A diplomat’s job is often to shore up old alliances. On Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio worked to shore up an alliance older than America itself — Western civilization. Speaking before the Acropolis in Athens, Greece, he celebrated “the Greeks of antiquity” who “captivated the imagination of the Western world,” while also warning of dangers ahead.

“The history of America, the history of my country, is covered with the fingerprints of antiquity,” Rubio confessed. “Greece is literally carved into the architecture of our government: in the towering columns, in the domes and the monuments across our capital city. The city where our Constitution was born — Philadelphia — is itself a Greek name. … The most commonly cited author in the Federalist Papers was Plutarch, the Greek biographer.”

The reason for this, Rubio added, was that “here, in Athens, we found the first full realization of all the essential traits that would come to define the West: fierce individuality and relentless ambition; daring exploration and invention; a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory…” More than that, “Athens gave us democracy. Plato and Aristotle gave us Western philosophy. Our ideas of law, of virtue, of citizenship, and republican government were shaped in the Greek city-states. Even much of our political vocabulary — words like democracy, tyranny, the word ‘politics’ itself — found its origins here.”

The civilization birthed in Greece grew to manhood in Rome. It then “paved the way for the gospel of Jesus Christ to find fertile soil in Europe and flourish into the empire of Christendom,” Rubio continued. “It was the foundation of the riches of Christian theology — of Augustine and Aquinas and the whole tradition of natural law.”

“The men who built the Parthenon were succeeded by the architects of European Christendom, who raised the cathedrals of Milan, Cologne, and Florence. … The Greek philosophers’ search for the structure of the universe was inherited by Copernicus, and then Galileo, then Kepler, and in Newton,” Rubio continued. “The hunger for new knowledge, that’s what gave birth to Magellan’s first expedition around the world, to Columbus’ discovery of the Americas, and ultimately to Apollo 11’s journey to the moon. … And in America, that same tradition rediscovered itself anew. … The civilization of Athens and Rome transformed an infant seaboard republic into a continental empire.”

Christians across time have debated the value of Greek learning. Thinkers like Tertullian, Basil of Caesarea, and Martin Luther preferred the pure milk of Scripture to a drink they perceived to be clearly tainted with paganism. But others, like Augustine, Aquinas, or Philip Melancthon (Luther’s theological successor), co-opted philosophical thought underneath Christian doctrine on the ground that all truth is God’s truth.

Unfortunately, Rubio warned, Western civilization is contemplating a new rejection of antiquity, one based not in Scripture but in postmodernism. “Over time, we in the West came to feel ashamed of the very things that made us exceptional. We felt embarrassed that our achievements set us apart from the rest of the world. Our prosperity somehow became a source of guilt. We no longer believed we deserved and had earned our greatness,” Rubio lamented.

“And so, we tore down our monuments; we condemned our own history. And in too many places, we taught our children to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit,” he continued. “With every passing year, we seem to outsource more of our sovereignty, transferring our decisions to global bureaucracies far beyond the reach of our control.”

Rubio blamed this tendency on ideologies that prefer “a world of perfect safety, devoid of risk or failure, with neither the glory of victory nor the shame of defeat, which “build downwards” instead of upwards. “We design our standards to ensure no one will lose; we preoccupy ourselves more with the comfort of the worst than the potential of the best. We hold the most exceptional things among us hostage to the average, the ordinary, the mediocre.”

By unilaterally ceding its excellence, Rubio argued, the West only succeeded in ceding its advantages, not achieving perfect safety or equality. “Others were all too happy to fill the vacuum that we left — the vacuum left behind by our weakness. And as the West’s confidence faltered, its adversaries and its rivals only grew more assertive, building up their own wealth and their own power in our stead.”

Rubio conceived of Western civilization at a crossroads. “The course we take will determine whether the West maintains its place at the head of the world or resigns itself to a future of atrophy and servitude and decline.” And he argued that the West should reinvigorate itself by retrieving its roots of classical greatness rather than wallowing in the doldrums of postmodern mediocrity.

“The ancient Greeks were not naïve,” Rubio insisted. “They understood that nations have interests. They understood that statecraft requires prudence and diplomacy, but they also understood that it requires the ability to wield force when prudence and diplomacy fail. They understood that power requires not only having the means to defend yourself, it requires the credibility that you are willing to use it.”

As if to reinforce Rubio’s diagnosis, student protests are erupting across Europe because students are demanding education spending increases beyond what the bloated socialist taxes can fund. Nearly 7,000 demonstrators — mostly minors — have been arrested in France and Belgium, and protests have also spread to Greece, Italy, Ireland, Germany, and Austria.

Europe’s student protests once toppled monarchies (in 1848, as immortalized in “Les Miserables”), but they failed to establish the communist utopias they sought. In the 21st century, youth protests are becoming a matter of course, something the young do as a cultural identity marker — or rather, an anti-cultural marker. For that is the true nature of Marxism: a Western ideology that seeks to destroy Western culture and civilization. It hates individualism, private property, nations, absolute truth, and above all Christianity — the very things that made the West the best. And, in most applications, the unhealthy anger it generates among the young is downright ignorable.

To revive their flagging vigor, the Reds have taken up the cause of the Greens; Marxists have convinced themselves that, because Arabs are not white, and all non-whites must of course be oppressed minorities, therefore the cause of Islam must be a righteous one.

Hence, on the third anniversary of the October 7 massacre, students at universities in prominent American cities took to the streets to celebrate the outrage of Islamist terrorism, chanting “long live the intifada,” gleefully marking the “anniversary of the al-Aqsa Flood” (Hamas’s codename for the operation), and accusing New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) of being too friendly toward Jews.

Some of the idiocy is homegrown. Some of it is imported. On Tuesday, the FBI arrested an 18-year-old Somali man who was plotting a mass shooting at Minnesota’s Mall of America. The symbols of Western civilization — such as abundant and free commerce — would remain more secure if at least some of the people who hated it were kept on the other end of a plane ride.

Only fools view the past through rose-tinted glasses. Ancient Greek cities faced their own share of wars, oppression, immorality, betrayal, and revolution. But Western civilization has carried forward the best of their ideas for more than two millennia, slowly improving it with each passing generation. As the 12th-century thinker Bernard of Chartres put it, “We are like dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance — not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical height, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant stature.”

Western civilization now faces saboteurs in the camp, civilizational assassins who deride the giant’s ugly mug. All they want to do is take a hammer to his kneecap and boast in the long vision of their own short stature. The rest of the heirs of Western civilization must decide whether they will let this radical movement succeed.