LONDON — The U.K. is hoping Marco Rubio can lend a hand to steady the special relationship with Washington — but there’s a catch.
Donald Trump’s new foreign policy chief has his own relationships back home to worry about, and they’re with people far less focused on transatlantic ties.
The signs have hardly been auspicious for relations between Keir Starmer’s Labour government and the incoming U.S. president since his sensational comeback in November. Labour Party officials have been accused of meddling in the U.S. election, while Trump’s newfound “first buddy” Elon Musk seems intent on trashing Starmer at every opportunity.
The two leaders could also not be more temperamentally dissimilar, and it remains to be seen how Starmer will square his desire to get closer to the U.K.’s European allies with Trump’s early moves to leave the EU in the shade.
Unsurprisingly, the British political establishment breathed a sigh of relief when Trump named Rubio, his one-time fierce rival for the presidency, as his nominee for U.S. Secretary of State.
The former Florida senator is seen as a link to a more internationalist-minded Republican tradition, and a force for sanity in Trump’s second term compared with some of his wilder appointments.
Yet Trump’s top diplomat is battling headwinds that may be difficult to overcome when it comes to holding the U.K.’s hand.
Rubio is “trying to thread a needle between his own very strong commitment to international rules and the clear antipathy on the American right to Davos-style globalism,” said Luke de Pulford of the International Parliamentary Alliance on China, of which Rubio was a founding member.
Rocky start
London got a pretty good idea of its place in the pecking order when Rubio made calls to 30 other capitals before getting round to phoning his opposite number in Britain, Foreign Secretary David Lammy.
When the two men did speak, it wasn’t all warm words. Rubio reportedly warned Lammy that the U.K.’s plan to hand the Chagos Islands, where the U.S. has a military base, to Mauritius could strengthen China’s influence in the region.
Rubio disparaged the deal before entering government, and has a history of paying close attention to the U.K.’s positioning on China.
He took an interest in its attempts to recognize the Chinese government’s treatment of Uyghurs as “genocide,” according to two people who led the campaign, and intervened in Britain’s plan to use Chinese tech firm Huawei in 5G infrastructure, which was subsequently abandoned.
It will not be lost on Rubio that Labour struck a rather different tone in opposition than it has since taking power, recently courting Chinese investment with high-profile visits to Beijing by Lammy and Chancellor Rachel Reeves.
Despite the early friction, many in the U.K. still see Rubio as their greatest hope for something approaching a normal relationship with their transatlantic ally.
“There’s just no doubt that he’s a committed internationalist,” said De Pulford.
Tom Tugendhat, a Conservative MP and former security minister who has worked with Rubio, described the secretary of state as a “friend” to Britain and “someone who’s serious and deeply concerned about the erosion of human freedom in dictatorships around the world.”
Rubio vs. the new right
The bad news for the Brits is that Rubio is fighting his own battle within the State Department to balance his philosophy against the new right-wing voices that are ascendant in Washington and that take a far more skeptical view of international relations.
Zack Cooper, a senior fellow at the right-of-center American Enterprise Institute, said there is “a big cleavage” between the worldviews of Rubio and new national security adviser Mike Waltz, on the one hand, and those of Vice President JD Vance, who is “at the vanguard of a movement which sees a much more restrained and limited role for the U.S. in the world.”
He added that “Trump leans toward this.”
Pivotal in this movement is the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. The foundation, a longstanding think tank with strong Republican links, has published policy recommendations for every incoming president for half a century.
This time the organization partnered with other conservative think tanks and lobbying groups to produce Project 2025, which has helped mold the new Trump government both in personnel and policy substance.
E.J. Fagan, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois who writes on think tanks, observed that before Trump was elected, the Heritage Foundation had in the past espoused “what you might call a Reagan-esque foreign policy,” but “if you read it now, it’s very much about pulling back from the world.”
When it comes to the U.K., Project 2025 takes at least some of its cues from Nile Gardiner, a foreign policy analyst and director of the Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom.
Speaking to POLITICO, Gardiner acknowledged “our thinking, our ideas for shaping the future of U.S. policy toward Europe, are playing an important role” in Trump’s regime, which he said was embarking on “a rejection of the globalist mindset that you typically see in a Democrat administration and [that] you’ve even seen in some Republican administrations.”
However, he denied any tension between this movement and the new secretary of state, describing the leadership as “very unified” behind a “clear willingness to wholeheartedly defend the American national interest.”
Rubio has come a long way since the Republican presidential primary rivalry of 2016, when he was happy to attack Trump for his insular viewpoint, insisting that “a world without our engagement is not a world we want to live in.”
At his confirmation hearing for secretary of state, he signaled his willingness to align with Trump to a large degree, specifying that America can only engage in the world while “putting our core national interests above all else.”
It’s not yet clear if Rubio has fully reconciled himself to the new right mindset, but if he is hoping to act as a moderating influence within the White House, his scope to do so appears limited.
“When we get down to the bare brass politics of it all, I think that Republican voters just are isolationist, fundamentally isolationist, and increasingly so,” Fagan said.
Those who have dealt with Trump or members of his transition team stress that amid a host of competing forces, the person who makes the final decision is Trump.
The “eye of Sauron,” as one foreign policy-minded MP put it — riffing on the Lord of the Rings villain — is notoriously hard to predict.
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