Rubio calls for “unapologetic pursuit of national power,” invoking ancient Greece in Acropolis speech

October 7, 2026 / 1:20 PM EDT / CBS News

Athens — As the United States wages a costly war with Iran and Europe struggles with the grinding conflict in Ukraine, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood before the Acropolis on Wednesday and reached back more than two millennia to argue that the answer to the West's current problems can be found, at least in part, in ancient Greece.

In a speech timed to the sunset from the Pnyx, where Athenians gathered for their democratic assembly, Rubio cast ancient Greece as the source not only of Western democracy and philosophy, but of what he described as the character that fueled the West's rise.

"Here, in Athens, we found the first full realization of all the essential traits that would come to define the West," Rubio said, citing "fierce individuality and relentless ambition," and "a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory."

He argued that those modern Western societies had allowed those qualities to erode.

"The ideal of many ideologies in our time has, frankly, become a world of perfect safety, a world devoid of risk or failure, where neither the glory of victory, nor the shame of defeat," Rubio…

Original source: https://www.cbsnews.com/world/