Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look, and an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

At last week's Munich Security Conference, U.S. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio offered a statesman-like defense of the West,

emphasizing the historic and religious foundations that are shared by America and Europe.

He also critiqued a false and misleading view of civilizational history.

The fall of the Soviet Union, Rubio said, led to the dangerous delusion, and I quote here,

that we had entered the end of history, that every nation would now be a liberal democracy,

that the ties formed by trade and by commerce alone would now replace nationhood,

that the rules-based global order, an overuse term, would now replace the national interest,

and that we would now live in a world without borders where everyone became a citizen of the world,

end quote. Here, Rubio was referencing without naming political scientist Francis Fukuyama's end-of-history

thesis. Fukuyama had adopted Hegel's philosophy of capital age history as the record of

inevitable human advancement from one age to the next.

Though Fukuyama's thesis helps to explain why progressive politicians seem so obsessed with

being on the quote-unquote right side of history, Rubio soundly rejected such thinking as,

and I quote again, a foolish idea that ignored both human nature and the lessons of over 5,000 years of recorded human history.

Such thinking, Rubio then added, has cost us dearly.

Like Winston Churchill's 1941 appeal to the U.S., where he rallied the New World to partner with the old world amid World War II, Rubio grounded a similar

call in our shared heritage. I quote again, the men who settled and built the nation of my birth

arrived on our shores carrying the memories and traditions and the Christian faith of their ancestors

as a sacred inheritance, an unbreakable link between the old world and the new.

We are part of one civilization, Western civilization.

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