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Secretary of State Marco Rubio responded to Daniel Ortega’s announcement ending elections in Nicaragua by insisting the regime could no longer expect normal relations with other nations for thwarting the basic tenets of a democratic hemisphere. Ortega and his wife have governed as a personal fiefdom for nearly two decades, yet Rubio’s language signals a swift return to the very neoconservative posture the current administration was elected to discard.
The National Security Strategy issued last year explicitly instructed officials to remain realistic about what is possible and desirable in relations with other nations and to seek good relations and peaceful commercial ties even where political systems differ. Rubio’s public rebuke elevates abstract democratic requirements above that directive, treating hemispheric conformity as a non-negotiable condition for ordinary statecraft.
The actor here is not merely an individual but the persistent Managerial Priesthood that measures every foreign government against universal liberal standards rather than concrete national interest. Such rhetoric revives the same impulse that once justified repeated interventions under the banner of spreading democracy, regardless of local history, culture, or strategic cost.
Christendom historically recognized that ordered polities arise from distinct peoples under God, not from the imposition of a single political form across borders. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 codified this principle by establishing sovereign realms accountable to their own realms rather than to supranational creeds of uniformity.
Scripture and the Augustinian tradition alike distinguish the City of God from the earthly city, rejecting any claim that one temporal order can be forcibly universalized. When American power is enlisted to enforce a democratic hemisphere, it subordinates the concrete good of the American nation to an ideological abstraction that dissolves borders and loyalties.
The Faithful Remnant must reject every formulation that places hemispheric democracy ahead of national sovereignty and commercial realism. Officials who revive such language must be recalled to the explicit terms of the National Security Strategy or replaced by those who will uphold it.
Continued indulgence of this rhetoric risks entangling the nation in endless moral crusades that weaken its own household economy and invite reciprocal interference from rival powers. The governing principle remains unchanged: a people owes primary fidelity to its own inheritance, not to the political preferences of distant regimes.
