ATHENS, October 7. /TASS/. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio believes the collective West is at a crossroads: it must either begin acting decisively on the international stage or condemn itself to "servitude and decline."

"And now, 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 top US diplomat said in a major policy speech in Athens addressed primarily to Europe. "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 and servitude and decline."

"Over time, we in the West came to feel ashamed of the very things that made us exceptional. We felt embarrassed that our achievements set us apart from the rest of the world. Our prosperity somehow became a source of guilt. We no longer believed we deserved and had earned our greatness. The word ‘nationalism’ became a dirty word. And so we tore down our monuments; we condemned our own history," the US secretary of state said.

"And with every passing year, we seemed to outsource more of our sovereignty, transferring our decisions to global bureaucracies far beyond the reach of our control. But others were all too happy to fill the vacuum that we left - the vacuum left behind by our weakness. And as the West’s confidence faltered, its adversaries and its rivals only grew more assertive, building up their own wealth and their own power in our stead," Rubio concluded.