He really, really gets it.

He began with a bit of a history lesson.

“For thousands of years, the civilization that built what stands behind me has captivated the imagination of the Western World. Generations of statesmen, artists, and philosophers have looked to it — they’ve looked to it wonder. They’ve looked to it with awe,” he said. “Now, time has a tendency to dull the senses. Great victories and catastrophic defeats — they seem to shrink to becoming like a footnote in a textbook, another fact for our school children to memorize and forget.”

“But the Greeks of antiquity, they seem to have an almost mystical hold on our memory,” he continued. “They call us back to them again and again.”

Here’s more:

“For 25 centuries since, the Parthenon has stood. Empires have risen and fallen beneath its shadow.

And the progeny of the men who built it — the sons of Athens and Rome — have carried their civilization with them to the ends of the Earth.

Two and a half centuries after the founding of the American republic halfway across the world from where I stand now, I stand here today — as the Secretary of State of that republic, and as the great-grandson of settlers who arrived in the new world from Spain — I stand here to testify to a debt that no lapse of time, no distance of space, can ever extinguish.

Today, we find ourselves at a crossroads because the next decade and the decisions we make will write the story of the next century. The course we take will determine whether the West maintains its place at the head of the world, or resigns itself to a future of atrophy, servitude, and decline. We will either choose to act now, or lose the choice to act at all. Under President Trump, the United States has made its choice.”

Preach it, brother.