Marco Rubio is promoting troubling ideas about ‘Western civilization’ | Ted Widmer

They had obviously worked hard on the backdrop – and it was magnificent. On 7 October, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, delivered a major speech in Athens, outdoors, with the Acropolis behind him. The sun was setting, bathing the ancient scene, including the Parthenon, in the light of the golden hour.

The golden hour, but yet not quite the golden age. This was not Pericles defending democracy. Instead, Rubio offered a haunting vision of the choices facing the west, arguing that the US and Europe must rediscover the values of exploration and conquest that once drove centuries of expansion, or face decline and irrelevance.

For long stretches, it was an exercise in nostalgia, lamenting the decline of western civilization as if this were a seminar at Hillsdale College or the Claremont Institute.

In fact, a freshman seminar would have been able to puncture most of the speech’s assumptions. It’s true that the founders read deeply in the literature of ancient Greece and Rome, but they went there to justify their hope to build a democracy of equals – not a civilization of conquest.

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, admitted his debt to Cicero, who wrote: “Citizens of the same republic ought to have equal rights.” Abraham Lincoln considered the Greek mathematician Euclid a major influence, precisely because he defined equality as an inviolable concept.

And what exactly is “the west”? We have a vague idea, but the question becomes complicated in the details. Is Vladimir Putin invited to this party? Russians also feel that their history stems from Greece and Rome. How about Adolf Hitler?

Few leaders loved Rome and Greece more, as he made clear at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. In Mein Kampf, he celebrated the “higher culture” that arose from “the hardships of the Persian War”, in lines that might easily have fit into Rubio’s speech.

Then there is the problem that a great deal of knowledge flowed into Greece and Rome from other places – eastern, not western. Writing comes from ancient Sumer, in what is now Iraq.

Much mathematical thinking comes from the Arabs (a young Pythagoras probably traveled through the Levant). Even as the Persians and Greeks fought, they also influenced each other.

Rubio seemed to enjoy retelling the story of a small band of Greek fighters, defending the Acropolis from Persian invaders. But that seemed theatrical during a week in which the war against Iran is not going well – with the USS Abraham Lincoln limping into San Diego, 12 B-1 bombers hastily evacuated from a base in England, from fear of a drone attack, and a rise in Iranian attacks on shipping.

The price of oil remains sky-high. This is not a war that the speech’s heroes – Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne and Hernán Cortés – would rush to claim as a conqueror’s legacy.

To be fair, there was some elegant writing in the speech, displaying actual historical knowledge (for example, that the authors of the Federalist Papers cited Plutarch more than any other author).

But again and again, Rubio wandered back to a precarious theme, that history is decided by “great men” who defy adversity and conquer lesser peoples.

He almost seemed to be writing out text for a video game (Super Mario?), offering “an arena for great men to test and prove themselves”, where they can show off “fierce individuality and relentless ambition; daring exploration and invention; a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory”.

To be fair, there have been many speeches in this vein, about striving for greatness and avoiding the fatal weaknesses that cause empires to vanish. Decline was much on the mind of the founders; John Adams wrote that “there never yet was a democracy that did not commit suicide”.

Later presidents sounded similar themes. In 1910, Theodore Roosevelt described the virtues of the “Man in the Arena”, “whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds”.

Similarly, John F Kennedy promised that “we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty” in his 1961 inaugural address.

But in each case, they also paused to define the democratic ideals they believed in, and Kennedy went out of his way to mention human rights and the aspirations of the vast parts of the world that are not the west.

Also, Roosevelt and Kennedy were legitimate military heroes, with the authority to discuss the waging of war and the even more important waging of peace. They were deeply read historians, too, who used the bully pulpit to celebrate intellectual excellence.

The chief monument to Kennedy, of course, is the Kennedy Center, currently shuttered, its fate uncertain. It’s a short distance from Rubio’s state department, which added to the hollowness of his claim that a great nation, like the Greeks, pursues achievement “in philosophy and poetry, in sculpture and drama”.

Given extensive cuts to scientific research, particularly climate science, it also sounded a false note to argue that Americans, like the Greeks, are consumed by “an insatiable curiosity about the world and the principles by which it operates, a hunger to know the mysteries of nature and grasp the secrets of the cosmos”.

On the second day of the administration, the United States pulled out of the World Health Organization, and nearly every day brings another story about funding cuts for research.

A former director of the White House office of science and technology policy, Arati Prabhakar, has argued that these cuts are leading us less to the “golden age” than to the stone age.

Rubio’s speech was not quite as dismissive of Europe as a previous one he gave, in February, warning of “civilizational erasure”. At the foot of the Acropolis, he extended an olive branch, saying: “We believe that Europe can awaken from its long slumber and rekindle the fire that was here millennia ago.”

But still, as he stood below the Parthenon, he seemed to be pointing out a path that will be difficult and mostly uphill for the US’s allies.

In sum, it was a beautiful photo op. But at the end of the day, that’s all it was. There were no new policies advanced, and no ideals expressed, beyond the right to exploit resources and dominate others.

This was a long distance from the Enlightenment that inspired Jefferson and the other founders. Instead, it provided more evidence of a moment that is darkening, despite Rubio’s efforts to capture the fading light of a sunset on the Acropolis.

• Ted Widmer, a former White House speechwriter, is the editor of American Speeches, and the recently published The Living Declaration: A Biography of America’s Founding Text, both published by the Library of America