Aftergut, a former federal prosecutor in San Francisco, is co-counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy.
March 1 was a good day. We learned that Asteroid 2022 AE1, a heavenly body large enough to do real damage and thought to hit Earth on Independence Day 2023, will miss us.
Of course, the climate apocalypse, symbolized by the meteor hurtling toward Earth in the recent pop film “Don’t Look Up,” is still before us. But if you scan the headlines from the past week, some positive light shone through, but time will tell its duration.
Internationally, in Ukraine, for the moment at least, David has Goliath stumbling.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has established himself as a global hero, inspiring resistance in his country, world-wide demonstrations, and a rebirth of the European Union as a powerful, unified force.
Autocratic leaders in Hungary and Poland, whose knee-jerk response is usually to back Russian President Vladimir Putin, have opposed the invasion. Neutral countries that usually stay silent have taken sides against Putin, Finland even contemplating aligning with NATO.
The Russians, supposedly masters of propaganda, are losing the battle for the narrative day after day. On March 1, former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s granddaughter lambasted Putin.
The world has unified in applying severe sanctions against Putin, and, while not likely to stop his mad and illegal assault, will soon take a deep bite out of the Russian economy and build a foundation for national opposition to the war and potentially to him. The Wall Street Journal reported on March 1 that traders will not buy Russian oil for fear they will get stuck with it.
On March 2, Russian oil, gas and bank stocks collapsed on the world market. You can’t run a war on economic fumes. Television cameras captured Russian citizens standing in impossibly long bank lines to withdraw cash.
In Washington, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection reported new activity. On March 1, it subpoenaed six Trump lawyers. That list included Cleta Mitchell, who was on Donald Trump’s infamous phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger during which Trump asked him to find 11,780 votes to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state, and Kenneth Chesebro, who reportedly played a role in the forged electoral slates that the Trump campaign arranged to have sent to Congress for the electoral vote count.
The same day, momentum built toward Republican support in the Senate for Biden’s Supreme Court nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Black woman with a stellar resume. The highly regarded Republican lawyer William Burck, who represented Trump’s White House counsel Don McGahn, followed two esteemed conservative former federal judges in endorsing her nomination.
On March 1, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said that it was “ unacceptable ” for fellow GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to have stood on a podium with neo-Nazi Nicholas Fuentes on Feb. 25. The day before, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had also excoriated Greene. These actions show shared American values still working in party leadership amidst the damage done to them by disinformation and political fear over the past five years.
Those shared values showed themselves again on March 1 in the unusual fact that 201 House Republicans and 221 Democrats joined together to pass the Emmett Tillett Anti-Lynching Act. Till was a 14-year-old African-American boy whom Mississippi Delta racists murdered in 1955, after he was falsely accused of whistling at a white woman. They weighted his lifeless, beaten body and threw it in the river.
Social media companies have gotten more aggressive about hateful speech and disinformation. On March 1, Twitter suspended the account of U.S. Senate candidate Vicky Hartzler for an anti-transgender tweet attacking “men pretending to be women.” On the same day, YouTube took a similar aggressive approach by blocking channels linked to Russian media outlets RT and Sputnik.
All these are good things. It’s okay to look up.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivers a keynote speech at the 62nd Munich Security Conference on Saturday, Feb. 14, 2026, in Munich, Germany.
Marco Rubio is the only adult left in the room
Finally free from the demands of being chief archivist of the United States, secretary of state, national security adviser and unofficial viceroy of Venezuela, Marco Rubio made his way to the Munich Security Conference last weekend to deliver a major address.
I shouldn’t make fun. Rubio, unlike so many major figures in this administration, is a bona fide serious person. Indeed, that’s why President Trump keeps piling responsibilities on him. Rubio knows what he’s talking about and cares about policy. He is hardly a free agent; Trump is still president after all. But in an administration full of people willing to act like social media trolls, Rubio stands out for being serious. And I welcome that.
But just because Rubio made a serious argument, that doesn’t mean it was wholly persuasive. Part of his goal was to repair some of the damage done by his boss, who not long ago threatened to blow up the North Atlantic alliance by snatching Greenland away from Denmark. Rubio’s conciliatory language was welcome, but it hardly set things right.
Whether it was his intent or not, Rubio had more success in offering a contrast with Vice President JD Vance, who used the Munich conference last year as a platform to insult allies and provide fan service to his followers on X. Rubio’s speech was the one Vance should have given, if the goal was to offer a serious argument about Trump’s “vision” for the Western alliance. I put “vision” in scare quotes because it’s unclear to me that Trump actually has one, but the broader MAGA crowd is desperate to construct a coherent theory of their case.
So what’s that case? That Western Civilization is a real thing, America is not only part of it but also its leader, and it will do the hard things required to fix it.
In Rubio’s story, America and Europe embraced policies in the 1990s that amounted to the “managed decline” of the West. European governments were free riders on America’s military might and allowed their defense capabilities to atrophy as they funded bloated welfare states and inefficient regulatory regimes. Free trade, mass migration and an infatuation with “the rules-based global order” eroded national sovereignty, undermined the “cohesion of our societies” and fueled the “de-industrialization” of our economies. The remedy for these things? Reversing course on those policies and embracing the hard reality that strength and power drive events on the global stage.
“The fundamental question we must answer at the outset is what exactly are we defending,” Rubio said, “because armies do not fight for abstractions. Armies fight for a people; armies fight for a nation. Armies fight for a way of life.”
I agree with some of this — to a point. And, honestly, given how refreshing it is to hear a grown-up argument from this administration, it feels churlish to quibble.
But, for starters, the simple fact is that Western Civilization is an abstraction, and so are nations and peoples. And that’s fine. Abstractions — like love, patriotism, moral principles, justice — are really important. Our “way of life” is largely defined and understood through abstractions: freedom, the American dream, democracy, etc. What is the “Great” in Make America Great Again, if not an abstraction?
This is important because the administration’s defenders ridicule or dismiss any principled objection critics raise as fastidious gitchy-goo eggheadery. Trump tramples the rule of law, pardons cronies, tries to steal an election and violates free market principles willy-nilly. And if you complain, it’s because you’re a goody-goody fool.
As White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said not long ago, “we live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.” Rubio said it better, but it’s the same idea.
There are other problems with Rubio’s story. At the start of the 1990s, the EU’s economy was 9% bigger than ours. In 2025 we were nearly twice as rich as Europe. If Europe was “ripping us off,” they have a funny way of showing it. America hasn’t “deindustrialized.” The manufacturing sector has grown during all of this decline, though not as much as the service sector, where we are a behemoth. We have shed manufacturing jobs, but that has more to do with automation than immigration. Moreover, the trends Rubio describes are not unique to America. Manufacturing tends to shrink as countries get richer.
That’s an important point because Rubio, like his boss, blames all of our economic problems on bad politicians and pretends that good politicians can fix them through sheer force of will.
I think Rubio is wrong, but I salute him for making his case seriously.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.