Forget Maga. Welcome to Mega: Make Empire Great Again

Mega: Make Empire Great Again. Marco Rubio arrived at the Munich security conference with a disturbing message for European governments: the empire is great.

Undeterred by the possibility of overthrowing Venezuela’s president and taking control of the world’s largest oil reserves, the Trump administration’s top diplomat arrived at the Munich security conference on Saturday with a very new and very worrying message for European governments.

Empire is great. Empire is back. Empire is American.

The US Secretary of State delivered what can only be described as a 22-minute ode to empire. A love letter to conquest and colonialism. A proud defense of the territorial expansion of the West.

That secretary of state was, of course, Marco Rubio — the veteran advocate of an aggressive foreign policy who is now one of the most influential voices in a Republican Party dominated by Trump supporters who once pretended to want to end “endless wars.”

In his speech, Rubio went far beyond the typical defense of U.S. “leadership” or an aggressive foreign policy, as so many of his predecessors, Republican and Democrat, have done before him. Instead, he issued a ringing endorsement of imperialism – and did so at precisely the moment when the United States, under his boss Donald Trump, is openly engaging in the kind of territorial and extractive imperialism that most Western European governments have spent the last 80 years repudiating.

In Munich, Germany, Rubio praised five centuries of missionaries, pilgrims, soldiers and explorers from the West, who left its shores to cross oceans, colonize new continents and build vast empires that stretched across the globe. He lamented the “contraction” of “great Western empires” after World War II. He condemned the “atheist communist revolutions” and the “anti-colonial uprisings” that, by the way, helped free 750 million people in 80 former colonies since the founding of the United Nations in 1945.

And what was the reaction to your statements? European elites gave him a standing ovation, as if he had just announced a cure for cancer rather than the literal return of empire. And in doing so, they have become shamefully complicit in the Trump administration’s rewriting of not just US history, but European and world history as well.

These are the facts that the US Secretary of State conveniently chose to ignore when praising the “great Western empires”. European colonization of the Americas is estimated to have killed more than 50 million people – about 10% of the world’s population at the time – and even led to a period of global cooling. The British Raj in India may have caused the deaths of 100 million people in just 40 years. The German and Spanish empires were responsible for genocides against the Herero, Nama and Taíno peoples, respectively.

However, today, the Trump administration wants to erase all that memory. “We don’t want our allies to be chained by guilt and shame,” Rubio told his Munich audience. “We want allies who are proud of their culture and heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization and who, together with us, are willing and able to defend it.”

The psychological manipulation promoted by Rubio was an impressive spectacle: the son of Cuban immigrants, whose grandfather was deported from the United States, propagating far-right and white nationalist speeches about the “erasure of civilization”. The former Republican presidential candidate, who previously denounced Trump as an “impostor” and a “lunatic”, now urges European governments to support the belligerent American president. A former US senator, who spent years pushing for votes and bills to undermine the United Nations, is now criticizing the UN for failing to stop the bloodshed in Gaza.

Imagine if China’s foreign minister had given a speech attacking the UN and the “abstractions of international law”. Imagine if Russia’s foreign minister had given a speech defending imperial plunder and plunder. European elites would have collapsed. But when Rubio finished his prepared speech, in which he also bragged about (illegally) bombing “radical Shiite clerics” in Iran and (illegally) kidnapping a “narco-terrorist dictator” in Venezuela, more than half the room in Munich stood up to applaud him.

Did they not realize that perhaps they were applauding their own ruin? That, despite Rubio’s milder tone and polite language, despite all his talk of harmony and transatlantic unity, he was advocating a geopolitics of ruthless authoritarianism? That Rubio may be the good cop in contrast to the bad cop Trump, but their goal is the same: to make the empire great again.

And it wasn’t just what Rubio said. That’s what he didn’t say. His 3,000-word speech contained not a word about Russia, not a word about China and, perhaps crucially for his Western European audience, not a word about… Greenland.

Yes, Greenland. The largest island in the world which, despite being the territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, an EU member state, is coveted by the president of the United States. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said Saturday that Trump is still determined to acquire Greenland. “I think the American president’s desire is exactly the same,” Frederiksen told reporters in Munich, the same day Rubio spoke at the conference. “He’s very committed to this.”

Yes, he is. Surprisingly, Trump refused to rule out the use of military force against Denmark, a NATO ally. He ignored concerns about international borders and national sovereignty. And this weekend, he sent his secretary of state to a conference in Europe that was supposed to be about collective security to give a speech that, in effect, said: The United States must dominate. Trump must lead. And Europe must join – or else…

I repeat, I cannot emphasize this enough: European officials even stood up in Munich and applauded an American official who praised the empire, while serving an American administration whose stated foreign policy goals include the imperial seizure of European territory.

Have they lost their minds?

Europeans in the audience may have convinced themselves that they were applauding a return to stability and even friendship with the United States.

In reality, they were standing up and applauding the return of something much uglier, bloodier and more dangerous.

Empire.

And this time, it may not stop at Europe’s own borders.

Originally published by The Guardian on 02/17/2026

By Mehdi Hasan

Mehdi Hasan is the editor-in-chief and CEO of Zeteo.