Marco Rubio’s Munich Speech Sanewashed US-Backed Dictatorships

from Common Dreams

Much has already been written about Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s damage-control mission to the Munich Security Conference, sent to cool transatlantic tensions mere weeks after President Donald Trump hinted multiple times at annexing Greenland by force. But beneath the conciliatory tone was Rubio’s explicit defense of the fight against “godless communist revolutions” and “anti-colonial uprisings” throughout the world, a horrific sanitization of the US-backed dictatorships that terrorized Latin America and beyond in the last century.

Rubio painted a sweeping narrative of Western civilization under threat. “The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline,” he declared, “accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map.”

 

That line is a direct homage to the doctrines of Cold Warriors Henry Kissinger and Jeane Kirkpatrick, both of whom infamously argued that right-wing dictators were acceptable allies in the fight against communism—regardless of their brutality—because they were “authoritarian” rather than “totalitarian.” Yes, even if those “communists” were democratically elected, popular, and nonviolent.

The implication, delivered with straight-faced solemnity in Munich, is that the US-backed campaign against leftist movements in the Cold War was a noble defense of freedom, democracy, and Christian civilization. 

In the 1970s and 1980s, the US helped set up Operation Condor, a network that far-right dictatorships operated throughout the 1970s and 1980s as a coordinated system of state terror across South America. The Chilean intelligence service chillingly described it as “something similar to what Interpol has in Paris, but devoted to subversion.” It was, also important to mention, explicitly framed by the US government to defend Christian civilization (also called the Banzer Plan).

Rubio’s Christian civilization trope is an ode to a very specific, pro-corporate, pro-authoritarian, and white-supremacist Christianity, the same ideology championed by Donald Trump’s MAGA movement. This is the same ideology that colonized, enslaved, and subjugated Latin America and the Global South, through the European institutions he lifted up in his speech. Centuries later, the United States resurrected this crusade through the CIA, which funded and even armed the rise of far-right, pro-capitalist Evangelical movements, to actively oppose and dismantle the more redistributive, popular Catholic churches rooted in liberation theology.

Many of the right-wing paramilitaries and dictatorships backed by the US were explicitly Christian. They, however, killed priests who did not adhere to rigid far-right fundamentalism—Catholic groups were central to the resistance. That Evangelical fundamentalism now fuels the region’s new wave of right-wing leaders, including Jair Bolsonaro, Javier Milei, Maria Corina Machado, and José Antonio Kast, who are also fanatical supporters of Israel...

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