Sinn Féin decision on White House timely in light of Rubio speech

Sinn Féin President Mary Lou McDonald announced on Monday that party representatives will not participate in St Patrick’s Day events in the White House this year.

As in 2025 this move has been prompted by solidarity with the people of Palestine as Mary Lou McDonald explained:

“The situation on the ground in Gaza and the West Bank remains dire, and the reality is that for all of the talk of a ceasefire, Israeli attacks on Gaza have not ended. The genocide continues. Civilians are still being killed. Homes are still being struck. Families who have already lost everything continue to live under fire.

“Peace in Palestine must mean the end of occupation, the end of apartheid-like systems of control and the full realisation of a sovereign Palestinian state.”

Clearly the grotesque plan for Gaza put forward by Donald Trump offers none of this and his administration remains hand in glove with the genocidal regime of Benjamin Netanyahu. Having financed, armed and politically supported the genocide, the Trump administration now claims to have created peace. In a speech at the Munich Security Conference on 14 February, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the US had “freed captives from barbarians and brought about a fragile truce”. Meanwhile Israel continues the genocide.

Lazy media reports presented Rubio’s speech as conciliatory with Europe after recent rifts between Washington and the EU. RTÉ News said: “Washington's top diplomat struck a markedly soothing tone.” CBS said it was a “charm offensive”. But this is to completely ignore the menacing content of the speech which was nothing less than a clarion call for the US and Europe to re-unite to dominate the world as European empires did in the past.

Rubio described the rules-based global order as “an over-used term”. He said that many nations had “invested in massive welfare states at the cost of maintaining the ability to defend themselves”. And as for measures to address the climate emergency he said that “to appease a climate cult, we have imposed energy policies on ourselves that are impoverishing our people”.

And of course the hard right act would not be complete without banging the drum on immigration: “We opened our doors to an unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people,” declared Rubio. Music to the ears of those spreading fear and bigotry in Europe.

Claiming that the US and Europe are “one civilisation” Rubio issued his call for “together, advancing our mutual interests and new frontiers, unshackling our ingenuity, our creativity, and the dynamic spirit to build a new Western century.”

And in case anyone doubts that this “new Western century” will be based on the old imperialism, Rubio spelt it out in a history lesson:

“But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, it was contracting.  Europe was in ruins.  Half of it lived behind an Iron Curtain and the rest looked like it would soon follow.  The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come.

“Against that backdrop, then, as now, many came to believe that the West’s age of dominance had come to an end and that our future was destined to be a faint and feeble echo of our past.  But together, our predecessors recognized that decline was a choice, and it was a choice they refused to make.  This is what we did together once before, and this is what President Trump and the United States want to do again now, together with you.”

The message from the Trump administration, via Rubio, to the billions of people across the globe whose nations won freedom from colonial empires is that their struggles were illegitimate and that they are inferior to ‘the West’. This is morally no different to Trump’s threats to grab Greenland except that Rubio wants to bring back the ‘old firm’ of the US-Europe to fulfil their  mission together to rob, dominate and exploit the rest of the world.