I AM DETOXING from a reported piece I filed yesterday about the genocide in Gaza. I can say nothing more about it except that it is the heart of darkness, and the space I had to get myself into in order to report it is not a space I wish to inhabit when I do not. I might be finished with the piece, but the pieces, it turns out, are never quite finished with me. So this is me detoxing. Yes, on a Friday. I feel like if I don't put out a newsletter and in the process pivot away from the Gaza piece, I will stay in the Gaza piece. Lucky you. While I was at work on that piece, Secretary of State-plus Marco Rubio gave a speech to the Munich Security Conference that represents to me the adhesive strength of the War on Terror for uniting neoconservatism and nativism. I wish he had given it when I could have included it in a different piece, one about the role of the War on Terror in producing Trump's version of imperialism. When that piece comes out, this edition may make a little bit more sense. Rubio's speech, as you may have read or heard over the past week, exhorts Europe to reembrace unapologetic Western dominance under American hegemony. It isn't really a policy speech. It instead seeks to go deeper than policy, to what Rubio calls the "fundamental question" that ought to unite America and Europe instead of divide it: the preservation of "centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir." If you are perhaps outside of any such ancestry, whether in America and Europe, you understand the point of this speech. Rubio is very deliberately excluding you from both the American and European stories, as a way of saying you are not welcome at the table in the emerging Trumpist world order, and so will be on the menu. It is an absurd and accordingly ideological exclusion to anyone who understands actual American or European history from pre-modernity to now. Rubio cannot admit any indigenous, Black or non-Christian influences on cultures inextricable from them. That's particularly unfortunate for Rubio when he talks about his ancestors from Seville. His aunts and uncles didn't tell him that the Real Alcázar Palace was built by the Ummayyad Emirate and then improved upon by the Almorad Caliphate and that's why it looks so splendid? They didn't tell him why it's called Andalucia? While Joan Didion could have told Rubio all the ways white Americans are ready to exclude Cubans like him from that heritage, Rubio, like many a white Cuban emigré, elides the issue. He locates his own heritage not in the Caribbean but in what are now Spain and Italy. Whiteness is an invention and Rubio will demand his place in its sun. However refracted through the ahistorical inventions of the far-right imagination, we are supposed to find in the sunshine the civilizational purpose of American hegemony. After the kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro, and now in the strangulation of Cuba and the seemingly imminent move against Teheran, the far-right imagination is running wild. Rubio's speech is in one sense full of euphemism, leaving unsaid just what the implications are of an unapologetic U.S.-European hegemony, but in another sense it's obvious for those who are willing to look Rubio's agenda in the face. The Europeans should join MAGA in "not maintain[ing] the polite pretense that our way of life is just one among many," but rather insisting that it is superior, and ought to command the lower orders of the world. I doubt this man, this man who would tell foreign-policy elites in Munich that they belong to a heritage of superior beings, uses a bidet. And the delusions poured forth from Rubio. His main point is familiar from the Bush era of the War on Terror: American leadership, to which Europe should bandwagon, must "not allow its power to be outsourced, constrained, or subordinated to systems beyond its control; one that does not depend on others for the critical necessities of its national life; and one that does not …[ask] for permission before it acts." This is the oldest imperial bargain there is: the rules bind others, never us, who do as we please. That worked at the dawn of American unipolarity. But the sun has set on its potency. Yet here is Rubio, sounding like Dirk Diggler telling himself in the mirror how powerful he is because he can't get erect. His agenda "will rebuke and deter the forces of civilizational erasure that today menace both America and Europe alike." This is an insane and malicious thing to say. There is no force of "civilizational erasure" that menaces "the West." There is instead a migration crisis in large part caused by the rapacious foreign policies preferred by Rubio and his cohort, which impoverishes people through sanctions, destabilizes or overthrows their governments in the name of counterterrorism and desolates the climate. Which, earlier in the speech, Rubio told us not to bother caring about, since it would constrain the ambitions of the oligarchs that his agenda enriches. ("The alliance that we want is one that is not paralyzed into inaction by fear—fear of climate change…") There is a lot of whining here about no longer "operat[ing] a global welfare state and aton[ing] for the purported sins of past generations." What Rubio calls "the West" never operated a global welfare state. Never did the West provide more than it extracted from its imperial holdings. During and after decolonization, the provision of foreign aid came as a band-aid over the wound of continuing extraction, now often at the hands of private enterprise that could call upon state violence. When it came to national economies, western institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund essentially traded loans or grants for sovereignty, imposing austerity to discipline a population (and especially its labor force) while directing value toward foreign, usually western, investors. To the extent Rubio's reference to atonement for the "purported" sins of past generations is anything beyond white fragility—can Little Marco not bear hearing how the West was won?—it is a promise against changing the beneficiaries of the hyperextractive geoeconomic order, to say nothing of providing reparation. Did you know that the United Kingdom's wealth extraction from the Indian subcontinent from 1765 to 1938 is estimated at $45 trillion? Rubio's speech was not programmatic. (Although, when placed alongside J.D. Vance's earlier speech demanding that Europe embrace the nationalist right, Rubio's line rejecting a Europe "shackled by guilt and shame" suggests a certain programmatic agenda.) But a few days afterward, Trump's new "Board of Peace" met for its inaugural Washington meeting. Rubio did not mention the Board at Munich, but the Board can be thought of as operationalizing the vision he outlined. The Board of Peace has granted itself the right to rule Gaza, a 21st century version of the post-World War I British Mandate over Palestine and Iraq and the French Mandate over Lebanon and Syria. It seeks to outsource its dirty work to foreign troops no less than the British or the French, and that dirty work will be staged from a 350-acre forward operating base commanded by a special-operations veteran of the War on Terror. It will posture as an end to the genocide when instead it will operate as its latest phase, destroying what remains of Gaza's political sovereignty, in the hope of extinguishing it forever. Gaza is a proof of concept for the Board of Peace. "At the broadest, most grandiose level, the Board of Peace is theoretically supposed to deal with much more than Gaza," Rob Malley told Jewish Currents' email newsletter yesterday. "It’s a substitute United Nations, a gathering of countries that were not able to say no to Trump, or saw some benefit in joining." This is Donald Rumsfeld's "Coalition of the Willing" scaled up: a task-specific League of Nations pop-up, whose operations drain off resources and legitimacy from the remaining artillery-battered hulks of international law. Supremacist delusions like Rubio's work when the West is on the rise. But the fundamental reality Rubio neglects—denies is probably the more accurate word—is that it is not, for all the wealth and power it retains. Durable dominant powers tend to innovate and dominate new forms of fuel: Welsh coal for British sea power; petroleum for Euro-American economic and military power; nuclear fission for American military power. Only China does that now. Rubio and his ilk resist the development of that new fuel source, and accordingly position themselves only for vicious in-fighting to control a shrinking share of wealth, power and influence. That is what genuine decline looks like. I guess it is a choice, after all. WE MAY BE DAYS AWAY from war with Iran. Reuters reports that U.S. warplanning is at an "advanced stage, with options including targeting individuals as part of an attack and even pursuing regime change in Tehran." Never forget that this has all been a manufactured aggression, starting from the rejection from Rubio and then Trump of the 2015 nuclear deal that resolved the Iranian nuclear program as a security question. This is an even more cynical version of the Second Iraq War. Reps. Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie plan on forcing a floor vote as a means to stop it. I don't know if that'll happen or if it happens it will stop the war or end up ratifying it, because members of Congress who aren't bloodthirsty tend to be cowardly. But you are neither of those things, so call your representatives and demand this unjustifiable bloodshed stop before it starts. There also need to be protests against this, at scale. SOME QUICKER STORIES WORTH YOUR TIME: Elizabeth Spiers for The Nation on the Epstein Class. My old friend Richard Zuley: What, Me Torture? Harry Davies and Yuval Abraham on the deepening ICE-Microsoft relationship. WIRED's Makena Kelly on the deepening DHS-Palantir relationship (already very deep!) | 
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