“The story of our civilization is the greatest story ever known to man.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered these triumphalist words earlier this month as he stood before the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. Rubio’s speech, which centered the need for Western civilizational rejuvenation, received laudatory marks among conservative circles. On a certain level, this is unsurprising. Civilizationism is indeed the cause du jour on the new right.

But on closer examination, one suspects that Rubio is not truly offering some radical new vision, but a lot of the same.

Take his bemoaning of the West for supposedly creating a vacuum in global leadership:

“Others were all too happy to fill the vacuum that we left – the vacuum left behind by our weakness. And as the West’s confidence faltered, its adversaries and its rivals only grew more assertive, building up their own wealth and their own power in our stead… Under President Trump, the United States has made its choice. We choose the unapologetic pursuit of national power.”

Rubio goes on to juxtapose Western civilization with the “fanatics like the radical mullahs of Iran, whose cult of death hails child suicide bombers as national heroes, and portrays martyrdom as an end to itself.”

Clearly, Rubio recognizes that civilizational renewal resonates with national conservatives right now. But by so singularly focusing on power as the means to achieve such rejuvenation, he is in reality laying the rhetorical groundwork for sustaining American primacy. The portrait of Iran as irrationally barbaric also precludes any sort of diplomatic resolution to the war in Iran. Such a speech is thus no primer for American retrenchment; it is simply a rhetorical rebranding of the Bush-era Global War on Terror.

For decades, neoconservatism and liberal internationalism largely prevailed over the Washingtonian establishment. While the two respective ideologies may have somewhat diverged on their prescribed course of action, each operated from an underlying interventionist impulse, the use of American military might to socio-engineer change abroad.

Such an impulse thrust Democratic and Republican administrations alike to pursue grandiose nation-building projects without time-bound objectives. Unsurprisingly, they failed: the Iraq and Afghanistan debacles, Libya’s descent into sheer anarchy, arming the “moderate” Syrian opposition.

All this gives ample reason for introspection, not into the manner in which each project was conducted, but the underlying ideologies themselves. Sadly, however, such introspection is not really taking place. Instead, as Rubio vividly illustrated, the interventionist principle beckons onward, meeting the current moment by co-opting language more amenable to today’s populist-nationalist conservatives, but maintaining the baseline policy prescriptions of yesteryear’s Cold War hawks and neoconservatives.

Other Republicans have already seized on Rubio’s rhetorical sleight of hand to maintain their hawkish positions. Take Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker’s recent statement justifying continued American support for Ukraine. Speaking to NATO’s resolute response to Russian aggression, Wicker concludes his statement by referencing Rubio’s speech:

“[Rubio] reminded us that the free world was born in that birthplace of democracy and that Europe and America are bound to one another still. He clarified our shared mission, saying, ‘We must strengthen an alliance capable of confronting threats of our age’ As I return from Europe, I could not agree more.”

As Luke Nicastro, senior editor at The American Conservative magazine, astutely points out , this is no more than conventional Atlanticist interventionism under the guise of civilizationism. Clearly, the grandiosity of Rubio’s speech does not lend itself to a reconsideration of America's place in an increasingly multipolar world. It is a recipe for American overextension and domination.

A similar dynamic is unfolding on the American left. Amid Israel’s appalling onslaught on Gaza, the spirit of solidarity and self-determination has understandably become the defining ethos of progressive foreign policy thinking. But, observing attempts to tie this sentiment to American foreign policy beyond Gaza, one cannot help but notice the mere rehashing of liberal internationalism, rather than a fresh new vision.

Take the words of Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who calls for a Democratic foreign policy centered around human rights and self-determination, from Ukraine to Gaza and beyond. Such abstractions are grounds for American interventionism in perpetuity, untethered from concrete American interests. It is no break from the past, but simply the preservation of Wilsonian idealism that has dictated so much American foreign meddling.

Khanna follows from the speech by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) at the Munich Security Conference in February. She outlined a “ foreign policy for the working class ,” a policy that prioritizes the global working class over consolidated oligarchical capital. On the surface, such a vision appears to be charting a new path forward beyond conventional Democratic foreign-policy thinking. But when pressed at the conference on ongoing conflicts such as the war in Ukraine, AOC nonetheless retreated to conventional liberal internationalist bromides, decrying American retrenchment as a pathway to global authoritarianism.

Rather than embrace a foreign policy that genuinely recalibrates American strategic thinking, politicians on both the right and left remain wedded to interventionist impulses divorced from concrete realities.

Civilizationism is certainly an ideology in itself. But it need not fuel primacy. In fact, if Rubio really sought to view the world through a civilizationist lens, it would be prudent for him to acknowledge and understand other civilizations beyond the West.

This should begin with Persian civilization, one that of course predates the Islamic Republic by thousands of years. A true examination of its history would expose Trump’s threats to end it as grotesque. Such an empathic approach, however, might lead to a more restrained approach and god forbid, a diplomatic resolution to the war, which Rubio and the Trump administration seem disinclined to pursue with its adversaries.

The interventionist duopoly — including neoconservatives and internationalists — has insidiously continued for far too long, precisely because of each camp’s rhetorical flexibility to meet the current zeitgeist. If such machinations are not called out, American foreign policy will not evolve for the better, but remain entrenched in orthodox interventionist thinking to further destabilization and bloodshed.