US Calls for Colonial Expansion at Munich Security Conference

Every February, the Munich Security Conference convenes powerful diplomats, generals, CEOs, and policymakers under the banner of “global security.” The 2026 Conference revealed once again that institutions like Munich Security Conference are a performative coronation of militarized priorities, capitalist accumulation, and geopolitical expansion under the name of “diplomacy.”

One of the most contentious proposals discussed in Munich was Trump’s so-called “Board of Peace” that is to serve as a colonial administration of Gaza. Critics like the EU’s head of foreign policy, Kaja Kallas, warned it risked sidelining international law and Palestinian political agency.

Yet this did not hinder Foreign Secretary Marco Rubio holding a speech virtually calling for a new era of colonialism. Rubio argued that “godless communist revolutions” and “anticolonial uprisings” had served a blow to Western nations in the last century. Revamping a “Clash of Civilizations” narrative, Rubio’s MAGA-styled speech argued that the West must uphold (white) culture, fight migration and build a “new Western century.”

Rubio further called for: “a unified effort to compete for market-share in the economies of the global South. Together we can take back not only control of our own industries and supply chains, we can prosper in the areas that will define the 21st century. But we must also gain control of our national borders: Controlling who and how many people enter our countries.”

He further legitimized the Trump administration’s protectionist “American First” policy and gave a further swing at the “Global Order” saying it cannot be upheld above “our people and our nations.”Rubio added that the “Global Order” was unable to: “solve the war in Gaza, instead it was American leadership that freed captives from barbarians and brought about a fragile truce.”

It goes without saying that the US’s imperialist wars from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan or its regime changes all across Latin America or its support for dictatorships throughout the Middle East are a key root cause of instability across the global South. It is this US imperialism that is a driving force of mass migration who sectors of the capitalist class in the US as well as Europe gladly exploit as cheap labor.

Hillary Clinton’s speech at the Conference that her husband (Bill Clinton) and Barack Obama deported more people from the US than Trump did and that migration must be fought, underlined that the Democrat’s foreign as well as domestic policies are in the same caliber of brutality of the Republicans’. With the difference that the Democrats use smoke screens of liberal language and “rules based orders” while bombing Afghanistan, Somalia or Yemen. Or while implementing capitalist economic policies that devastate local economies. For example Bill Clinton’s administration in the 1990s implemented trade policies that forced Haiti to drastically lower tariffs on imported U.S. rice, which devastated the local Haitian rice industry. Subsidized rice from Arkansas flooded the market, destroying local farmers’ livelihoods and making Haiti dependent on food imports.

It was the Democrat administration under Biden and Harris which aggressively funded the Gaza genocide. Rubio’s racist language of Palestinians as barbarians and calling for carving up the global South amongst Western powers gives the tone of colonial expansion that Palestinians have known for over a hundred years. Zionist settler colonialism, regardless of how ruling-class politicians in the West have tried to sugarcoat it, has occupied Palestinian land and slaughtered Palestinians for over 78 years. The fear Rubio voices in his speech that anticolonial struggles and revolutions weakened Western imperialism is true. Just as anti-colonial resistance movements from Algeria to Vietnam to Angola were defamed as “barbarians” while facing Western armies much stronger than they were, they succeeded in throwing the colonizers out. So too, the Palestinian resistance will succeed.