Although there have been stemwinders with amusing and touching moments, it’s been a long time since an American politician has made a speech worthy of serious commentary. Perhaps the last one was when Ronald Reagan delivered the “tear down this wall” speech at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin in 1987.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s “Remarks from the Acropolis in Athens, Greece” on the not-accidental date of October 7 was such a speech. It may not have the ramifications of Reagan’s address, at least not immediately, but it should.

Rubio chose his delivery location on Pnyx hill overlooking the Parthenon to dramatize his subject matter—that Western Civilization and democracy itself, much of which emanated from the discussions on that same Acropolis, is “at an inflection point.”

At that very moment, much of Western Europe—France, Spain, the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, even Germany— was and is in the midst of various forms of a cultural and political nervous breakdown, possibly suicide or suicidal empathy, as Gad Saad would put it.