pleas on borders and cultural change.The US vice president’s 2025 address was a blunt ideological intervention: conditioning American support on Europe embracing Trump’s political-cultural approach, while accusing leaders of “running in fear of their own voters” and comparing some actions to Soviet tactics. It shocked the audience, drawing rebukes for its culture-war focus over traditional security threats, and set a confrontational tone for the Trump administration’s transatlantic relations.Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.Rubio’s 2026 speech has softened the delivery but preserved core themes. Positioning the US as Europe’s “child,” he declared: “For us Americans, our home may be in the Western Hemisphere, but we will always be a child of Europe.” He invoked “centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.” Rubio warned of “forces of civilizational erasure that today menace both America and Europe alike,” blaming “mistakes” like unfettered globalization and mass migration. Rejecting “polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline,” he called for joint reindustrialisation, secure supply chains, advancements in AI and automation, and “a Western supply chain for critical minerals not vulnerable to extortion from other powers.” Most provocatively, he urged “a unified effort to compete for market share in the economies of the Global South” – a renewed neo-colonial offensive.Rubio, Vance good cop, bad cop actThis progression – from Vance’s 2025 scolding on civilisational-cultural matters and migration to Rubio’s 2026 collaborative “renewal” of Western supremacy – illustrates the adaptability of American exceptionalism. It builds on the historical duality: Woodrow Wilson’s liberal internationalism and Donald Trump’s far-right nationalism masked racialised hierarchies and imperial ambitions under claims of superiority. Vance’s blunt critique of Europe’s “retreat” from values echoed far-right anxieties about cultural and demographic change; Rubio repackaged these into a polished transatlantic project for economic and civilisational dominance.Rubio’s Munich address conspicuously erased the foundational role of slavery and African Americans in shaping the United States. Rubio repeatedly framed America as a direct “child of Europe,” emphasising that settlers “arrived on our shores carrying the memories and the traditions and the Christian faith of their ancestors as a sacred inheritance.” This narrative traces American origins solely to European Christian settlers who “discovered, built, and transformed empty lands,” omitting entirely both Native Americans let alone enslaved Africans whose forced labor built the nation’s capital (including the White House), economy, and infrastructure, as well as free Black contributions to culture, innovation, and resistance. During this Black History Month, Rubio’s speech pointedly ignored centuries of African American history – from chattel slavery’s brutality to Reconstruction gains, Jim Crow, civil rights struggles, and ongoing systemic legacies – reducing US formation to a seamless European inheritance.By urging European allies to reject “guilt and shame” over history and embrace pride in this “noble civilisation,” Rubio’s rhetoric aligns with broader Trump-era efforts to sanitise America’s past, sidelining slavery’s role in forging the very power he seeks to renew transatlantically.Woodrow Wilson.Wilson and Trump – rooted in racial-class and imperial hierarchyWilson’s exceptionalism cloaked racism in progressive universalism. Domestically, from 1913, he enabled resegregation of federal offices: photographs on job applications screened out Black candidates; segregated facilities confined them to menial roles, slashing employment in key departments like the Post Office and Treasury. His 1915 White House screening of The Birth of a Nation fuelled Klan resurgence and 1919’s deadly racial riots. Internationally, he blocked Japan’s Racial Equality Proposal (1919) and oversaw Haiti’s brutal 1915–1934 occupation – imposing corvée labour, censorship, and suppression to secure US financial control under “civilising” pretexts.Trump’s variant discards pretence and nurses grievance: from the 1989 Central Park Five ads (insisting on guilt post-exoneration) to branding Mexican immigrants “rapists,” the Muslim ban, family separations, and second-term deportations often via racial profiling of appearance, accent, or profession. Praise for strongmen like Orbán and Putin prioritises ethno-nationalist alignments.Rubio’s address bridges Vance’s confrontational edge with collaborative veneer. By emphasising Christianity and migration’s threat to “cohesion” and “continuity” – echoing conspiratorial ‘replacement’ fears – he aligns with Vance’s 2025 warnings while projecting outward. Competing aggressively in the Global South’s markets and resources implies neo-imperial leverage through investment, tariffs and China exclusion. This revives Western entitlement – Wilson’s mandates, Trump’s exemptions – framed as mutual defence.The flexibility and growing fragility of exceptionalismExceptionalism’s duality persists: the “light” of a civilisational mission (Wilson’s democracy, Vance’s liberty defence, Trump’s sovereignty, Rubio’s renewal) veiling a “dark” racial and class empire. It divides racialised classes at home while justifying dominance abroad.In the domestic arena, Trumpism’s second act is showing unmistakable signs of unravelling, triggering widespread civil disobedience, sanctuary-city defiance, workplace walkouts in agriculture and construction. There is a burgeoning of cross-racial coalitions that bridge Black, Latino, Asian American, and white working-class communities long divided by the administration’s racialised rhetoric. Federal courthouses are inundated with injunction suits; state attorneys general mount the legal barricades; and public approval for the immigration crackdown has dipped below 40 percent in multiple polls, even among some erstwhile MAGA voters weary of economic disruption and family separations reminiscent of 2018. This growing delegitimisation is compounded by elite fractures, as corporate donors hedge, traditional Republican institutions distance themselves from the most extreme executive actions, and whispers of a “post-Trump” realignment circulate in conservative think tanks. Abroad, resistance hardens. European capitals, stung by Vance’s 2025 scolding and Rubio’s 2026 conditional “renewal,” accelerate strategic autonomy—bolstering EU defence spending, diversifying energy away from US leverage, and deepening trade pacts with the Global South that sideline American firms. In the multipolar arena, China and Russia are happy to fill the vacuum: just look at Beijing’s Belt and Road investments surge in Africa and Latin America, or Moscow’s diplomatic outreach in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. BRICS expansion and currency de-dollarisation experiments erode US financial hegemony, and multi-aligned states – Brazil, and also India to some extent – refuse to openly choose sides in what they increasingly frame as a declining Western bid for civilisational supremacy. Exceptionalism’s veneer may be flexible enough to accommodate Wilson’s selective liberalism, Trump’s raw nationalism, Vance’s ideological confrontation and Rubio’s transatlantic polish but it is cracking under the combined weight of internal dissent and external rejection. What emerges is not inevitable collapse but a protracted reckoning: the United States must either confront the racialised hierarchies and imperial entitlements that have long sustained its exceptionalist myth or face accelerating marginalisation in a world no longer willing to accept its self-appointed guardianship. The path forward lies not in renewed civilisational claims but in genuine reckoning with power – domestically through inclusive economic justice and racial repair, globally through equitable partnerships that abandon the logic of dominance.Inderjeet Parmar is professor of international politics and associate dean of research in the School of Policy and Global Affairs at City St George’s, University of London. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and writes the American Imperium column for The Wire. His Twitter handle is @USEmpire. He is the author of several books, including Foundations of the American Century, and is currently writing on the history, politics, and crises of the US foreign policy establishment.