United States Calls on Europe to Join in Return to Era of Western Expansionism

In addressing the Munich Security Conference on 14 February 2026, US secretary of state Marco Rubio told European leaders that the Trump administration is calling on EU nations to join America in reembarking upon the path of western expansion, which these nations had been on until World War II, and he underscored that this requires curbing mass immigration to preserve western civilisation.

According to Rubio and hence, the MAGA administration, the post-World War II concept that the globe would become “a world without borders” was a “foolish idea” as it “ignored human nature”. This process, he continued, has cost the Global West dearly, via deindustrialisation and mass immigration, which now threatens social cohesion and continuity of both culture and people.

This colonial vision, which served from the time of Colombus until post-WWII decolonisation began, has been critiqued over readers’ entire lifetimes. The era the Trump administration is reinvoking was prior to the establishment of universal rights, and while Rubio plainly suggests rights denials for the Global South, he neglects to mention his government is vying for the same for its own constituents.

The Trump administration has taken this drastic detour from globalisation and the rules-based order, at a point when US economic hegemony is under threat due to rising China and increasingly, the BRICS alliance. The proposed return to western expansionism, whilst its culture and civilisation are understood to be under threat, is steeped in the white supremacist great replacement theory.

And whilst Rubio was speaking to Europeans, this emerging vision of a return to “might is right” and the exploitation of others for economic benefit, these shifts in our nation’s closest ally’s foreign policy is morphing the political climate here, and as our PM has long hardened his stance in response to Trump, the Australian right are now in a belligerent scramble for the populist vote.

The transatlantic era 2.0

“This is the path that president Trump and the United States has embarked upon,” Rubio continued in his speech at the Munich event, which involves western heads of states and military officials having met annually since 1963. “It is the path we ask you here in Europe to join us on. It is a path we have walked together before and hope to walk together again.”

“For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding – its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe,” the US secretary of state continued on, as he evoked nostalgia for the “white man’s burden”.

This brazen attempt to upend the values that have underpinned the international order for the last 80-odd years is coming on the back of the open settler colonial mass murder and starvation program to usurp land progressed by Israel in the Gaza Strip, which has given way to further expansionist warfare against neighbouring countries, like Lebanon and Syria, in pursuit of “Greater Israel”.

Rubio adds that the reason the Trump administration has taken an aggressive attitude towards its European allies is that it wants them to toughen up in order to achieve this return to broad western imperialism. This will be about defending western people, interests and freedom, and it will not be about the West operating “a global welfare state” and atoning for the “sins of past generations”.

But this “transatlantic bond” based on “shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers” is under threat of “mass migration” and the western world can only be saved by gaining control of national borders, which is not an idea based in hate or xenophobia, but an expression of “national sovereignty” for the survival of western civilisation.

Amerikan Nazism

The Trump administration appears to have planned on ditching the post-WWII international order prior to taking office for the second time, as the attempt to wind back the clock to a period before civil rights and the welfare state have been obvious in its domestic policies, ever since US president Donald Trump sent tech bro billionaire Elon Musk in to trash the US government bureaucracy.

The Republican party has further launched a mass deportation drive of undocumented migrants that’s involved rolling out a new domestic security force, which comprises of armed and masked ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents being sent into cities that do not align with Trump’s antiimmigration, antimigrant stance to randomly and violently seize and deport immigrants.

These deportation drives involve ICE agents terrorising communities and the brutalisation of immigrants and citizens. Two citizens have been shot dead, and the agents who killed them have been given impunity.  This terrorising of the domestic population, further involves detention centres where migrants are kept in deplorable conditions and many are completely disappearing from them.

But the reinvigorating of western imperialism really kicked off when the US military swept into Venezuela on 3 January 2026 to kidnap then president Nicolás Maduro, and further to secure US control over the South American nation’s oil reserves, which are the largest on Earth. And Trump is further threatening to topple the Cuban government, as he has it in an economic stranglehold.

The US military has again struck random boats in both the Caribbean and the Pacific, killing 11 occupants this week. The Trump administration asserts the dead are narcotraffickers, but many consider them fishermen. This is the 42nd strike on “drugboats” in Latin American waters since last September.  And this aggressive, illegal behaviour serves to further break the world order.

The authoritarian creep down under

As can be seen with Rubio’s speech to European leaders in Munich last week, the Trump White House not only considers that it is embarking on a new age of western imperialism, but it has also been provoking its allies to make similar reforms. The US State Department has already warned this country that it is monitoring the Australian migrant population for its criminal behaviour.

Our prime minister Anthony Albanese has been at pains to placate the new White House, while Trump did not seek a personal meeting with him, until a move by China made Australian rare earths more attractive to the US president. Although federal Labor’s recognition of the state of Palestine last September, appears to be a stain upon Albanese in Trump’s eyes.

Ever since the 14 December 2025 Bondi Beach massacre, Albanese has bent to the will of the Israel lobby to implement combatting antisemitism criminal and migration laws, as well as implementing the envoy’s plan, which involves the adoption of the IHRA working definition of antisemitism to supress free speech about Israeli atrocities, and there’s a Royal Commission on antisemitism to boot.

The Liberal party has taken its own internal hardline post-Bondi, as just leaked documents reveal that former leader Sussan Ley’s office had been concocting a plan to ban immigration from certain areas in 13 countries. This sounds quite reminiscent of the 2017 ban on seven Muslim majority nations that the Trump administration imposed in its first term.

But as far as populist leaders akin to Trump are concerned, its Pauline Hanson and her One Nation party that have surged ahead in the polls and this coincides with a newly emerged white nationalist movement on the streets. One Nation has overtaken the Liberals in the polls for the first time, and with the addition of former deputy PM Barnaby Joyce in its ranks, it now has two populist leaders.

While Hanson has this week pulled out the stops in terms of her growing election campaign, when she implied to Sky News host Sharri Markson last Monday night that there might be no such thing as a “good Muslim”, and this strategically placed dog whistling call has certainly pricked up the ears of white nationalists, who’ve started spurting their own versions of their chief antagonists’ bile.