Marco Rubio

The first barbed fences of the Berlin Wall had gone up just two years prior.

And just months before that first conference, before our predecessors first met here, here in Munich, the Cuban Missile Crisis had brought the world to the brink of nuclear destruction.

Even as World War II still burned fresh in the memory of Americans and Europeans alike,

we found ourselves staring down the barrel of a new global catastrophe, one with the potential for a new kind of destruction more apocalyptic and final than anything before in the history of mankind.

The time of that first gathering, Soviet communism was on the march.

Thousands of years of Western civilization hung in the balance.

At that time, victory was far from certain.

But we were driven by a common purpose.

We were unified not just by what we were fighting against.

We were unified by what we were fighting for.

And together, Europe and America prevailed.

And a continent was rebuilt.

Our people prospered in time.

The east and west blocks were reunited.

A civilization was once again made whole.

That infamous wall?

that had cleaned this nation into two came down, and with it, an evil empire, and the East and West became one again.

But the euphoria of this triumph led us to a dangerous delusion that we had entered, quote, 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 overused 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.

This was a foolish idea that ignored both human nature and it ignored the lessons of over 5,000 years of recorded human history.