Marco Rubio Has Lost Himself

In 2013, Marco Rubio gave a towering foreign policy speech designed to signal his seriousness to the world. In soaring rhetoric, he chastised his isolationist colleagues succumbing to the “false allure of protectionist policies” and touted America’s use of hard and soft power to deliver a more stable world.

“Consider the countless lives we’ve saved from the scourge of AIDS in Africa through the PEPFAR program. Or consider the economic mobility created by American trade and investment,” Rubio wrote in prepared remarks. He spoke of the country’s legacy spreading “liberty, free enterprise, and respect for human rights” around the world and warned that “a lack of American engagement comes with an even higher price” than the cost of getting involved.

“If America stops leading,” he asked, “who will fill the vacuum we leave behind?”

Anyone know what happened to that guy?

On Friday, Secretary of State Rubio told reporters that the United States would decide “in a matter of days” whether a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine is “doable.” If not, he said, “We need to move on.”

“It is not our war,” he said, according to The New York Times.

Rubio’s remarks came a day after he met with top Ukrainian and European officials, including French President Emmanuel Macron, for high-level talks about a possible peace deal. But Rubio made clear that Donald Trump’s patience for peace negotiations is waning. While campaigning for president, Trump promised he’d end the war within a day. Rubio said the president “has spent 87 days” working on a resolution. Far be it for complex geopolitical negotiations involving a centuries’ old turf war and one merciless dictator to take longer than three months.

Meanwhile, Trump has continued to rewrite history, repeatedly arguing that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy started the war. “You don’t start a war with someone 20 times your size and then hope people give you some missiles,” Trump said earlier this week according to Axios. In the face of the United States’ waffling and the president’s blame game, Russia, meanwhile, launched a missile attack on Kharkiv Friday morning that killed one person and wounded 82 others, including children.

But Ukraine is far from the only issue on which the New Rubio has become wholly recognizable from the old one.

The same person who, in that 2013 speech, celebrated PEPFAR’s accomplishments and warned about American abandonment spilling over into humanitarian crises, has now overseen the systematic dismantling of USAID, the very agency that runs the program.

The same person who, in 2013, called for stapling green cards to foreign students’ diplomas is now defending his decision to rip them away by the hundreds.

The same person who said back then that we must “find ways to make the visa application process less burdensome for those wishing to travel and do business in the United States” argued last week that “visiting America is not an entitlement. It is a privilege.”

The same person who, in 2013, said that America must stay true to its “guiding principles of liberty and human rights” is now doubling down on the president’s supposed authority to send people who have neither been charged nor convicted of any crimes to a gulag in El Salvador.

The only explanation? He’s not the same person after all.